AE Tragedy: Old Mystery, New Hypothesis, Part II

Today we continue with Part II and the conclusion of John Riley Jr.’s “The Earhart Tragedy: Old Mystery, New Hypothesis,” from the August 2000 issue of Naval History Magazine.  Although Riley was a thoroughgoing crashed-and-sanker and Navy apologist, and there’s nothing new in his conclusions or the evidence he presents, you won’t see Riley’s depth of research and detail in today’s Earhart disinformation screeds.  Little more than an iPhone and a third-grade reading level are required now for our “woke” citizens — and growing illegal citizenship as well — to become the latest brainwashed tools of the Deep-State, and in many far-more live-threatening topics than the Earhart disappearance.

Exaggerated Search Reports

In his 6003-1250 message of 3 July, Thompson claimed to have searched “3,000 square miles.”  His deck log shows he steamed 268 miles.  Therefore, he made the assumption that he could at all times see a plane on the water at a distance of up to 5.6 miles on either side of his course.  But the cutter covered only about 124 miles during daylight—and only about 55 of them on or within 10 miles of the LOP.  Most of the night he was on random courses far to the east of the LOP search area and could see practically nothing in the darkness—except the meteors that he mistook for flares.  A more accurate report would have claimed only 616 square miles searched.  He completely misled headquarters.

In a later message, Thompson claimed to have “searched 1,500 square miles during the night.”  This concept of searching is hard to accept.  It seems to assume that the downed fliers would still be alert, be able to see the ship’s searchlight, and be able to launch flares to attract attention.  A partly submerged plane, miles away, could not easily be seen at night, with or without the “vigilant lookouts [and] and powerful searchlights” mentioned in his messages.

The Bogus Howland Radio Log

For years, many details of the search for the missing fliers were classified.  They were declassified finally and released as required under the Freedom of Information Act, but the picture remains obscured today, perhaps unintentionally, by a pea soup fog of disinformation that continues to mislead researchers.

It is interesting to speculate on what person(s) may have written one of the strangest documents that survives from that era: the Howland radio log.  Today, it is virtually impossible to determine who concocted it; in any event, this record of the DF station on Howland Island is a counterfeit, according to the two men still alive who were on the island at the time and are alleged to have participated in writing it: Yau Fai Lum and Ah Kin Leong (see below).  The Itasca’s deck logs, radio logs, message traffic and Commander Thompson’s Earhart Search Report (of which at least two versions exist), however, all support the fiction of a radio and DF watch on Howland during the Itasca’s search for the fliers.  If the Howland radio log is bogus, it follows that these other fundamental documents also may be suspect in some details.

                            Radio operator Yau Fai Lum revealed details regarding the

                          direction-finding station on Howland Island and the log of

                          its alleged activities.  Courtesy John P. Riley Jr.

If this sound like classic “conspiracy theory,” remember that all material was classified promptly and researchers like Commander Weems and Paul Mantz were denied access—and access for all researchers continued to be denied for many years.  Francis X. Holbrook, who wrote “Amelia Earhart’s Last Flight”(Naval Institute Proceedings, February 1971, pages 48-55), concluded that he had been led astray and put to considerable trouble by misinformation.  Such misinformation did not require a large conspiracy; indeed, a single mischief maker could have been responsible.  In the absence of access to factual data, researchers were at the mercy of whatever tidbits of information—or misinformation—that were leaked to them.  I put my trust in the following accounts of Lum and Leong, both of whom maintain that the log was cooked.

In the mid-1930s, both the United States and Great Britain claimed the Line Islands, which included Jarvis, Baker and Howland.  Thinking they might one day prove to be of strategic value, the United States occupied them in 1935 to reinforce its claim.  Four-man civilian teams were landed on each and rotated from time to time; all were trained as weather observers, and each team included one amateur radio operator.  They sent daily weather reports to another amateur radio station in Honolulu, which passed them to Pan American Airways, then pioneering trans-Pacific clipper flights.

Richard B. Black, Department of the Interior, recruited men in the Hawaiian Islands for the teams; nearly all were Americans of Chinese or Hawaiian descent.  Yau Fai Lum operated the amateur radio station on Howland Island in July 1937.  Serendipitously, while searching the Radio Call book for a fellow ham operator with whom I had lost contact, I came across the new call letters, name, and address of Yau Fai Lum near where my friend would have been listed.

I began a long and interesting correspondence with Lum.²He told me of that fateful day when they waited in vain for Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan.  I was impressed by his almost total recall of details.  Lum said he had washed his sheets and aired his bed, the best on the island, so that Amelia could lie down and rest in comfort after her long, exhausting flight.  He described the private shower improvised for her—a 50-gallon drum of fresh water with canvas enclosure.

When I asked Lum about Cipriani and the high-frequency DF equipment, he replied: “I never met him.”

“How could you not meet him?” I asked.  “Didn’t you, Henry Lau, and Ah Kin Leong live with him on that fly-speck island that had only one sleeping shelter and one 15-foot-long tent for a kitchen/dining area?  And didn’t you report to him and stand radio watches under his direction during the 16 days that the Itasca was at sea searching for Amelia?”  I enclosed a copy of the Howland Radio Log, which had numerous entries supposedly made by Lum.

