by Susan Butler
Sunrise at Howland was at 1745 GMT. If the headwinds stayed steady on the nose, they would get there about two and a quarter hours after sunrise. Flying into the sun, all Fred had to figure was longitude: he knew they were heading in the right direction—he just didn’t know how far they had gone, for the effect of wind, often variable on a plane over water, is hard to determine.
The Itasca, 250 feet long, painted white, was lying off the northeastern side of Howland Island. It was sending up a plume of black smoke to serve as a signal for the fliers that could be seen for miles. The low-lying island, two miles long by half a mile wide, was marked by a lighthouse erected by the U.S. Lighthouse Service. At sea level the lighthouse could be seen ten miles away. Mariners figure that they are two miles from a shore when they can see a building’s windows, but for aviators, visibility at sea changes in the blink of an eye. An island can disappear under a bank of clouds.
Visibility at Howland Island was good that morning, according to the Itasca—the sky was clear to the south and east, the direction from which Amelia was approaching, although it was somewhat overcast about twenty miles to the northwest. There was an east-northeast wind ranging between fourteen and thirty miles per hour.
And so began the tragic last act. Amelia was supposed to contact the Itasca at fifteen minutes before and after the hour. They were supposed to send her a steady stream of weather information and position fixes.
Fourteen hours and 15 minutes into the flight, the Itasca reported that they had recognized an Earhart voice message, but that it wasn’t clear except for the words “Cloudy weather cloudy.” One hour later, 15 hours and 15 minutes into the flight, the Itasca heard Amelia asking them to broadcast on 3105 kilocycles on the hour and half hour. She reported it was overcast. Sixteen hours and 24 minutes into the flight, the Itasca reported that they could hear Amelia but that her voice signals were “unreadable” with five people listening. Twenty minutes later she broadcast again, and this time her message was clear: she wanted bearings on 3105 frequency and said she would whistle into the microphone. A few minutes later she called again. “About 200 miles out,” the Itasca radiomen heard, and she whistled briefly into the microphone. A half hour later, back on the agreed-upon schedule, 17 hours and 15 minutes into the flight, Amelia was back on the radio:
Please take bearing on us and report in half hour I will make noise in microphone about 100 miles out.
During this time the Itasca had been transmitting weather reports to Amelia on the hour and half hour on 3105 kilocycles, as she had requested. She had received none of their transmissions.
It was 17:45 GMT; 17 hours, 45 minutes into the flight: sunrise at Howland Island. There was now enough light so that Amelia and Fred would have been looking to see the island, as Amelia’s next transmission, nineteen hours into the flight, makes clear:
We must be on you but cannot see you but gas is running low have been unable reach you by radio we are flying at 1000 feet. Twenty-seven minutes later, at 19:27 GMT, the radiomen heard:
We are circling but cannot see island cannot hear you go ahead on 7500 kilocycles with long count either now or on schedule time on half hour.
Nineteen hours 33 minutes into the night—for the first and only time—Amelia received a transmission.
Earhart calling Itasca we received your signals but unable to get minimum please take bearings on us and answer on 3105 kilocycles.
The Itasca then reported that they heard long dashes for a brief period but that the high-frequency direction finder could not cut her in on 3105 kilocycles.
Twenty hours and 14 minutes into the flight, Amelia radioed the Itasca the following message:
We are on the line of position 157 dash 337 will repeat this message on 6210 kilocycles. We are now running north and south.
And then there was silence.
Fred was good at estimating distance covered, he thought he knew how far east they had traveled, and he felt secure using his octant, looking up the Greenwich Hour Angle of a star, then figuring their position from it. “This was a trick that Noonan had used in Pan American navigation many a time. He would make the longitude by time and then he would start looking north and south for the island objective,” recalled Richard Black. But what if during the night the winds had increased, slowing them down more than he expected, and the skies had been too overcast to get a good star fix? As Amelia mentioned twice, it was cloudy. They were, Fred had to have thought, far enough east, so he had started looking north and south for Howland. They had gone the required distance, he would have figured: that was the significance of the communication that they were running north and south. To the southeast, just thirty miles from Howland, was Baker Island. Other than that, there was nothing for hundreds of miles.
The Itasca waited in disbelief. At 21:45 GMT—an hour and a half after Amelia’s last transmission—they reported Amelia’s nonarrival to fleet headquarters, at the same time giving the weather: “Sea smooth visibility nine ceiling unlimited.”
Ceiling unlimited. And yet Amelia and Fred hadn’t seen the plume of smoke, the boat, or the island.
They had never even been close.
23
Later
•••• Prior to her Hawaii—Oakland flight two years before, Amelia had gone over the procedures for landing a land plane in the ocean with Paul Mantz so she knew it could be done successfully. As she had noted at the time, “a craft of that type has been known to float for eight days before the crew were rescued.” For that solo overwater flight, Amelia had worn an inflatable rubber vest and of course carried an inflatable life raft. Now, in 1937, she was a much more seasoned flier than she had been in 1935. She and Fred had a Very pistol to shoot rockets and balloons to raise a flag, and they would have believed that they had a fighting chance of coming out alive even if they did run out of gas and land in the sea. And because the gas tanks on the Electra were empty, they would have acted as floats—another reason to think there would be enough time for them to get out of the plane and into the inflatable raft. The odds of making it with the inflatable, which was stocked with food, were pretty good.
