William Miller, Chief of the Air Carrier Division of the Civil Aeronautics Administration, died of a heart attack in Washington, D.C., in 1943. Doing a job in Hollywood, I received that news August of the same year in a booth at the Brown Derby on Wilshire, from Lt. Colonel Paul Mantz of the Army Air Forces First Motion Picture Unit.
“Well, that’s a surprise,” I said.
“That a guy as young as Miller would die of a heart attack?” Mantz asked over his frosted martini.
“That Miller had a heart.”
Mantz’s smile twitched under his mustache; he looked spiffy in his military threads. “You always were a sentimental soul. So, Nate—what’s the story on you and Guadalcanal?”
“Got likkered up, lied about my age, and found myself in boot camp with a bunch of kids. We saw rough action, but it was malaria that got me sent home early.”
Mantz’s expression told me he knew I was holding back, but respected a fellow soldier’s right to privacy. Then, chewing a bite of Caesar salad, he grinned and said, “Hear the latest about Gippy?”
“Which story? Faking his own kidnapping to promote that Hitler book? Or pretending to sue RKO for making that movie about Amelia?”
Shortly before the war, Putnam showed up at the Los Angeles DA’s office with threatening notes to himself and a bullet-riddled copy of The Man Who Killed Hitler, which he’d just published. Later he reported firing shots at a man trying to break and enter the Putnam home. The fascist plot against him—widely covered in the papers—reached its pinnacle when G. P. was found—within hours of his staff reporting his “disappearance”—bound and gagged (but unharmed) in a house under construction in Bakersfield.
The 1943 film Flight for Freedom starred Rosalind Russell as an Amelia Earhart-like aviatrix and Fred MacMurray as her Fred Noonan-like navigator, who undertake an espionage mission for the government with heroically tragic results. Putnam loudly objected and rattled litigation sabers in the press. In fact, he had sold the rights to Amy’s story to the studio and earned extra money by promoting the picture through his public protestations.
“Neither one,” Mantz said. “Gippy’s got himself commissioned as a major in Army Intelligence.”
Putnam, who was also in the process of acquiring a new wife (his fourth—Margaret Haviland, an executive with the USO), served in China, reportedly briefing, and debriefing, squadrons flying bombing raids into Japan. He also visited American-held Saipan, supposedly to investigate the rampant rumors about two white pilots, a man and a woman, captured before the war by the Japanese, that were circulating among GIs who’d spoken to Chamorro refugees in Camp Susupe, a city of tents run by the Army for the former citizens of Garapan, which had been obliterated in June 1944.
Thirty thousand Japanese and thirty-five hundred Americans—Navy, Army, Marines—died in Operation Forager, the twenty-four-day battle for Saipan, the Pacific island hit worst by the war. I don’t know that anyone ever bothered to total up casualties among the islanders, but many had to have died in the bombings; Garapan was reduced to rubble by June 24. Garapan Harbor thereafter was home to thousands of Allied ships; while the seaplane base was destroyed, Aslito Haneda was quickly rebuilt, expanded, and renamed Isley Field, handling hundreds of takeoffs and landings each day, becoming an airbase for the B-29 Super Fortress Bombers (the Enola Gay took off for Hiroshima from neighboring Tinian). The Japanese never completed the airstrip at Marpi Point; nearby was Suicide Cliff—there, and, near the north end of the island, at similarly named Banzai Cliff, thousands of Japanese men, women, and children threw themselves to a rocky death to avoid a worse fate at the hands of invading barbarians.
One odd, persistent rumor that came out of the Pacific theater was that Amelia Earhart was the voice of Tokyo Rose, the infamous female disc jockey whose Japanese propaganda broadcasts enticed American soldiers to listen to nostalgic songs from home interspersed with lies about how Japan was kicking the Allies’ ass. Major Putnam, while in the Far East, reportedly crossed enemy lines to listen to broadcasts of an American woman performing such propaganda, and rather defensively proclaimed the voice absolutely not to be Amelia’s. He said he would stake his life on it.
I have to admit, when the rumors that Amy might have been Rose first found their way to me, I had to wonder. Could she have survived that nightmarish rainy night? Had those bullets not been fatal? Did the Japs fish her out of the clear waters—we hadn’t been that far from shore—and revive her, and ship her off to Tokyo as a propaganda tool, as always intended?
And hadn’t she been known, in Saipan, as Tokyo Rosa?
Sometimes, late at night, I could almost talk myself into it. But too much was wrong. For one thing, there was no “Tokyo Rose”; it was a nickname, possibly picked up by GIs in Saipan who heard the “Tokyo Rosa” moniker, attached by the Chamorros to Amelia, and—in the way verbal storytelling evolves into legend—got applied by GIs to any English-speaking female disc jockey who turned up on Japan’s regular propaganda broadcasts.
