Amelia Earhart (21 page)

It was later learned that Forrestal, after being removed from his post as secretary of defense, was delivered to Bethesda Naval Hospital under White House orders. There, he was kept in what amounted to solitary confinement, barred from most outside contacts, handled as a patient with an advanced mental condition, and provided “unusual” medical treatment and limited freedom.

In June 1949, Forrestal's widow sought payment of a $10,000 insurance policy, claiming accidental death. Her attorneys argued for payment, maintaining in spite of the official report that the navy secretary's death did not involve suicide. The details of Forrestal's death in 1949 were suppressed by the U.S. government. From 1949 until 2004, they were classified as top secret. Again, these are extreme measures related to someone allegedly suffering from fatigue and related symptoms.

In 2004, after invoking the Freedom of Information Act, a newsman named David Martin was provided access to “the full report of the investigative review board appointed the day after Forrestal's death.” It was named the Willcutts Report. The report contained the odd conclusion that the U.S. Navy was in no way responsible for Forrestal's death, a statement that seemed somewhat defensive and unnecessary. A second odd aspect of the report is that, though the government claimed Forrestal committed suicide, the report did not cite suicide as the cause of death. The fact that the government refused to release the contents of the report for forty-five years invites suspicion.

Martin, an investigative reporter and news analyst, conducted his own inquiry into Forrestal's death. He discovered that the results and witness testimony compiled and reported by the U.S. Navy was kept secret and that the entire event was “replete with deceptions.” From his own investigation, which included interviewing many of the same witnesses as did the government, Martin concluded that Forrestal had been murdered and that government collusion was involved.

An examination of the method by which Forrestal allegedly committed suicide is warranted. The U.S. government press release stated he had tied one end of his bathrobe sash to a radiator, tied the other end around his neck, and leaped out a sixteenth-floor window. This could not have been possible. Providing a generous length of six feet for a bathrobe sash, an experiment conducted on November 6, 2013, revealed that the knots necessary for attachment to a radiator and a human neck would take up approximately four feet of the sash, leaving only two feet. Assuming the radiator was located conveniently beneath the window Forrestal allegedly jumped out of, the two feet of remaining sash would not allow the former Naval officer enough length to stand upright, much less leap out of a window. This entire explanation offered by the government was a lie.

Interestingly, there exist other versions of Forrestal's death. Earhart researcher and author Thomas E. Devine states that Forrestal “fell” from the sixteenth floor of the naval hospital. Yet another account refers to Forrestal as leaping “from the sixteenth floor window to the third floor bridge that connected the two wings of the hospital.” What this indicates is that there remains a significant amount of confusion related to the mysterious death of James V. Forrestal.

With Forrestal's death went his version of what might possibly have occurred on the island of Saipan in relation to Amelia Earhart's airplane.

T
o this day, controversy surrounds the actual airplane manned by Earhart and Noonan on the around-the-world flight. The XC-35 Electra was constructed by Lockheed and test-flown on May 7, 1937, just prior to Earhart's famous flight. In that year, the XC-35 won Lockheed the Collier Trophy, given for the most valuable contribution to aircraft. The XC-35 represented a significant advancement in flight at the time, but following the disappearance of Earhart on July 2, 1937, production was discontinued. According to author and researcher Joe Klaas, “No record exists today as to what final disposition was made of the XC-35.”

Prior to the commencement of Earhart's around-the-world flight, she was photographed on several occasions in the cockpit of the XC-35. Close examination of the photographs, however, reveals that they were cockpits of two different airplanes. The instrument panels were markedly different. Among Earhart researchers, there are some who contend that such modifications were made relative to the alleged spy mission.

The notion of there being two XC-35s used by Earhart has also been advanced on the basis of other photographic evidence. In some photographs, Earhart's aircraft is equipped with fixed-pitch propellers without spinners. In other photographs, “the propellers are hubbed with spinners such as are used to streamline the feathering gear of variable-pitch props.” This has led some researchers to suggest that not one, but two Lockheed XC-35s were associated with Earhart's flight.

