But the Japs wouldn’t have used Amelia anonymously; they would have played up her celebrity, if they’d actually had her, and had actually turned her. No. Amy died that night, when we almost made it. If Chief Suzuki and Jesus Sablan hadn’t come stumbling out of that brothel, we would have.
I didn’t learn of Suzuki’s death, incidentally, until many years later when J. T. “Buddy” Busch of Dallas, Texas, told me that a Mrs. Michiko Sugita — the daughter of Mikio Suzuki — had provided the first testimony by a Japanese national that placed Amelia Earhart on Saipan. Mrs. Sugita told Busch of hearing her father and other Garapan police officers discussing the female pilot, and whether or not she should be executed. Mrs. Sugita seemed embarrassed that her father’s vote had been for execution.
The former chief of Saipan police had not been among those Japanese who flung themselves from the suicide cliffs. After hiding in the mountains for a while, Suzuki surrendered and cooperated with the occupying forces; due to fatigue he was transferred to a hospital tent, where a witness saw an islander and an unidentified American make him drink poison. The case was investigated by one Jesus Sablan, who had been appointed (by the Army) “sheriff” of Camp Susupe, due to his “police background”; the murder was never solved.
Aviatrix Jacqueline Cochran Odium, Amelia’s close friend, was the first American woman to set foot in postwar Japan; after her mission to investigate the “role of Japanese women” in the air war, Jackie reported seeing several files on Amy in Imperial Air Force headquarters. I did not meet Mrs. Odlum during those years of my relationship with Amelia, but sometime later, when she and her wealthy husband Floyd Odlum hired me on an industrial espionage case related to their cosmetics business.
“I didn’t see anything that would lead me to think Amelia was captured and kept in Japan,” Jackie told me, over dinner at the Odium ranch in Indio, California. She was a bubbly blonde who might have been the missing Andrews Sister. “Certainly nothing to make you think she was ‘Tokyo Rose.’”
She also showed me a precious memento Amy had given her before that last flight: a small silk American flag.
For whatever reason, G. P. Putnam returned from military service a different man, though staying involved with publishing and writing several more books. Plagued with illness, he lived in a Sierras mountain lodge, and later at a resort he ran in Death Valley, with his fourth wife, Peg, in what by all accounts was a happy if brief marriage. The postwar Putnam was apparently a much mellowed man, his outrageous promotional stunts behind him. He died of kidney failure in January 1950.
Paul Mantz’s military service was stellar, and not just because the movie actors serving under him included Clark Gable, Ronald Reagan, and Alan Ladd. His unit shot over thirty thousand feet of aerial combat footage and hundreds of training films, and while most of his duty was stateside, as he operated out of so-called Fort Roach (at Hal Roach Studios), Lt. Colonel Mantz shot stunning combat footage over the North Atlantic and in Africa.
At war’s end Paul was back at his old charter service stand, and enjoying his long and happy marriage to Terry. Radio commentator and Putnam-esque world traveler explorer Lowell Thomas hired Mantz to develop the multi-camera techniques for the famous Cinerama process; director of photography Mantz was perched in a chair in the nose of a converted B-25 bomber as he shot This Is Cinerama. Most of the famous aviation pictures of Hollywood’s Golden Age included footage shot by Paul Mantz and his team of fliers; he died in 1965, in an airplane, when a stunt went wrong on the James Stewart picture The Flight of the Phoenix.
James Forrestal moved from his administrative assistant position at the White House to Under Secretary of the Navy, and in 1944, when Secretary of the Navy Knox died of a heart attack, Forrestal took over; in 1947 he became the country’s first Secretary of Defense. He was credited with “building” the Navy, increasing the number of combat vessels from under four hundred to over fifteen hundred; he was considered “two-fisted” for taking frontline inspection tours, unusual for a ranking cabinet officer. He was also a virulent anticommunist and appeared to cheerfully despise Jews.
After President Truman forced his resignation, Forrestal — attacked in the press by Drew Pearson for war profiteering — apparently sank into a deep depression. Two months later, he fell — or perhaps was pushed — from the sixteenth floor of the Naval Hospital at Bethesda, Maryland, supposedly tying his bathrobe belt to a radiator and trying to hang himself, succeeding rather in falling to his death.
I didn’t keep track of, or run into, any number of the other people from those days. Ernie Tisor was still working with Paul Mantz in the late fifties, but that’s the last I saw of him. Toni Lake, who walked away from five crash landings, was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1943. Earl Carroll and his showgirl girlfriend Beryl Wallace were killed in an airliner crash in June 1948. Dizzy Dean ruined his pitching arm and got traded to the Cubs; FDR ran for a third term. I never saw Myrtle Mantz again; Margot died a few years ago — she never married; perhaps she was pining for me — or Amy.
Fred Noonan’s widow, Mary Bea, to whom I carried his message, married a widower, happily. For all her complaining about her family, Amy turned out to have a very loyal mother and sister, both of whom honored her at their every opportunity. Amy Otis Earhart, who never really gave up on the thought that her daughter might just show up one day, died at age ninety-five in October 1962.
From Boston to Honolulu, in dozens of towns across America, Amelia Earhart is honored with memorial plaques and markers, and streets and schools are named for her. Commemorative stamps have been issued; libraries and museums honor her with displays. Television movies and documentaries of her life frequently turn up on my Mitsubishi. And her luggage is still being manufactured and sold.
But also, the questions about her disappearance have developed into a cottage industry of research, expeditions, and books of a sort that G. P. Putnam might well have published. Rarely did a researcher track me down, and even more rarely did I cooperate. With one or two exceptions, I didn’t read their books, either. I didn’t need anybody to tell me what happened to Amelia Earhart. Besides which, I was under contract to Uncle Sam to keep my mouth shut; it’s like a deal with the devil — no escape clause.
And the government laughed off the Amelia-on-Saipan stories, though occasional documents surfaced due to the Freedom of Information Act that supported the “theory”; and scores of other letters and documents remain unclassified and/or destroyed. But Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, wartime commander-in-chief of the Pacific Fleet, later Chief of Naval Operations, admitted that the truth about Amelia Earhart would “stagger the imagination.”
In 1969, when I heard, after so many years, from Robert Myers — now a grown man, working in a sugar factory in Salinas, California — it sent me hurtling back to his parents’ living room where we heard that exciting radio drama on the family Philco. Still peppy, he told me he was writing a book about his memories of Amelia and, on weekends and vacations, lecturing on the subject.
I was struck by odd resonances in what he’d said: the statue of sugar Baron Matsue Haruji somehow loomed over the career of Amelia Earhart’s kid pal, now working in a sugar factory, supplementing his income out on the lecture circuit. I wondered if he’d ever spoken at the Coliseum in Des Moines; I wondered if it was even still there.
“She’s alive,” he told me excitedly, and over the phone, the voice, even with the deep, older timber of an adult, still sounded like a kid’s. “She’s a woman named Irene Bolam, and she lives in New Jersey. Fred Noonan’s alive, too!”