American History Hit - Amelia Earhart

Episode Date: June 26, 2023

On July 2 1937, Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, took off on what was supposed to be the final leg of their circumnavigation of the globe, but would in fact be their final flight.In this episode Don is joined by Susan Butler to explore this American sweetheart's personality, her early life and her work for women's rights.We then explore some of the many theories surrounding the thing that Amelia is perhaps best known for, her disappearance. For this, Don is joined by Richard Spink.Produced and edited by Sophie Gee. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Dan Snow, James Holland, Mary Beard and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code AMERICANHISTORY. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up at historyhit.com/subscribeYou can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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245 a.m. this morning, we received our first radio contact from Amelia Earhart's Lockheed Electra, which we understand had taken off from Ley, New Guinea at noon yesterday. Two hours ago, at 6.45 a.m., the plane radio to position 100 miles out. Just an hour ago, she reported a location over the island, but not siding land, and she was running low on fuel. Now it's 8.43 a.m. The transmission reported being online 157 to 377, running north and south. But there's no sign of the plane, nothing. And we wait, watching the skies, checking the radio. The shore party has come aboard now. At an hour and 17 minutes after our last signal, we set to sea.

The search for Amelia Earhart begins. Hello, this is Don Wildman, and you're listening to American History Hip. Very glad to have you. Eight decades on, we are still fascinated, entranced even by a remarkable, charismatic woman who accomplished in her day a list of aviation firsts, but is most famous for her final daring exploit that came up tragically short. A single plane circumnavigation of the globe along the equatorial zone. This pioneering flyer whose life is now legend was extraordinary in every regard.

Her achievements in aviation put her at the cutting edge of an emerging transportation that would transform civilization, all the while deliberately placing herself at the cusp of cultural change, challenging the tired norms of how women were viewed in society, in home and at work. While she lived, she was a phenomenon, an iconoclast. The moment she disappeared in the spring of 1937, somewhere out there in the Blue Pacific, she entered the pantheon of the world's preeminent adventurers. She was, of course, Amelia Earhart. Later in this episode, we're going to take a look at some of the theories about Amelia's disappearance,

and I'll be joined by Richard Spink. But first, I'm delighted to welcome the author who wrote the definitive best-selling biography of this trail-blazing figure, East to Dawn, The Life of Amelia Earhart, which upon publication the Washington Post called The Single Best Book We Now Have on Earhart's Life. Susan Butler, I'm thrilled to meet you. Thanks for coming on to the show. Well, I'm thrilled that you asked me to talk about Amelia Earhart. Your book came out more than 20 years ago, and we are still talking about it. It was the biography upon which the Hillary Swank movie, was based. I'm curious, when you decided to write it, you were working as a journalist,

and this was your first book, am I right? Yes. So Amelia Earhart was already well-trod territory. What was the story that still hadn't been told for you? The story that hadn't been told was how important she is in the history of the women's movement in the United States. I don't think anybody realized what she was trying to do at the time. And if somebody had asked her, what she thought was her greatest achievement, I think she probably would have said, raising women's sights. She was much more interested in the end of her life in making women think of themselves as contributing to society and being more than wives and mothers. 30 years before Betty Friedan wrote the feminine mystique, 40 years before Gloria Steinem launched

Ms. Magazine, she was telling women that they should fulfill themselves and that they had more to offer men in their bodies. She wanted women to have careers. And this was a conscious motive for her. I mean, this isn't just interpretation after the fact. This was something she spoke of and was well known for at the time. Yes. She thought of her flights as record-breaking flights.

She loved flying. But she used flying, really, to contribute to her message. She used flying as a tool to raise women's sights. She was unusual in a basic sense. that she did not have an adventurer's mentality. She'd been chosen to be the first woman to fly the Atlantic. I grew up with a mom who was a big fan. For my mother's generation, Depression era and all that,

she was the star. And she really did inspire my mom to inspire my sisters, who were all older than me. And it was a big deal in our household. Amelia Earhart was born in 1897. Childhood spent in Kansas, Iowa, Minnesota. Her father worked for the railroads. messy career, troubled man, alcoholic.

Amelia's mom eventually moves her two daughters to Chicago. She is a very bright kid, of course, interested in science. How did this kind of childhood shape her and tee up this life of adventure ahead? Well, as a child, she was always the most adventurous, one of her group. Actually, I'd been very lucky, and I found women who had grown up with her. And they said that she was always the leader, and she was always the innovator. And she was always daring different things, including she invented a slide down from a roof of their playhouse. She was always very courageous.

And she was always trying new things. But I want to say one thing, Don, which is not known, which is I was looking recently at the New York Times. And the New York Times banner headline, when her plane went missing, for six days, the entire world was trying to. transfixed by the plight of her plane six days. I mean, that's amazing. The fame that she achieved in short order in her life was both a tribute to her adventures and these incredible daring exploits, but also her incredible magnetism. You know, even today, you look at one picture of her and it's, she's movie star quality

and yet she's the real deal as far as what she did as a trade. You know, she was just good at what she did. So early in her life, how did she become? interested in flying? Was it Barnstormer shows, mail carriers? What did she see that drew her in? Well, she'd moved out to L.A. to be with her parents. And there were just flying fields opening all the time. And it was the thing to do. And that's what drew her in. And she went for a test flight. And she just fell in love with flying. I know the feeling. I never got my license, but I certainly have gone up plenty of times and just love the feeling. So you can imagine in those days what that was like.