On the other hand, assuming that she made as good a landing as possible under the circumstances, two things could rule against survival: waves, which could break up the plane before they had a chance to get out, and sharks. The crew of the Itasca had been catching sharks since their arrival at Howland on June 23. The sharks and barracuda, observed Air Corps Lieutenant Daniel Cooper, were “plentiful.”
Search efforts began. Going on the assumption, as they reported to fleet headquarters, that “if the plane had been close to Howland it was believed the island or the Itasca would have been easily seen except from the northwest” (the overcast area) and also because Baker Island lay thirty miles to the southeast and Amelia had not mentioned sighting it, Itasca began searching to the northwest. As night fell, the search continued; lookouts were posted, and sailors swept the seas with high-powered searchlights. They found nothing.
There were navy PBY seaplanes in Honolulu capable of making the 1,660-nautical-mile flight to Howland to mount an immediate air search—but only one plane at a time could go because only one plane at a time could land in the sea, be refueled and stay on a towline for the night behind the Itasca. Upon hearing the news that Amelia was overdue, Lieutenant Sidney Harvey, the senior officer in charge of the navy flight squadron, with a crew of eight including himself, immediately made ready to fly a PBY to Howland to begin the search. But it took the whole day before the plane was ready.
Harvey and his men left at seven P.M. that evening, planning to arrive at Howland in daylight, spend the next day searching, and that evening land in the sea and tie up behind the Itasca. As they proceeded, the radiomen kept requesting Amelia to send her carrier wave—that is, press down on her microphone button. “The pilots received three dashes,” recalls Page Smith, one of the pilots, adding that such a sound was inconclusive evidence and quite possibly it was from someone other than Amel
ia. As the men strained to hear, the weather deteriorated, and soon they were flying in snow, sleet, and lightening. Itasca radioed that a tropical front had moved in causing ten-foot waves that would make it impossible for a plane to tie up to a towline. That clinched it—the PBY turned back, reaching Honolulu twenty-four hours and ten minutes after it had taken off. Well before then, the navy, worried that the plane would run out of gas, had sent four ships steaming out in the PBY’s flight path to keep watch for the fliers.
At Howland there was still only Itasca on the scene.
Itasca kept monitoring the airwaves in the hope that the plane had landed on a reef or island—the radio would have been silenced almost immediately if it had landed in the sea. And they kept thinking they heard something. False lead followed false lead. Three days after its disappearance, Itasca radiomen heard a transmission they thought was so promising, they cabled Washington that they were going to check out an area 280 miles north of Howland. It turned out to be another false lead. By Tuesday, July 6, the Itasca had searched three thousand miles in daylight and fifteen hundred miles at night. But it was the only ship on the scene.
George’s first thought was that Amelia was down in the Phoenix Island region southeast of Howland. The battleship Colorado catapulted three planes from its deck to inspect the region’s islands. The planes skimmed over Gardner Island, also called Nikumaroro Island, McKean Island, and Carondelet Reef, but saw only ruined guano works and the wreck of a tramp steamer. By then it was Wednesday; five days had passed.
On the premise that the ocean current ran west and the winds south-southeast, it was decided to intensively search the Gilbert Islands, six hundred miles due west of Howland. But it was not until July 13 that the minesweeper Swan, which had been midway between Hawaii and Howland, actually checked out Onotea in the Gilberts, subsequently continuing to Taputeouea, Nukinau, Peru, and Nonuti, also in the Gilberts. The Itasca followed, reaching Tarawa in the Gilberts two days later. Crew members interviewed the British administrator, who assured Itasca personnel that there was no sign of the plane. Nevertheless the Itasca continued to search various islands in the group. The Japanese embassy in Honolulu was also questioned.
The Lexington, the fastest aircraft carrier in the navy, had put into Santa Barbara, California, on July 3 and given its men liberty, according to J. J. Clarke, air officer on the ship. At about four P.M. they got a message to get ready to go to the South Pacific and make a search for Amelia. They hoisted the recall flag, sent out search parties to try to get as many men back as they could, and that night went down to San Diego so they could load the squadrons early the next morning. They made quick work of loading the planes, sixty-two in all, but needing fuel, the ship had to make first for Honolulu. Running at a speed of about thirty knots, it reached the Hawaiian Islands in four days, something of a speed record. Three destroyers, the Lamson, the Drayton, and the Cushing accompanied the Lexington and stayed with it during the search.
Fastest ship in the navy or not, it took, in total, eleven days for the Lexington to reach Howland Island. While the carrier was under way, the fliers organized their planes into groups and drew up a search plan so that when they took off, they would have “an eye on every mile.” The information they had was that Amelia had passed over the Gilbert Islands on course and on speed and had only had about four hundred miles to go to Howland.
Once at their destination, the naval pilots took a point north of Howland and drew a circle in the outer range of the amount of gas the Electra could have carried. They searched that circle—150,000 square miles. They found nothing. They concluded that Amelia and Fred never even got into their life raft, because if they had, there would have been some sign of it, but there was no sign of anything. But then, they didn’t begin the search until two weeks after Amelia’s disappearance.