Anyway, there was no single “Tokyo Rose,” rather dozens of female DJs who appeared on various Japanese radio shows, some with Japanese accents, others without, none of them using the Tokyo Rose appellation.
The myth grew so strong, however, that one of these women, who came forward and admitted having been coerced into doing some broadcasts—an American of Japanese descent who’d been visiting Tokyo when the war broke out—was railroaded into prison by such wonderful Americans as Walter Winchell and J. Edgar Hoover.
Amy’s name came up in the coverage, however, because during the public witch hunt that put innocent Iva Togori away for the crime of her race, another Amy Earhart attended every day of the trial: Amelia’s mother, though elderly and in poor health, traveling from Medford, Massachusetts, to San Francisco. Amy Otis Earhart told reporters her daughter had been secretive about the world flight, not sharing as much as she usually did with her mother.
“I’m convinced,” Mrs. Earhart said, “she was on some sort of government mission, probably on verbal orders.”
Also, I could see Army Intelligence, in 1944, with the end of the war looming, panicking that Amelia Earhart might turn up embarrassingly, and sending G. P. to check out those broadcasts. After all, in my debriefing—conducted by William Miller in June 1940—I had mentioned that Amelia was nicknamed “Tokyo Rosa” by the islanders. Maybe they put two and two together, and came up with egg on their face.
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 wi
th 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!”
“If he is, he’s got a splitting headache,” I said.
“What?”
“Nothing. Look, Robert, it’s nice hearing from you—”
“Fred Noonan is this guy William Van Dusen. This former Air Force major and this author, they’ve researched both of ’em, and Van Dusen and Bolam, their backgrounds are phony. It looks like a witness protection plan kind of deal.”
“I don’t think they had a witness protection program in the forties.”
“How do you know? If Amelia got turned into Tokyo Rose, maybe the government would want to…sort of, bury her.”
“Robert, it’s nice hearing from you again.”
“You don’t want to look into this for me?”
“Are you hiring me?”
“I can’t afford that. I work in a factory.”
“I work for a living, too, Robert. Thanks for the call. Good luck.”
And that had been that. I didn’t know whether to feel happy or sad for Robert Myers: his friendship with Amelia had given meaning to his life; yet it had obviously been painful for him, carrying around so many unanswered questions, going through his life a “kid” few took seriously.
I’d been there. I sat in the living room with him. I knew what he’d heard. He just didn’t know where I’d been.
The book that claimed Irene Bolam was Amelia Earhart got its authors sued and itself pulled from the shelves. This made me suspicious, and one day in 1970, when I was visiting the Manhattan office of A-1, I took a side trip to Bedford Hills, New York. I found Irene Bolam in the bar with three other women in the clubhouse of Forsgate Country Club; these were ladies in their late sixties and they seemed to appreciate the attention of a good-looking kid like me, in his early to mid-sixties.
I knew at once which one was Irene. She bore a resemblance to Amy, though her nose was different, wider, larger; noses change, though, not always for the better. And the eyes were a hauntingly familiar blue-gray.
Standing next to the ladies, who looked pretty foxy in t
heir golf sweaters and shorts, I said to Irene, “My name’s Nate Heller. We had a mutual friend.”
“Oh?” She beamed up at me. “And who would that be?”
“Amelia Earhart. I understand you were an aviatrix yourself, and flew with her?”
“That’s right, I was in the Ninety Nines…. Oh, my goodness, I hope you don’t believe that baloney in that horrible book.”
The “oh my goodness” gave me a start: it was a favorite phrase of Amy’s.
But this wasn’t Amy. Amy couldn’t look at me and not betray the feelings we’d had. If by some bizarre circumstance, this was an Amelia Earhart who had survived those bullets and been carted off to Tokyo, brainwashed by Tojo, returned home, and brainwashed again by Uncle Sam…if that ridiculous scenario were even possible, I didn’t want to know.
Whether this was Irene Bolam, or Amelia Earhart, I knew one thing for sure: my Amy wasn’t in this old woman’s eyes.
I sat with the girls and they had tropical drinks with umbrellas while I had a rum and Coke. One of the girls was a widow with a nice body and a decent face lift and I think I could have got lucky. But I was an old married man now, and had changed my ways.
Irene Bolam died in July 1982. She left her body to science and her family honored her wishes that her fingerprints not be shared with those who had been hounding her about her identity.
The Continental DC-10 circled lazily on its approach, as the island of Saipan made itself known through the clouds. We had left Guam forty-five minutes before—Buddy Busch, his two-man camera crew, and me. At first glance the long narrow island appeared to be nothing more than a jungle with a mountain rising from its midst; but soon rolling hills, shell-pocked cliffs, and white sand beaches disclosed their presence, as did roads, buildings, and cultivated fields.
This was a slightly different view than I’d gotten from the Yankee or its dinghy, and I could finally understand what everyone had been raving about all these years: the ocean waters surrounding Saipan were dazzlingly blue and turquoise and green and yet transparent.
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