It's interesting to consider the public's opinion of flying, though, in this early age. People were scared of this thing. I mean, it was very, very dangerous to do, obviously. It was very, very dangerous. If people made lists, they were just basically crossing out more and more people because it was so dangerous. The engines hadn't been affected. But there was something else. There were many, many people who believe that when you went up in a plane, you were near God.

They really believed that pilots were near. heaven. It's hard for us to believe now that people were so naive, I guess is the word. But females were not very well respected. The idea that a female could not only be up there closer to God, but could be fine themselves. That was totally startling. That's what comes from reading your book is the unlikelyhood of this entire story. I mean, you have a form of transportation, which is just barely invented. I mean, the Wright brothers are a couple decades earlier. And no young woman or any woman of any age is going to be welcome in this chauvinistic world of primarily military flyers, I suppose, who are, you know, daring, do, and all that sort of thing. It takes a while for her to

get around to this. She has a teenage life, of course, and it leads her eventually into a job in the war, just after the war, in Canada, right? She becomes a nurse of sorts. And this runs her into the Spanish flu, which is so interesting to think of nowadays. She was a student at the Ogun School. She was a teenager and she went to visit her sister who was living in Canada and she was so stunned by the number of Canadian soldiers. She saw limping along who had been wounded by the war that she immediately decided that she had to be of use. And she decided she was going to be a nurse and she withdrew from school. It is such a personality, isn't it? It's an empathetic soul who sees her role in the world as being of greater use, which is,

is such an interesting theme in her life, despite her own personal, perhaps ego-driven, who knows, desires to adventure, she has that gene that wants to be bigger than that. Yes, you're right. She had that gene, and that was really the motivating factor in her life. She also loved adventure. She loved riding horses. And I have a wonderful quote from somebody who went horseback riding with her. You said that, you know, the wilder the horse, the harder to control, the more she loved it.

That's so cool. She actually contracted a sinus infection, which was interesting to read about, which would have been a big trouble later in life with her flying. Right. Well, she actually contracted that when she was taking care of the many wounded in Canada. It was sort of a derivation from the Spanish flu. Yeah, yeah. And it becomes a long-time illness, right?

I mean, it's... Yes. She has to have a sort of drainage tube and the whole thing is in a lot of her pictures. It periodically flared up. Her career in aeronics begins in the 1920s, the roaring 1920s. It would have been big news in my family if I decided to be a professional pilot, never mind being a woman in the 1920s when there wasn't even an industry yet. What drew her to even considering this job?

How many women pilots were there at 1920? Oh, they were very few. She was the first woman to be awarded an FAA license. You could number them on one hand, the number of pilots in the United States. Yeah. But it was a growing movement that was an interesting subculture of America. I'm sure you'd find equivalence elsewhere in society, but it was a cool bunch of women who were doing this

and who were seeing a path for themselves. Oh, absolutely. There was a small group of, a very small group of women out in L.A. who were flying and had their own planes. And actually, in 1923, she briefly held the altitude record for women and for you to realize the state of aviation at that point, She won it going up only 14,000 feet. In one of those planes, that would be plenty high for me.

1927, Charles Lindbergh flies the Atlantic in the spirit of St. Louis. He sets the new bar. By this time, Amelia's been living in the Boston area. She attended Columbia University briefly. She wanted to go to MIT but couldn't afford it. And she's now flying out of the Quincy, Massachusetts airport there, making money writing columns in local papers. She already envisions a role for herself as a feminist.

advocate in aviation, doesn't she? Yes, absolutely. And the written word will have a lot to do with this, won't it? Yes, she was also a very good writer. She put in an article in the Boston magazine that everybody in Boston read called the Bostonian saying how wonderful it was for women to fly and how much they would enjoy it. It's got to be such a metaphor for her, right? I mean, if you feel bound up by society and the role you have to play and suddenly there's

this way of jumping into a plane and flying through the sky, I mean, what a perfect the escape. Yes, she adored it. Yeah. She must have been making a name for herself already in these days because she's called up out of the blue. I mean, how does this even happen? She's offered the opportunity to be the first woman to cross the Atlantic with many strings attached. Can you explain this first endeavor, this first big mission for her in which she meets George Putnam? Well, a very wealthy woman by the name of Amy Yes, had decided she was going to be the first woman to fly the Atlantic. When I say fly the Atlantic, I mean, just as a passenger, nobody expected a woman would even be able to pilot a plane. But just to be a passenger, there was a woman whom the very correct Amy Guest thought was sort of trashy and not worthy of having the fame.