There had to be a reason for the tragedy, everyone said. Carl Allen had agreed with Amelia in Miami that jettisoning the trailing antenna and the marine frequency radio “made complete sense,” since neither she nor Fred were proficient in Morse code, and extra fuel “could spell the difference between life and death.” He concluded, after reading the Itasca’s radio log, that the key to the tragedy lay not in the jettisoning of the marine radio but in the lack of knowledge of that fact aboard the ship, for they kept asking her to tune in to the 500-kilocycle marine frequency and pick up their direction finder. To add to the mystery there was another direction finder on Howland that operated on 3105 kilocycles, although it wasn’t properly calibrated, according to Lieutenant Daniel Cooper, stationed on the island.
One thing was sure: Bill Miller, as a former navy pilot, would have been knowledgeable about radio frequencies. Had he been coordinating everything for Amelia, it might have made a difference. More important he would have known—because he would have been on the scene in Miami—that Amelia had dropped the trailing antenna, and he would have notified the Itasca and Richard Black at the outset. If Gene Vidal hadn’t resigned, Miller would still have been on the scene.
There is also the strong possibility that it wouldn’t have mattered what frequency Amelia’s communications equipment was operating on, because the equipment wasn’t working. A blown fuse had knocked out the generator on the Oakland—Honolulu flight in March, air force mechanics had discovered after they landed. A blown fuse was the culprit in the lack of functioning of the direction finder receiver on the Kupang-Darwin flight, Australian authorities reported. The day after that there may have been another short circuit in the receiving equipment, according to Amelia’s last cable from Lae: “my navigator has been unable because of radio difficulties, to set his chronometers” (although there was also a report of a line breakdown at the Malabar radio station, making it impossible to receive time signals). Fuses are easily replaced. But when fuses blow it is an indication of an underlying electrical problem, and means that the problem will recur. The Itasca had asked Amelia to broadcast on 500 kilocycles to make use of its ship direction finder, but they also kept communicating on every frequency they could think of. They asked her on every transmission that she acknowledge. Only once through that long morning did she indicate that she had received any signal from them, yet Itasca would later find out that they were heard all over the Pacific on 3105, 7500, and 500 kilocycles. So it is quite possible that the lack of communication was not due to confusion as to kilocycles but to a fault in the Electra’s wiring.
Before Amelia took off, George had moved into the coast guard station in San Francisco so that he would be able to give out bulletins on Amelia’s progress from Lae. He simply stayed there, spending days and nights without sleep in the copper-walled radio room with the coast guard radio operators, hoping against hope that word would come that Amelia was still alive, wearing himself out listening to every false message—and there were many—reporting that she was. Each time a new hopeful report came in, he offered suggestions as to search quadrants to the navy and he suggested that the Department of Commerce pressure England and Japan to mount rescue operations of their own. He tried to keep the U.S. Navy search from winding down. Finally, exhausted, he went into seclusion at the San Francisco home of Dr. Harry Clay, an old friend.
But he didn’t give up on finding Amelia. Nor did Gene Vidal. At the end of July Gene succeeded in meeting with President Roosevelt and Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles and convincing them that “a thorough surface search” of the Gilbert Islands—British possessions—should again be made.
George offered a two-thousand-dollar reward for any information. Sumner Welles wrote countless letters on behalf of both Gene and George.
When not a scrap of the plane turned up after more than a year had passed, George finally, reluctantly, came to the conclusion that she had died.
On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
Ever since, there have been people who thought the Japanese were hiding something. The idea began to grow that Amelia had been on a mission to find out what the Japanese were up to in the S
outh Pacific. In 1943, when the United States and Japan were two years into the war, Hollywood made a movie, “Flight for Freedom,” starring Fred MacMurray and Rosalind Russell. Amelia and Fred, the movie script went, were working for the government: they agreed to get “lost” in order to give the U.S. Navy an excuse to search Japanese waters.
Harry Manning was tracked down and denied that they were on a spy mission. Charles Edison, assistant secretary of the navy at the time and later secretary of the navy, in an interview, remembered that the matter had been “thoroughly discussed” at the time. “I am satisfied,” he stated, that “Amelia Earhart was not flying on any Navy mission.”
As the war progressed and the United States began to retake islands that had been in possession of the Japanese, speculation about Amelia’s fate surfaced in another form. Servicemen began hunting for and finding evidence that she had been captured by the Japanese: executed, tortured, imprisoned. All the stories had one thing in common: she had suffered a horrible fate.
Fred Goerner, a CBS reporter, spent six years and mounted four expeditions in search of Amelia and Fred. He was sure that they had been found by a Japanese fishing boat, transferred to either the Kamoi or the Koshu, and transported first to Jaluit, then Kwajalein, and finally to Saipan, where they were imprisoned and died. There have been countless other expeditions, and every group that travels to a South Pacific island comes back with something that they try to turn into enough money to pay for the expedition: a generator, a piece of a shoe, part of a box; but in the end nothing matches.