He wrote back immediately:

• The Howland radio log is a “ . . . fraud—it is B.S.”  He never met Cipriani, never stood watches on Amelia’s frequency, and never operated a direction finder.  He said that two men (presumably Cipriani and Black) came ashore with a direction finder and set it up in a tent.  He walked by the tent a few times in the course of his work and heard bits of conversation in passing but did not intrude.  He told me several times that he did not want to get in the way of other people when it was not his business to do so.  My impression is that he is by nature rather shy.

He also pointed out that his name in the log was consistently spelled wrong (as “Yat” Fai Lum) where he supposedly signed off at the end of each watch.  Yat is a common Chinese name, but his is “Yau” not “Yat.” He added, “I should know how to spell my own name.  According to the Howland log,” he continued, “other operators were Henry Lau, [call letters] K6GAS, and Ah Kin Leong, K6ODC.  But they were not even on the island during the 16-day search.  They and Cipriani were on board the Itasca.”

Henry Lau is dead, but I wrote to Ah Kin Leong, ex-K6ODC.  Asked what he knew of all this, he replied on 4 September 1994: “No idea who wrote the false log.  I stand no radio watch on Howland Island.  Cipriani, Henry Lau and me was on the Coast Guard Cutter Itasca when it left Howland Island looking for Earhart.” (According to the Itasca’s deck log for 2 July, when it became evident that Earhart was overdue and in trouble, the landing party [no exceptions are mentioned] returned to the cutter, which departed to begin a 16-day search for the missing fliers.  It does not say that Cipriani or other radio operators remained ashore.  The 18 July deck log entry, however, states that they re-boarded from Howland on that date.)

Coast Guard Chief Radioman Leo Bellarts led the radio teal aboard the Coast Guard Cutter Itasca Itasca during the final flight of Amelia Earhart.

On 4 July, the Commander Hawaiian Sector had sent the following message to the Itasca: “HAVE HOWLAND DIRECTION FINDER BE ON STANDBY FOR BEARINGS.”  Thompson would have been hard put to explain that he could not comply because he had Cipriani on board.  So, inserted in the cutter’s log dated 4 July, is this message supposedly sent to K6GNW (Lum’s call letters) on Howland as follows: “MR. BLACK SEZ CIPRIANI IS IN CONTROL ES TO KEEP CONTINUOUS WATCH ON 3105 ES TAKE BEARINGS USE CHINESE OPS HR IF YOU HAVE TROUBLE HAVING BOYS STAND WATCHES MR. BLACK SEZ TO TELL JIMMY.”When I asked Lum about this, he replied: “It is all B.S.”

Was “HR” a Freudian slip or just a careless error?  It means “here,” not “there,” as intended.  If Cipriani really had remained on Howland when the landing party was recalled, it seems logical that such a message would have been sent to NRUI2, the call letters he used with the portable radio equipment that he took ashore along with the portable direction finder.  It is very unlikely that such a message would have been sent to K6GNW (Lum’s station) instead.

Why take the word of Yau Fai Lum and Ah Kin Leong against that of Commander Thompson?  For starters, neither has an ax to grind. Lum impresses me as being a highly reliable and completely sincere man.  When he returned from Howland Island he acquired a Commercial First-Class Radiotelephone license, joined the Honolulu Police Department, and eventually headed its Radio Maintenance Department until he retired.  Commander Thompson, on the other hand, had a motive to distort facts.

Circumstantial details, such as the misspelling of Lum’s name, support Lum’s and Leong’s statements.  The log also incorporates a one-day date error in all entries (a day must be subtracted to get the correct date), and uses a +10 1/2 time zone instead of +11 1/2.  It seems quite unlikely that an error of one whole day would persist in a radio log, day after day, if it were kept by four operators as claimed.  Surely, at least one of them would have known the correct date.  Furthermore, the first page of the bogus log is headed “Radio log ITASCA,” at least in the version that I have.   That looks like another Freudian slip by someone assigned to the Itasca—or whoever actually wrote the log while on board the Itasca instead of on Howland.

Why would Thompson take Cipriani off Howland Island when the cutter departed on the search?  He did not want him there in the first place, but he probably was not thinking about Cipriani at all when he ordered the landing party back to the ship.

To sound plausible, the log had to be written by a person with detailed knowledge of what was going on at the time, and who was familiar with the usual log details, radio procedure signs, and jargon—i.e. a radio operator.

Chief Radioman L. G. Bellarts had died, and I contacted his son to ask what papers and memoirs his father left.  Bellarts, I was told, recognized the historical importance of the radio logs and took personal possession of them soon after the plane was lost.  He guarded them carefully for years, but eventually sent them to the National Archives. I wrote asking whether the logs they were giving researchers were direct copies of those received from Bellarts, or had they come perhaps from some other source?  To date, I have received no reply.

I have been unable to locate Frank Cipriani or any close relative.  Dwight Long, another Earhart researcher, told me that Cipriani became a civilian radio operator and was lost at sea in a World War II convoy when his ship was torpedoed.