And she had hired a pilot, and she was going to be the most famous woman in the world. And so very proper, very, very wealthy, Amy Guest decided that she was going to be. going to do it. So she bought a plane. She hired two pilots and made plans to fly the Atlantic. And then her children found out about it. And they talked her out of it. They just said, you know, you're 55, you're too old. We love you too much. You can't do this. So she said, okay, I will not do it. I will give up my place. But only if you find a passenger, she should be a lady. We're talking about many years ago. And so this was important for Amy guess. So she said she had to be a lady. She had to be educated and a man by the name of George Palmer Putnam, who was a publisher who had actually

published all the adventurers, including Lindbergh. He was in charge of the search. And he asked a friend of his to start looking. And the friend lived in Boston. And so he started in Boston. And the first was Amelia Earhart. And so he interviewed her and asked her if she would like to fly the Atlantic. And she said, well, of course. So they checked. her out and they liked her so much. Amy Phipps' family liked her so much that they never interviewed anybody else. It's very dramatized in the movie version of this story. She describes herself as being a sack of potatoes on the plane. You know, it's just a passenger, which must have driven her crazy. Is the movie true to that where she actually takes part in the flying and so

forth or not? Yes, no, she never touched the controls. But actually, she had been very important in the flight because the plane was a seaplane and they'd had a terrible time taking off from where they were starting out from. And the pilot had started drinking. And so she had sort of taken control of all the plans and was calling the shots with the pilot as to the day they were going to start. So although she was not permitted to touch the controls of the plane, she was in fact integral to the flight. Very engaged. That's interesting. They succeed. They land. Big story. Of course, it had already been planted as such because this is already a promoted endeavor. You know, she's dubbed Lady Lindy because, you know, immediately compared to Charles Lindberg. She even looks like them. She bears a certain resemblance to the guy.

They have a ticker tape parade when they get home. They're invited to the White House by President Hoover. It's heady stuff. and all the while she's being groomed, right? She's being professionally promoted by George Putnam. But she's a natural at developing this sort of aviator image. She's taking part in this, right? She is, and she's sort of taking control. She's a very competent woman. By that time, she's on,

she'd been working at a settlement house before she was chosen to make this flight. And she was so confident that she was already on the board of directors of the settlement house, although she was still a young woman. But she's a natural. at creating this image for herself, right? I mean, she has a lecture series, a clothing line, a luggage line. The woman is an influencer.

She was, besides being the most famous female pilot, she was the Oprah Winfrey of her day. Then it was all lectures. So she was traveling all over the country. She was flying herself all over the country. And by the way, she had incredible stamina. So she could visit three different small towns and give lectures in their women's groups.

and not even be tired, which of course showed up later and contemporaneously, actually. Her flights were 18 hours, and she had a huge amount of stamina. What do you think accounts for her star quality? I mean, where does that magnetism come from? Was she fighting her way out of something? Or was she drawn to celebrity? What was it about her? Well, in the first place, she loved adventure.

But then she came to it as a social worker, and she knew that she was a leader. She had been a leader. For the time she was in kindergarten, to the time she was in school and college, she'd always been a leader. For instance, I went to Columbia University, which is in Manhattan. In the middle of the campus is Low Library, which has this curved roof. And while she was there, she climbed up to the top of Low Library, which is slippery. It's dangerous.

And she just had a wonderful time there. She not only climbed it a couple of times, even though it was long. and you weren't allowed to, but she got a professor to go up there with her. She was an very, very adventurous young woman. After she does this trip across the Atlantic, this is when her career really begins to take off. In the midst of becoming this major celebrity, she determines to set her own records and becomes the first woman to, I'm going to do a list here, flies a round trip across America, across the continent and back again. She races planes competitively. She sets an altitude record in

1931, she's suddenly everywhere in aviation. And this at a time when everything, you know, said no to a woman doing this kind of thing. It's an incredible amount of moxie. And in the midst of all of this is a relationship with this man named George Putnam. They get married in February in 1931. What was this marriage like? It was totally on Amelia's terms, totally on Amelia's terms. I mean, I'd love to quote you from the letter. She handed him a letter the morning of the wedding. And it's really amazing to think that he married her after she wrote it. She wrote to him, you must know again my reluctance to marry, my feeling that I shatter thereby chances in work, which means so much to me. I feel the move just now as foolish as anything I do.

But then she goes on, and this is really startling. I shall not hold you to any medieval code of faithfulness to me, nor shall I consider myself. have bound to you similarly. If we can be honest, I think the difficulty is which arise may be best avoided. But please, let us not interfere with the others work or play. I mean, it's just an amazing letter. It's a very modern sentiment about gender roles within marriage, let alone in society. It's incredible. In the spring of 1932, Ahart pilots her Lockheed Vega 5B. This is, of course, My favorite part of the story are these incredible planes that she pilots, these beautiful machines. She flies this Lockheed from Newfoundland to Derry in Northern Ireland.