Author Klaas has suggested that one of the XC-35s was the one in which Earhart and Noonan were flying, the one that was allegedly in the vicinity of Howland Island on July 2, 1937. The other, he suggested, was flown by an American man and woman and was reported to have crashed in the bay at Saipan.

Author Klaas argues that Earhart could not have flown from Lae, New Guinea, to Howland Island in the airplane in which she took off in Miami. It would not fly that fast or that far, insists Klaas. Somewhere between Miami and New Guinea, he says, the XC-35s were switched. With assistance from fellow researcher Joe Gervais, Klaas identified a number of differences between the two planes.

1. Some photographs of the Electra show the CAA registration number as NR16020. In other photos, it is R16020.
   
2. Photographs show different positions for the port and starboard wingtip navigation lights. In some photos, the lights “were located halfway between the leading and trailing edges and well in front of the curved wingtip.” In other photographs, the lights were mounted “jutting out from the forward part of the wingtip.”
   
3. In some photos, the Electra manifests painted engine cowlings, but in others, no paint is visible.
   

Author Thomas Devine has also acknowledged a number of differences in the early-flight Electra and the one photographed during latter stages of the flight. However, he insists that none of the differences (modification for greater fuel capacity, etc.) proves that the aircraft was equipped for a spy mission. In explaining the differences in the serial numbers, Devine explained that the
N
was not painted on airplanes unless national boundaries were to be crossed.

Based on available newsreel footage of various landings and takeoffs of the Earhart-Noonan flight around the world, including the final liftoff from Lae, New Guinea, it appears that the same plane was employed each time by the aviatrix. However, there may have been a second Electra in the air at the time in the Pacific. According to author James Donahue, there exists a likelihood of another Electra, one “sponsored” by the British and piloted by a man and a woman, flying in the region of Japan's mandated islands at the same time.

There is more to add to the mystery of two Electras involved in the Earhart flight. A man named Lloyd Royer, who was employed by Lockheed Aircraft and was involved in preparing Earhart's plane for the around-the-world flight, stated that there were, in truth, two planes that were being worked on at the facility following the aviatrix's ground-loop incident in Hawaii. Both planes, said, Royer, were to be used during the attempt.

T
oday in the coastal Chinese city of Weifang, Shandong Province, can be found a number of dark, gray, European-style buildings from the nineteenth century. The buildings have been neglected over the past decades and they now manifest peeling walls, broken windows, and sunken foundations. History records this site as the Weihsien Concentration Camp.

When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, it had an immediate effect on Japanese-occupied coastal China. All Westerners living in China and Japan were classified as enemy aliens, rounded up, and interned in prison camps. One of the largest was the Weihsien facility in Weifang.

What information remains available on Weihsien Prison reveals that at its height it housed 2,008 people from more than thirty countries. Three hundred and twenty-seven of them were children. The prisoners were fed rotten meat, thin soup, and two slices of bread per day. Prisoners were tortured for minor infractions, and executions were common.

It was to Weihsien Concentration Camp that many are convinced the prisoner Amelia Earhart was brought and where she remained until the camp was liberated by American military forces on August 17, 1945. According to author Fred Goerner, Admiral Chester Nimitz, one of the leading military figures of the day, was quoted as stating that it was long “known and documented in Washington” that Earhart lived “under the control of Japan long after she was reported missing in 1937.” During a tape-recorded conversation with Goerner, Nimitz stated, “I don't understand why [the U.S. government] still won't let people know what happened.” U.S. Naval Commander John Pillsbury sent word to Goerner that he “should continue your investigation, and I want to add that, don't you ever give up. You're onto something that will stagger the imagination.”

According to a few researchers, Amelia Earhart, following her internment in Saipan, was transferred to military headquarters in Tokyo, Japan. There, she may or may not have been forced into broadcasting as Tokyo Rose.