A retired officer who signed the Itasca’s deck log as “W. I. Swanston, Lt. (j.g.) USCG, Navigator,” confirmed being in the ship’s company during the search for the fliers but denied having been the navigator, despite clear evidence to the contrary.  He was 86 when I contacted him.  When I pointed out that he had definitely signed the Itasca’s deck log as navigator, I got a rude answer.  I asked him a question concerning navigation on board the cutter and he again replied rudely that I did not know anything about navigation.  He did not seem to understand the point I was trying to make.  He seemed to be in a bad mood.  I think that he had long ago forgotten any details concerned with navigation and did not want to be associated in any way with the incident.

Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. (left, with President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934) was concerned that release of the official report would smear Amelia Earhart’s reputation.  (Courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library.)

Clearly revealing high-level concern for embarrassment are the actions taken by then-Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr.  The U. S. Coast Guard, at that time, came under the Treasury Department, and among Morgenthau’s papers at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York, is the transcript of a telephone call he made on 13 May 1938 to Malvina Scheider, personal secretary to Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, the president’s wife, in response to a request she had made.  (Amelia’s mentor, aviator A. Paul Mantz, on 26 April 1938 had contacted Mrs. Roosevelt asking her to intercede for him with the Coast Guard to obtain a copy of “ . . . the official report of the ITASCA,” [the Itasca Cruise Report, a 19-page document, dated 24 July 1937, written by Commander Thompson and on file at Coast Guard Headquarters]).

Only Morgenthau’s side of the conversation was included in the following transcript:

• “If we’re going to release this, it’s just going to smear the whole reputation of Amelia Earhart.” (In the document requested, Commander Thompson had done his utmost to shift the blame from himself to Earhart.)

• “And we have the report of all those wireless messages and everything else.” (This had to refer, in part, to the messages quoted in this article.  They are the proverbial smoking gun.  Nothing else reveals so clearly Commander Thompson’s poor judgment at the time. They had not been released when Morgenthau made his call.)

• “. . . if we give it to this one man we’ve got to make it public; we can’t let [just] one man see it.”

By far the most revealing remark is the following:

• “. . . if the president [FDR] ever heard that somebody questioned that the Navy hadn’t made the proper search . . . I mean I think he’d get terribly angry if somebody. . . .” [comment left unfinished].  (FDR, as is well known, was fond of the Navy, but when Morgenthau said “Navy,” he probably meant “Coast Guard,” the service he headed. Mantz, after all, had requested the Coast Guard Cutter Itasca’s documents, not those of the Navy.³ )

Morgenthau apparently knew beyond any doubt that Commander Thompson’s actions were a factor in the loss of the fliers, and that he bungled the subsequent search.  Morgenthau was one of the few men who might have had important information on the Earhart incident.  On the chance that he might have told his son something about it, I wrote Robert Morgenthau asking if his father had ever discussed it with him; to date I have received no answer.

Commander Thompson suffered a coronary thrombosis and died at age 53 on 1 September 1939 in Ketchikan, Alaska, two years and two months after the fliers met their deaths.  (End of “Earhart Tragedy: Old Mystery, New Hypothesis.”

Notes:

1. This would imply that Noonan had accumulated a dead reckoning error of about 100 miles in the process of advancing his line of position in about two hours, which is ridiculous.  When Noonan was navigating Pan American Clippers, he wrote to Commander Weems, saying that with his bubble octant he was usually within 10 nautical miles or less of his intended landfalls.  (He relied, however, on radio bearings from Pan Am’s big ground Adcock arrays for final guidance).

2. An authentic radio old-timer, he described Howland Island and his radio equipment: A National SW-3 receiver, crystal-controlled transmitter, which he made himself, with an 801 in the power amplifier, and a “Zep” antenna—half-wave, end-fed by 600-ohm open-wire feeders. To avoid interference from stations in the amateur bands he got special permission to operate on a Coast Guard frequency.

3.  On 5 July 1938, Morgenthau sent a note to Eleanor Roosevelt saying Mantz had been given a copy of the “ITASCA log.”  Many researchers think that this was a sanitized version of the radio log with everything embarrassing deleted.  I have seen a shortened, expurgated version of the Cruise Report (nine instead of the original 19 pages) which may have been made for Mantz.  I suspect that this may be what he was given, loosely referred to by Morgenthau as the “ITASCA log.”  It contained nothing of importance.

John P. Riley Jr.

Mr. Riley, trained as a radar officer at Harvard and MIT during World War II, was on board the USS Colorado (BB-45) for the assault on Tarawa and later served on the staff of Rear Admiral Arthur D. Struble during landings in the Philippines.  He spent a career working with radio propagation and antennas for RCA and the Harris Corporation.  Fascinated by celestial navigation, he sailed single-handed from San Francisco to Honolulu in 1951, and later sailed from the United States to Monte Carlo.  He wrote “A Cuppa Joe,” Naval History, August 1998, pp. 18-22.  Paul Rafford Jr. and Joseph Huie provided invaluable assistance for this article.