@barbalot:
I had the same question, at the time this happened they would have been in the position that if they had taken action to try and find Earthardt, it would have let the Japanese know we had broken their encryption on the traffic. Likewise, after the war they would have reason to cover this up, with the cold war raging and Japan as our bulwark against communist expansion and we were rebuilding both Japan and its image, including rehabilitating Hirohito’s image, it would have worked against that if people found out a national hero had been caught and died that way. After that it likely is inertia, governments tend with stuff that is tagged secret to keep it that way long after it makes sense, the British didn’t finally take the Collusus machine that Turning designed to break the engima codes in WWII off the official secrets list until relatively recently, which was idiotic since the Collusus machine by 1945 was obsolete. Or they decided they didn’t want to dredge up the past.
The really interesting point is that in some ways no one disputes the Earhardt was transmitting, that transmissions were picked up well after she supposedly ditched into the sea, yet the official report still says that she likely crashed at sea and that was it, when signals were picked up days afterwords, both military and civilians picked up both voice and cw transmissions (morse code), and I think that says something, the radio transmissions are in official military records…so what gives?
What bothers me about a one off like this is there is no follow through. If the 1968 expedition to Saipan sent the bone fragments they sent to a forensic anthropologist, did they try and trace down at the university he was at if perhaps they were in the archives of his stuff? Did they try to get Freedom of information requests for the missing documents, require the government to look for them, or if they are found but claim they are secret, they would need to have cause to do so.
I respect @Cobrat’s knowledge a lot, their insight into that period is dead spot on, but I wouldn’t doubt that the Japanese if they had caught them would do what they say, there were a lot of crazies running around in the Japanese military, for every Yamamoto who knew what the US was capable of, who was afraid of the sleeping Giant, there were a lot of gung ho idiots who really believed their own PR of invincibility and so forth, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they ended up executed and had survived the crash only to die like this, knowing the lows that the Japanese military sunk to in that part of the world, makes me think that this could have happened.
The other expedition on the Island where they think noonan and Earhardt may have died are on scene with their dogs, who are trained to look for the scent of human remains. Apparently one of the dogs went under a tree on the Island and sat down, which is its way of saying it found something, they dug but didn’t find anything, but they are sending the soil they took for dna analysis (not sure how that one works)…I was laughing, the dogs in question are border collies, and I could see the dogs later on hanging out together, and the one who sat down laughing with the others, saying “boy did they fall for that” lol.