The files of the Federal Bureau of Investigation contain a memo from director J. Edgar Hoover to Carter W. Clarke, Assistant Chief of Staff of the Office of Naval Intelligence. In the memo, dated January 18, 1945, Hoover relates information about Earhart by an unnamed “member of the armed forces” during the latter part of 1944. According to the FBI director, the soldier was in the Philippine Islands prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. During that time, he and a fellow soldier were being “entertained by some Japanese in a hotel,” the walls of which were thin enough to overhear conversation in an adjoining room. As the soldier listened to two Japanese soldiers speaking English, he overheard that “Amelia Earhart was still alive and being detained at a hotel in Tokyo, Japan.”

Weeks later, the soldier was taken prisoner by the Japanese and sent to a concentration camp at Bataan, a Philippine province. From his prison guards, this soldier learned that Earhart was still alive and in Tokyo. They also stated, according to the soldier, that they had heard her broadcast as Tokyo Rose over Japanese radio.

At some point, Earhart was transferred to the Weihsien Prison in Weifang, China, where she may have been a resident for as long as six years. On August 17, 1945, the United States military “Operation Duck” involved an Office of Strategic Services team parachuting into the Weihsien Civilian Internment Camp in northeastern China. The OSS was a U.S. wartime intelligence agency. The objective was to liberate the camp, the first of many efforts involving many such camps throughout Japanese-occupied coastal China.

Among the OSS troops was Lt. Jim Hannon. On assisting in the removal of the prisoners from the Weihsien camp, Hannon encountered a woman he referred to as a “lady Yank.” The woman had been housed with the Japanese prisoners and was in poor shape, almost comatose. Many are convinced this woman was Amelia Earhart. The aviatrix would have been forty-eight years old.

Within a few days of the liberation of Weihsien Prison, a radiogram was sent from Chungking to George Palmer Putnam via the U.S. State Department to Putnam's address in North Hollywood, California, where he resided between 1935 and 1945. The text of the message was: “Camp liberated; all well. Volumes to tell. Love to mother.” The message was unsigned. The message was found in the National Archives in 1975. At the time it was sent, it was never made public, and Putnam never mentioned it to Earhart's mother or to her sister, Muriel.

Those who ascribe to the Earhart-was-not-at-Weihsien-Prison faction of related research have attempted to “prove” that the message was not sent by Earhart but by a would-be writer named Ahmad Kamal. In fact, Kamal, who was listed as a prisoner at Weihsien, did send a message, but it was to Maxwell Perkins, his presumed editor at Charles Scribner's Sons publishing house. There would have been no need for Kamal to communicate with Putnam. At least one book on Earhart has reported the contention that Kamal sent the message to Putnam, but the evidence presented is spurious.

According to Hannon, the “lady Yank” was flown from Weihsien via Tsingtao to a camp in Korea where other American prisoners were transported for assessment and preparation for return to the United States.

M
onsignor James Francis Kelley was a well-known Catholic figure in the United States during the 1940s. He was a university graduate, a psychologist, and a one-time president of Seton Hall University and was well connected with church hierarchy as well as established political figures in the United States and abroad.

Kelley was ordained on July 8, 1928, in Belgium. There he met Archbishop Eugenio Pacelli. Kelley's duties included teaching the English language to Pacelli, who went on to become Pope Pius XII. In 1934, Kelley earned a degree in philosophy at Louvain, Belgium, and later did graduate work in psychology. In 1935 he received his PhD in philosophy and psychology. A short time after that he was appointed head of the Department of Philosophy at Seton Hall College and professor of psychology at Immaculate Conception Seminary in Darlington, New Jersey. In July 1936 he was named president of Seton Hall College. On April 21, 1941, Kelley was named Right Reverend Monsignor by Pope Pius XII.

Not only was Kelley well connected within the realm of the Catholic Church, he also boasted strong political ties. On July 11, 1941, Kelley received a citation and a medal from Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau for “three years of patriotic service with integrity and diligence for the Treasury Department of the USA.” No details relative to why this award was presented have ever been located.