Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) by Davis Kenneth C

Author:Davis, Kenneth C. [Davis, Kenneth C.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Harper Collins, Inc.
Published: 2011-06-20T21:00:00+00:00

What happened to Amelia Earhart?

After Charles Lindbergh, the most famous flier of the day was Amelia Earhart (1897–1937). Born in Kansas, she graduated high school in Chicago in 1915 and became something of a wanderer, taking up flying along the way. In 1928, she flew across the Atlantic with two men, becoming overnight an outspoken American heroine and a model of “rugged feminism.” When she married the publisher George Putnam in 1931, Earhart made it clear that she would continue her career. By 1932 she had set the record for a transatlantic flight and was going on to pile up an impressive list of achievements.

Her boldest plan came in 1937, when she planned to fly around the world with navigator Fred Noonan. Departing from Miami, Florida, in June, Earhart reached New Guinea and took off for Howland Island in the Pacific on July 1. Then her radio messages stopped and she disappeared. A naval search found no sign of the plane, and speculation about the flier’s fate fed newspapers for months. The remains of her plane were never found. Many people believed that she was a great pilot—others, a lousy one—who had attempted the impossible. Perhaps she got lost over the Pacific, ran out of fuel, and crashed in the vast expanses, ending in a watery grave.

But another of those theories, strongly held by the historian William Manchester, indicates the temper of the times. The late 1930s was an era of increasing military buildup in answer to the economic crisis of the Depression, especially by Italy, Germany, and Japan, the three nations that would later join in the Axis. Looking to become predominant in its Asian sphere, Japan was arming heavily and building strong defenses on a string of Pacific islands it had been granted in 1919 under the Treaty of Versailles. Saipan, Guam, and Tinian were part of the Mariana Islands chain, unknown to most Americans at the time but soon to become a painful part of America’s wartime vocabulary. Passing over the Marianas, Earhart caught a glimpse of the fortifications that the Japanese were building on the islands, Manchester contends in his book The Glory and the Dream. Under existing treaties, these fortifications were illegal and an indication of Japan’s intentions. Manchester says, “She was almost certainly forced down and murdered.”

The irony may be that given the country’s isolationist temper at the time, even if Earhart had seen this buildup and lived to tell what the Japanese were doing, her warnings might have been ignored. In 1937, America was in no mood for joining anybody else’s wars.

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