It is not the sleek, shiny plane she's eventually famous for, the Elektra. But she finally does become the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. 14 hours, 56 minutes, very bad weather. This becomes then a series of solo flight she makes over the coming years, Honolulu to Oakland, L.A. to Mexico City. Mexico City to New York. 1930 to 1935, she sets seven speed and distance records. What was her grand plan here?

Was she just going to spend her life setting records? I mean, where did she see this all going for herself, do you think? She saw the record flights as expanding women's role. She had decided that she could be the role model for American women, and she could show the world what women could do, and that women were just as competent piloting a plane as men. And so the more records that she made, the more that drove that point home. Interesting.

So each time she would make one of these trips that was accompanied by lots of promotion in this regard. She would talk to talk about women's roles. Absolutely, absolutely. Every time the chief flew, then she would mark that as it wasn't that difficult to flight. I feel totally competent. I'm a woman. Right. Women can do these things.

She becomes good friends with Eleanor Roosevelt for kind of the same reason, right? Eleanor actually fell in love with her. Actually, Eleanor wanted to become a pilot. And Amelia was helping her become a pilot, and they had figured out a number of steps that Eleanor took, including passing the physical exam before you could take lessons. You had to pass a physical exam. And then finally, Eleanor told Franklin, what she had in mind,

And he said, no, you can't do that. We can't afford it. It was the excuse he gave. So she gave it up. But Amelia Earhart was, she visited the White House so many times that I lost track. And Eleanor said to her, anytime you want to come, please do. There you go. Everybody's fall in love with this woman.

Oh, yes. And then when she did come, when she did stay at the White House, at one point, there's a letter from Eleanor saying, well, I loved having you here, but why do you have to go out for dinner so often? Was the trip around the world going to be a caper? Was it going to be the final triumph? I mean, she can't fly to the moon. She had decided that she was going to do this round of the world flight, and then she was going to hang up her wings. I mean, not hang up. She was going to continue flying, but she was not going to do any more record-breaking flight. Gotcha. All right, let's focus on the fateful trip. This is a more complex story than people generally realize. This begins in Oakland,

March 17th, 1937, they fly to Hawaii. In Hawaii, after a stay of a couple of days, the plane is damaged in a ground loop. Explain what happens and why they need to be in Hawaii longer than they thought. Well, when she was taking off, nobody really knew what happened, but the plane did ground loop. It was heavily loaded, and it made a ground loop,

and it severely damaged a wing. And so the whole flight had to be changed because the plane had to be flown back to the United States. States to be repaired. And by that time, the winds had changed. And so the direction of the flight had changed. And so instead of flying from Hawaii west, by the time she started, the winds had changed, and it became a flight to the east.

Right. That was a huge alteration. I mean, according to the original plan, they were going to fly from Hawaii and then go west all the way around the world and come back. Now they've completely altered this to going east. down to South America and then take a left turn and head for Senegal and then across Africa and so forth, coming back to Hawaii. A gigantic change. Well, it was a shame. I mean, you're thinking of it.

But at that point when she hired Fred Noonan, he was considered to be a great navigator. He had a great reputation at Pan Am. He had been actually let go because he had a drinking problem. But the pilots there were quoted as saying that he could fly anywhere with one eye closed. He could find his destination. What a theme throughout her life, the alcohol, men with alcohol. Yes, men with alcohol. That was really crucial in her life.

Really a defining element. Let's talk about this plane. The most alluring machine ever built to grace the skies, the Lockheed Electra 10E. I've actually sat in a model of this, which is in Boeing, the museum up in Seattle. The gorgeous machine. It is built to her own specifications.

Was it intended to be part of this? image? I mean, was that all part of this deal? Well, at that point, she was a professor in residence, actually, at Purdue University. And Purdue financed the plane for her. It was a 12-passenger plane, which was very popular with the airlines. I mean, it was the only other person, the only other individual who owned a Lockheed Electra was Howard Hughes. So just the fact that this was her personal plane was startling. And she had great plans for, again, showing what a woman could do, piloting this plane. And she also hoped to make some scientific discoveries as she flew around the world. What does that mean? She called it a working laboratory. Well, I think she was

speaking of sunglasses, which, you know, that was a terrible problem in those years, having the right sunglasses. She was going to be capturing capsules of air at various places, at various altitudes. I don't know what else she had in mind, but I think she was sort of making it up as she was going along. She's not going to be the first to circle the planet in a plane. This has been done before, but it was with a team of planes, and it was all men. She'll be the first woman in the pilot seat. They chart a journey that follows the equatorial zone. This is important because that's the widest girth of the planet, of course. But also it was also important because it had never been done.

Exactly. The Post had circumnavigated the globe, but he had done it in a different route. And of course, he had died in the process. How many stops are they going to make and how do they fuel up? I've always wondered this. That had been George Palmer Putnam's job before the plane ever took off. He had to make sure that the aviation gasoline that plane needed. was available at every spot.

