Fate Of Earhart

May Have Come Down in Jap Territory

11THEN the United States Marines cap- Tt tured a Japanese position on Saipan in June, they came upon an album of photographs connected with the round the-globe flight of Amelia Earhart; and this has aroused new interest in the fate of the aviatrix.

It has been many times suggested that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, when they left Lae (New Guinea) in 1937 for Howland Island (Central Pacific), got astray and came down in Japanese ter ritory and were “liquidated” as spies.

The map shows how such a possibility comes under discussion.

Earhart was aiming at Howland, which is slightly north-east of east from Lae; the nearest Jap islands would have been the Marshalls, which are considerably north of north-east. If the American fliers failed to locate Howland—a tiny dot with a vast empty ocean beyond it— they almost certainly would have turned away north-westward, knowing that, if they had enough fuel, this would inevit ably bring them over the widely-spread and innumerable atolls of the Gilbert (British) or Marshall (Jap) archipelagoes.

There have been several ugly stories concerning the fate of Europeans who. for one reason or another, apneared among the Marshall and Caroline’ Islands after about 1933. After the Japs seized Man churia, in 1931. and defied the European world, they began to fortify the Caroline and Marshall Islands, and all their acti vities there became a very jealously guarded secret. If Earhart and Noonan came down in the Marshalls, they prob ably were murdered.