Flying Blind

renamed the new Yankee, and Johnson and his wife and family resumed their round- the-world cruises and continued to record their adventures (well, some of them) in bestselling travel books into the 1960s.

Their first mate did not join them, as he had another career to pursue. I would never have guessed that Hayden’s chief interest, other than sailing, would be little theater; he did not seem the artsy type. But he had gone from the deck of the Yankee into a Hollywood career that was prematurely interrupted by the war; like me, Sterling Hayden served in the Marines, only Hayden got assigned to the OSS, through the auspices of Captain Johnson’s good friend “Wild Bill” Donovan. Hayden’s low-key macho and the weary poetry of the peculiar cadence of his speech lent themselves well to such films as The Asphalt Jungle, The Killing, and Dr. Strangelove, wherein his General Jack D. Ripper saved the world from the loss of its “precious bodily fluids.”

After Pearl Harbor, Howland Island was the next United States territory attacked by the Japanese; nonetheless, its perfect crushed-coral airstrips, long since overgrown, have never been used.

William Miller, Chief of the Air Carrier Division of the Civil Aeronautics Administration, died of a heart attack in Washington, D.C., in 1943. Doing a job in Hollywood, I received that news August of the same year in a booth at the Brown Derby on Wilshire, from Lt. Colonel Paul Mantz of the Army Air Forces First Motion Picture Unit.

“Well, that’s a surprise,” I said.

“That a guy as young as Miller would die of a heart attack?” Mantz asked over his frosted martini.

“That Miller had a heart.”

Mantz’s smile twitched under his mustache; he looked spiffy in his military threads. “You always were a sentimental soul. So, Nate—what’s the story on you and Guadalcanal?”

“Got likkered up, lied about my age, and found myself in boot camp with a bunch of kids. We saw rough action, but it was malaria that got me sent home early.”

Mantz’s expression told me he knew I was holding back, but respected a fellow soldier’s right to privacy. Then, chewing a bite of Caesar salad, he grinned and said, “Hear the latest about Gippy?”

“Which story? Faking his own kidnapping to promote that Hitler book? Or pretending to sue RKO for making that movie about Amelia?”

Shortly before the war, Putnam showed up at the Los Angeles DA’s office with threatening notes to himself and a bullet-riddled copy of The Man Who Killed Hitler, which he’d just published. Later he reported firing shots at a man trying to break and enter the Putnam home. The fascist plot against him—widely covered in the papers—reached its pinnacle when G. P. was found—within hours of his staff reporting his “disappearance”—bound and gagged (but unharmed) in a house under construction in Bakersfield.

The 1943 film Flight for Freedom starred Rosalind Russell as an Amelia Earhart-like aviatrix and Fred MacMurray as her Fred Noonan-like navigator, who undertake an espionage mission for the government with heroically tragic results. Putnam loudly objected and rattled litigation sabers in the press. In fact, he had sold the rights to Amy’s story to the studio and earned extra money by promoting the picture through his public protestations.

“Neither one,” Mantz said. “Gippy’s got himself commissioned as a major in Army Intelligence.”

Putnam, who was also in the process of acquiring a new wife (his fourth—Margaret Haviland, an executive with the USO), served in China, reportedly briefing, and debriefing, squadrons flying bombing raids into Japan. He also visited American-held Saipan, supposedly to investigate the rampant rumors about two white pilots, a man and a woman, captured before the war by the Japanese, that were circulating among GIs who’d spoken to Chamorro refugees in Camp Susupe, a city of tents run by the Army for the former citizens of Garapan, which had been obliterated in June 1944.

Thirty thousand Japanese and thirty-five hundred Americans—Navy, Army, Marines—died in Operation Forager, the twenty-four-day battle for Saipan, the Pacific island hit worst by the war. I don’t know that anyone ever bothered to total up casualties among the islanders, but many had to have died in the bombings; Garapan was reduced to rubble by June 24. Garapan Harbor thereafter was home to thousands of Allied ships; while the seaplane base was destroyed, Aslito Haneda was quickly rebuilt, expanded, and renamed Isley Field, handling hundreds of takeoffs and landings each day, becoming an airbase for the B-29 Super Fortress Bombers (the Enola Gay took off for Hiroshima from neighboring Tinian). The Japanese never completed the airstrip at Marpi Point; nearby was Suicide Cliff—there, and, near the north end of the island, at similarly named Banzai Cliff, thousands of Japanese men, women, and children threw themselves to a rocky death to avoid a worse fate at the hands of invading barbarians.

One odd, persistent rumor that came out of the Pacific theater was that Amelia Earhart was the voice of Tokyo Rose, the infamous female disc jockey whose Japanese propaganda broadcasts enticed American soldiers to listen to nostalgic songs from home interspersed with lies about how Japan was kicking the Allies’ ass. Major Putnam, while in the Far East, reportedly crossed enemy lines to listen to broadcasts of an American woman performing such propaganda, and rather defensively proclaimed the voice absolutely not to be Amelia’s. He said he would stake his life on it.

I have to admit, when the rumors that Amy might have been Rose first found their way to me, I had to wonder. Could she have survived that nightmarish rainy night? Had those bullets not been fatal? Did the Japs fish her out of the clear waters—we hadn’t been that far from shore—and revive her, and ship her off to Tokyo as a propaganda tool, as always intended?

And hadn’t she been known, in Saipan, as Tokyo Rosa?

Sometimes, late at night, I could almost talk myself into it. But too much was wrong. For one thing, there was no “Tokyo Rose”; it was a nickname, possibly picked up by GIs in Saipan who heard the “Tokyo Rosa” moniker, attached by the Chamorros to Amelia, and—in the way verbal storytelling evolves into legend—got applied by GIs to any English-speaking female disc jockey who turned up on Japan’s regular propaganda broadcasts.

Anyway, there was no single “Tokyo Rose,” rather dozens of female DJs who appeared on various Japanese radio shows, some with Japanese accents, others without, none of them using the Tokyo Rose appellation.

The myth grew so strong, however, that one of these women, who came forward and admitted having been coerced into doing some broadcasts—an American of Japanese descent who’d been visiting Tokyo when the war broke out—was railroaded into prison by such wonderful Americans as Walter Winchell and J. Edgar Hoover.

Amy’s name came up in the coverage, however, because during the public witch hunt that put innocent Iva Togori away for the crime of her race, another Amy Earhart attended every day of the trial: Amelia’s mother, though elderly and in poor health, traveling from Medford, Massachusetts, to San Francisco. Amy Otis Earhart told