So the flight was very carefully planned. So he had to make sure that there was gasoline at every place that she went, which was a logistical problem, which he solved. And of course, that was one of the reasons that Howland Island was so important. Sure. I mean, they're fueling up in 1937 Africa. So I think that's talk about a logistical problem in the middle of Equatorial Africa. They're being tracked to the whole.

way, of course. It was not only being heavily covered on the front pages, but she had a contract with the Herald Tribune. So she was writing, she was such a busy lady. So she was not only having to fly all day and worry about maintaining the plane and worry that everything on the plane was working, but she was filing stories every day that appeared the next day. So the flight was being carried on the front pages of the newspapers. So the whole world was, with her, so to speak. It's an extraordinary story. She's flying 600, 800,000 miles a day, you know, on each one of these legs.

They finally make it around to the Dutch East Indies, you know, coming up from Australia, I guess. This is the final stretch. I mean, how dependable was this plane? I mean, it's an incredible long journey. Did they have any mechanical issues along the way? They did have mechanical issues along the way. But I think all planes have mechanical issues along the way. she was flying such a long distance, but she thought the plane was in good condition.

But the communications had been spotting, and an Australian radio operator had tried to contact her at one point, contact the plane, and the plane hadn't heard this radio station. So she thought that the radio had been repaired, and that she was not going to have any more problems. But of course, we learned later that indeed the plane did have communications problems. Right. One of the saddest aspects of this story is that she almost did it. I mean, she was on the final, literally the final stretch of this journey. They take off July 2nd, 1937 from Leigh Airport in New Guinea. They're heading for, in general, Honolulu, Hawaii, but along the way, they have to go to Howland Island, which is a gig.

gigantic amount of time. It's the longest leg of the entire trip more than 2,000 miles, 2,223 miles, as a matter of fact, 20 hours in the air, 1,100 gallons of fuel on board. They're inevitably going to be close to empty by the time they arrive. But that's, it's just fine, it's such a frustrating part of the story because they'd already gone all the way around the world. You know, they were really pretty much there. And then suddenly this happens. So let's talk about how the end comes. There is a ship called the It's The United States Coast Guard Cutter Itasca dispatched to Howland Island. That's how planned out this whole thing is.

They're ready for her arrival. They know about when she's supposed to show up on the radio. And they're going to send up smoke signals, literally from the boilers of the ship, to help her find the island. Take me through the events of this day and how it happens that she's lost. Well, the reason that Howland Island had been chosen is that it was almost on the equator, planes in those days. did not have the capacity to fly long distances. And so her ultimate goal, of course, was Hawaii again. But to fly across the Pacific, she had to land somewhere to get more fuel.

And Howland Island had been chosen, and there was gasoline there. Actually, in anticipation of her plane landing there, a small hut had been constructed, and there was a bed there. Everything was in readiness for Amelia to land there, courtesy of the United States government, by the way, because she was such a star. Although they said that it had been done because that was going to be an outpost of the United States, it had actually been, the airfield had been created and the hut created on request from Amelia Earhart. And so she had to land there because that was the furthest point that her plane could make it on the few. that a plane could carry in those years. And it was actually a pretty clear day. The last time that the I-Tasca gave a report on the weather, they said, sealing unlimited. And the I-Tasca was sending up signals, and they were radioing to find her because they wanted to know what her position was, and they wanted to guide her in. But she could not hear them. Of course, Fred Noonan,

was actually the navigator. She was not the navigator. And as I said before, Fred Ninnon was a great navigator. But I don't think that the plane was even close to Howland Island because Itasca was sending up smoke signals. The horizon was pretty good. Her last communication was that she was flying north and south, looking for the island. What was the main issue of the communications, as you see it? I have to say that I don't know. But I also have to say that this was not unusual in those days because things were always going wrong. Communications like everything else was still in its infancy. And this happened, you know, fairly often.

You know, in 1942, Jimmy Doolittle's plane, which was an Army plane, got lost in the middle of the Pacific. So nobody knows. I mean, the plane had been having communications difficulties. There had been shorts in the electrical system. She and Fred thought that they'd all been fixed, but something went wrong. Her last communication to them was, we are on the line of position, 157-37. We'll repeat this message on 62100 kilocycles. We are now running north and south.

That was her last communication to them. It has been now almost a century of speculation, rumor, conspiracy theories. I mean, everybody has a different idea. I interviewed people myself who spent the retirement years, in the most cases, fiendishly chasing this story, you know, to the end of their days, I'm sure. The plane goes down eventually, obviously, no fuel, but where is the question? In the aftermath of this loss, which is felt by the world, never mind those poor radio men on the Atasca, which it must have been incredibly agonizing, there's a search like it's never

been done before by the U.S. Navy and then by George Putnam. It's not like they didn't try. I mean, they really, really looked for this woman and this plane. Absolutely. Even Roosevelt was so stunned. He sent the U.S. Navy out. Our biggest carrier and four destroyers went out looking for her, went out to the Pacific. With Eleanor Roosevelt at the helm.

