When it comes to dismissing the truth about the Saipan presence and deaths of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan following their July 2, 1937 disappearance, establishment “historians” and authors are unanimous in their rejection of the so-called “Japanese capture theory,” and insist, for any number of false and specious reasons, that the fliers could never have been on Saipan.

Some of these self-proclaimed experts have gone so far as to state as fact that the Japanese military had not even established a presence on Saipan until the early 1940s, a claim so false as to be laughable.  We know, of course, that the doomed pair met their tragic ends on that Northern Marianas island, so far off the track of their original flight plan, and we have a mountain of evidence to prove it, much of it involving military personnel in the service of the Emperor.

A September 1933 letter (above) from Guam citizen Emilia M. Notley to retired Navy Cmdr. Albert Moritz, of Brooklyn, N.Y. gives us a rare glimpse into prewar Saipan.  Below is the missive Moritz sent to the Navy Department in Washington via the Commandant, Navy Yard, New York, with a copy of Notley’s letter, explaining that he had met Notley, who was married to an American and whose “people were recognized as prominent,” on Guam thirty-three years earlier, and he considered the letter to be “of military value.”  (Click on either letter for larger view.)

Notley’s letter is prima facie evidence that not only were Japanese military personnel stationed on Saipan at least as early as 1933, but “aeroplanes and ships were arriving for the maneuvers,” reflecting a level of military activity on early 1930s Saipan rarely suggested in Western literature.  The hostility and suspicion Notley met from the authorities — “the Japs,” as she wrote, clearly soldiers or military police — leave no doubt that Fukiko Aoki’s insistence in her 1983 Japanese magazine story, “Was Amelia Earhart Executed?” that 1937 Saipan was “the embodiment of peace: there were no soldiers,” was utterly false.

Cmdr. Paul W. Bridwell, chief of the U.S. Naval Administration Unit on Saipan, and Jose Pangelinan, who told Fred Goerner he saw “the fliers” but not together, that the man had been held at the military police stockade and the woman kept at the hotel in Garapan.  Pangelinan said the pair had been buried together in an unmarked grave outside the cemetery south of Garapan.  The Japanese had said the two were fliers and spies.  (Photo by Fred Goerner, courtesy Lance Goerner.)

In fact, at one point during Goerner’s Saipan investigations, Cmdr. Paul Bridwell showed him documents “that prove the Japanese began construction of their Saipan Military facilities as early as 1929,” according to Goerner.   Marianas historian D. Colt Denfeld Ph.D., author of Hold the Marianas: The Japanese Defense of the Marianas (1997), wrote that “a seaplane and naval base was built at Flores Point, on Tanapag Harbor” in 1934.  This claim has an obvious corollary — the requisite presence of military personnel to supervise, support and complete those projects.

For much more on the many and varied lies pushed by the U.S. establishment and its media allies about the Earhart case, please see Chapter XV, “The Establishment’s Contempt for the Truth” see pages 293-321 of Amelia Earhart: The Truth at Last.