Yeah. Well, people have devoted their lives to trying to find the plane. There are people who have mounted five missions. A recent entry into the search was Rick Gillespie, who I think, quit after 14 expeditions. Nobody can find the plane. I was actually on one of the boats that went out, we sent down submersibles to search the ocean floor. The ocean floor to the west of Howland Island and the north has now been pretty well searched. The further shore, if they had overshot Hallen Island, possibly when that part of the ocean is searched within 500 miles of Halland Island, possibly parts of her plane

can be found. But I am told that if parts of her plane could be found, they would still be at good condition because it's so deep, 17,000 feet that there'd be no oxidation. So it would be in pieces, but it would be still intact. Right.

So you adhere to the crash and sink theory, definitely. I don't think there's really any question that the Japanese never saw her, never. Well, you're referring to that controversy that came up a few years ago with the picture. That was supposedly Amelia and Fred Noonan sitting on a dock on an island where they would have been taken by the Japanese who had found them on another island. I mean, it gets very complicated.

And it's a sign of how much people still care, really, what the fate of this amazing woman really was. Oh, I think that there are people who will always be interested. There are people now who are trying to actually fund another search for the plane on the ocean floor. But I'll tell you something interesting, which isn't very well known, which is. that we blamed, that as most Americans alive at the time, blamed Japan. And there are, of course, dozens and dozens of stories of how she was captured. Each one is slightly different than the other. But they're all on the theme of her being captured by the Japanese.

All the speculation about her demise is ultimately a testament to her undeniable magnetism when she was alive. I mean, it really is. She was a beauty, but there's much more than that. It was a look in her eye, her smile, the whole persona, the woman making her way in a man's world without much regard at all for the resistance she would face. I mean, this is what she overcame and she accomplished so much that we pin so much to the close call that she dies in is a shame because there's so much that goes before. And that's what we learned from your book. Thank you so much, Susan, for joining us. I encourage everyone to read the book, East to Dawn, the story of Amelia Earhart by this fine writer.

Susan Butler, thanks for being on American History It. Thanks a lot. On Gone Medieval from History Hit, we set out to solve the biggest mysteries of the medieval age. So many of these travellers who went out looking for Presta John, what did they think they were hearing? Using science to identify our buried ancestors. Genetic signatures found in present day Ashkenazi Jewish populations were shared by the genetic ancestors we found in these individuals. And reveal the answers to centuries-old riddles. stand up straight in a bed. I'm hairy at my base and I make the ladies cry. The solution is an

onion. I'm Matt Lewis and every Tuesday and Friday you can join me to travel the medieval world in search of the stories you haven't heard and to get under the skins of the ones you have. Gone medieval from history hit twice a week, every week. Listen and follow on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, we're back. Talking about Amelia Earhart's mysterious disappearance in the South Pacific in 1937. It's territory rife with theory and proposition, conspiracy even, as various notions are endlessly explored and debated even today. Before we pick up the discussion with our next guest,

let me review the notable theories. Keep in mind the Pacific Ocean is very big, very deep water. We're still losing aircraft at sea. I mean, finding a lone Lockheed Electra, much less the remains of those who are inside it, defies logic and probability, But here's a brief list of the conflicting theories. One, crash and sink is the most common and straightforward theory

that Howland Island is this tiny spit of land, and Amelia and Fred had been flying for more than 2,000 miles, and ran out of fuel and crashed in the ocean, drowned, end of story. Crash and Sink is the official policy of the U.S. government, which, after all, expended great time and energy, not to mention money, looking for Amelia, a massive search that turned up no evidence at all, not even an oil slick.

So Amelia, Fred, and the Electra just sank beneath the ocean. Thousands of feet deep, gone forever. But this theory ignores some pretty potent alternatives. Two, the castaway theory. Tigar, the international group for historic aircraft recovery, has been active in this investigation for decades. And their position is that Earhart and Noonan could have found an alternative island to land on. Most likely Gardner Island, Nicomoro Island, they call it today.

350 miles southeast, this would have been uninhabited, and likely the two died on this isolated island. So goes the theory. It was hot, no water, no food. Evidence of plane parts and even human remains were claimed to be found here. Third theory, Japanese capture. In this scenario, Amelia and Fred were captured by the Japanese after the plane had crashed landed. And this was claimed to have been seen by many eyewitnesses in the Marshall Islands, a place called Mili Atoll.

And Amelia and Fred and the Electora were collected by the Japanese, who then imprisoned her, on Saipan, perhaps, until dying in captivity, which would have never been admitted to because of theory number four. She may have been a spy, so says this theory. World War II was looming, and the government dispatched her for secret reconnaissance, the U.S. government, and then obviously couldn't admit to her capture or look really bad. Last theory, and there are more after this, but this is the main ones. Amelia lived through captivity, forced to be a Tokyo rose through the war, and then returned to the U.S. after the war, changed her name, and lived out her days in New Jersey. I'm going to say no to that one. I grew up in New Jersey, for good and seek.

My guest taking us through these various theories and his own is Dick Spink, a teacher, engineer, boat builder in Washington State, a man whose garage I have visited myself filming a television special a few years back. And for our purposes today, we've circled back to Dick. My friend, Dick Spink, glad to have you on American History Hit, The Search for Amelia. here we go again. Thanks, Don. It's great to talk to you again. I'm looking forward to it. Are you still active in this area? Oh, yes, I am. You know, when I first got into this, I stumbled into this. This information just came to me accidentally, all of it when I was in the Marshall Island selling my boats. And I told myself, I wasn't going to let this story destroy my life like it has so many men in the past. Yeah. So I told myself at first, I was going to give it five years and then I was going to walk away

from it. Well, here I am 10 years later into it, and I'm trying to just kind of put it out of my mind and forget it. But these things keep popping back up. Thank you, Don. Yeah, you're welcome. I'm right here for you. What do you think the reason is that we're all so passionately interested in this woman's fate? Well, you know, Amelia Earhart was really something. She was really at the beginning of the women's movement to just become something spectacular. And she was. She was America's sweetheart. And the time right before World War II, four years before Pearl Harbor, when she's attempting to make this round the world flight be the first woman to do anything like this, first person

to do anything exactly like she did at the equator, you know, to circumnavigate to the globe. And for it to end up like it did, I mean, I totally stumbled into this when I was in the Marshall Islands. I was sitting with my Marshallese brother now Ramsey Rhymears, the president of the Marshall Islands, and a few other E-roaches. And as we were sitting around the table, Tony de Broome's place, we were talking about the war relics that are still there

because the Marshall Islands were quite a theater of war. And I just made the comment, hey, did the Amelia Earhart disappear in this part of the world? And there was an old guy at the end of the table who said, yeah,

she landed on our island and my uncle watched her for two days. And that's how I ended up getting into this whole thing. I took my video camera back and started interviewing some people and the next thing you know, I organized my first expedition, and we came up with some interesting artifacts that you saw when you were up here doing that episode. So you're with theory number three, which was the landing on the Marshall Islands, crash landing, sort of off islands.

She would have been looking for a coral reef, something in shallow water, at which point this man or his uncle would have seen this because here comes this plane out of nowhere. That doesn't happen a lot out in the middle of Pacific and much less a shiny, beautiful plane. and then two people come crawling out of it. What happens then, according to this theory? Well, there were Lajuan who I interviewed his son. He was one of the two men who were out fishing, and they saw the plane come in and land, and they watched these two people for more than a day,

and they noticed that one was a woman, one was a man. And the vast majority of the evidence of all of the theories points to this happening. I mean, the three most notable eyewitnesses of this theory are, you know, Admiral Chester Nimitz, Supreme Commander of the Pacific Fleet. In 1965, he told Fred Garner, you're onto something that will stagger your imagination. That's right. Or General Alexander Vandergrift, a Medal of Honor recipient, 1971 letter to Fred Garner.

He said Earhart was inside Pan. Really? General Gravesby Erskine. He went on to become the Assistant Secretary of Defense. in 1966 CBS interview, he said Earhart was on Sypan and she died there at the hands of the Japanese. And there were over 200 eyewitnesses, many, many accounts more than I can even begin to talk about right now. Yeah, yeah. I remember from our TV work together, it's an astonishing amount of detail. It's an extraordinarily complicated story once you start poking in the different

directions. But let's stick with yours for now. Why would there be such a cover-up? I I guess we could sort of reverse engineer it here. How come this isn't the accepted theory? Well, you have to remember in 1937, four years before Pearl Harbor, the Japanese had a massive expansion going on in the Marshall Islands. And we only had two aircraft carriers in the Pacific of the time. The Japanese had close to 10. I mean, if something would have happened and we would have ended up in a conflict,

Amelia Earhart was America's sweetheart. And if the general public would have found out that she was in Japanese custody, FDR did what he could do to keep it under wraps. Let's look at that a little bit. The broader context of this event, I mean, you think this is a world famous event. This woman's going around the world. It's very well publicized in all the newspapers. Meanwhile, all of what becomes the Pacific War is brewing and bubbling up. The Japanese have all sorts of designs about spreading all over the Pacific at that point in all directions, including the islands that we will very soon fight them for.

It's very controversial, obviously, what actions both sides are taking. So into the fray comes this world-famous activity, this woman flying through the very future theater of war. So the stakes are really high. And when you start poking around, even beyond you, Dick, my oldest sister served in the Peace Corps in Saipan, in the Marianas Islands, in the late 60s. And she talked to people then, you know, just anecdotally. Everybody kind of shrugged their shoulder and said, yeah, that was Amelia Archer.

She was here. People were talking about it all over the place. That's right. That's right. Just common knowledge. After a special, I called her, and, you know, she sort of laughed it off. And, you know, nobody's absolutely sure. And it was just kind of accepted knowledge out there.

But it's really quite explosive when you start to realize the implications involved. So you went there and investigated yourself. You've been through that island. What did you find? Well, the first expedition, we found some aluminum parts and pieces. And as the account goes, there were 39 Marshallese men that were told. to bring their sleeping mats. They couldn't say, talk or anything about what they were doing. They were conscripted by the Japanese. They were taken to this island and they were to move the airplane

from the outside of the little island to across the island to the inside, whereas the only place you could get a wooden barge. They had a coal barge. They sunk one end of it. These martial lease men said it was quite ingenious what the Japanese were able to do, sunk one end of the barge, and they moved her airplane up onto this barge to take it away. So I have 1943 naval pictures of the island compared to today's pictures. And the area where we found the aluminum parts are directly where La Jouan's son told us the plane had come to rest to where if you look on, even on Google Earth right now, I think I showed you the photographs before when you were here, where the coral heads were moved.

There's only one spot that's deep enough where you can get a barge at high tide up near that island. And you can still see on Google Earth when you're. you look at it, all the coral heads that are moved aside so a boat could get in there. I do remember that. Let me illustrate this for folks. When you look at this picture, and I guess you can on Google Earth, right? It's kind of cool to do this. You look down and you see a break in the coral reef very deliberately man-made. Theory being that they would have needed that space to get a barge carrying the electroplane, you know, in whatever parts it was left

in, off the island to later on dispose of it. They would have been taking her to Saipan, for sure? Is that where this goes to? Well, that's eventually where she ended up, yes, because she went, first of all, when she was picked up, she ended up in Jalute. That is where that famous photograph is, that photograph of her and Fred Noonan on the dock. And in the background is the Koschumaru, the ship that Billiman Amaran went out and treated Fred Noon for his injuries on. And in that photograph is also a barge with an airplane on it. Now, that was seriously in question as to whether that was a legit thing. given the fact that there were electric wires and so forth that might have changed the date.

Do you subscribe to that being true or not? That photograph is absolutely real. And the reason that it was in question was because in that scrapbook that had that photograph in it, there were also some other photos and one of them had a date on it. This was a paper-bound scrapbook held together with string. There were photographs in there that were post-dated that era and previous. that era. So it was a scrambling of photographs, and that was blogged by a Japanese person. So there's, I mean, you saw what we did when we had the forensic analysis done of the facial

structure, body structure, and everything. And our conclusion was that was absolutely Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan. I can't say absolutely, but that's what the evidence points to. Yeah, it is wild stuff. To your mind, do you think this will ever be solved? in your lifetime, say? Oh, boy, that is a question. That's why I told myself, I'm not going to continue down this road for a very long time, because I don't want it to destroy my life. I know what all the evidence points to. I know so many people in the Marshall Islands and my three trips to Saipan, the people I've talked to, it's common knowledge there that, yes, she was there. But, you know, like you said, when you talk to your sister, yes, that's just, yeah, we know she was here.

to absolutely have that final piece of smoking gun, Les Kenny is probably the one person that's the closest to this that has it right on the money. Well, you had a plain part. Let's conclude this with talking about that physical evidence that you showed me. Those aluminum pieces that you found in that forest matched the Lockheed Electrotennae, right?

Yes, they did. They were consistent with the parts, the metal ergy, and everything that would have been on her aircraft. and there's small little pieces that would have torn off when the plane was being drugged across the island to be loaded. And they were in that area where it was the only area between points A where the plane landed and points B where it was loaded onto the barge. Fascinating. I can't imagine that moment when you found that, or at least when you had it confirmed that it had a little red paint on it, right? It was actually her plane was painted red in some regards, which is a very unusual personal choice of hers. most of those Lockies did not have that kind of markings.

Yes, it was rather exciting. And, you know, I said, I've been to that island now in nine expeditions and had various people down there. This is where the account where most of the evidence that there is available to Millier Hart points to this. If it's true, why would there be a charade like this? Well, you have to remember that right after World War II and FDR had passed away, you know, we had the repatriation of Japan going on.

We had to buy their products. We had to do a lot of things. And we needed to really amp them up. And one more thing to think that if the Japanese had something to do with Amelia Earhart's death, that wouldn't help at all. Well, and geopolitically, I mean, even today, it's very important that these relations stay friendly and stay simple. That's right. And FDR, you know, he leaves quite a legacy. A lot of people just really believe in FDR.

And, you know, everybody didn't have a camera in their pocket back then. document everything. So FDR did what he had to do to get the job done. And some of those things may have been quite underhanded. Yeah, exactly. Well, I had the advantage of being a host, which allows me to be a generalist and to skirt the certainties of life and to indulge myself at your expense. And thank you for your expertise in this regard. Again, I really appreciate you coming on and shedding some light on what will be a continuing mystery, I think, to the day I die when maybe we'll meet Amelia on the other side and we'll finally find out. Yeah, well, you know, Les Kinney has got over 200 Freedom of Information Act requests that have

been denied for that information, so we'll see. Okay, we stand at the ready. Thank you, Dick. Nice to see you again. Take care, Don. Thank you for joining us on another episode of American History Hit. Please hit like and subscribe wherever it gets your podcasts. Leave a nice review there.

Five stars. Always appreciated it. And if you'd like to make suggestions on any future subject matter, send us an email at A-H-H at historyhit.com. Thanks a lot. We'll see you on the next new episodes, dropping every Monday and Thursday. Bye for now.