Fascinating @scualum! That didn’t take long did it? Certainly the travel brochure photo theory fits more with the mood and composition of the people in the photo. For some reason this story reminds me of Greene’s ‘Our Man in Havana’. Espionage experts submitting clipped photos from travel brochures as data.
Japanese spies in Hawaii did not have that hard a job scouting Pearl Harbor. They just went to a tourist shop and bought sets of photo postcards showing aerial views of Pearl Harbor with US Navy ships at their usual docks.
I tried to watch the History Channel program, but was put off by its breathless tone and repetition. And now given the Guardian article I’m even less convinced this is the answer. And maybe I missed something, but why would the US government cover up what happened?
@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.
If the Japanese controlled South Pacific Islands were under the jurisdiction of the Imperial Japanese Army and their Kempeitai, I’d be inclined to agree if Earhart and Noonan had crashed on them.
Most of the crazies and the worst excesses tended to be in the Imperial Japanese Army as they were far more officers…especially at the mid-senior levels who were highly fanatical, extremely nationalistic/fascistic in political orientation, and willing to expand the war than their Naval counterparts.
While there were some crazies in the Navy, very few of them existed beyond the junior ranks…and vast majority of those were apprehended and either cashiered or executed for being involved for their involvement in a series of militaristic assassinations or involvement with Army factional infighting which culminated in the attempted February 26, 1936 coup by the Kodoha(Imperial Way) faction vs the Toseiha(Control Faction).
One of the reasons why General Hideki Tojo rose in influence in the Army was because he was part of the latter faction which felt the former faction was too radical and worked with like-minded colleagues to put down that coup and purge or demote into powerlessness officers in the former faction.
The Navy’s relative lack of fanaticism relative to their Army counterparts…including the relatively “moderate” Toseiha faction which won the factional infighting and gained a stranglehold on Imperial Japanese politics/governance was one key factor in why the Navy had relatively little political influence and many of its key admirals were regarded with some suspicion…along with the fact the very nature of their service allowed their Navy counterparts much more contact with foreign influences/cultures…especially the British which the IJN was directly modeled on and which received the benefit of much technical assistance/training until the early 1920’s.
The IJN actually purchased a battlecruiser designed by a British naval engineer and built in a UK yard (Kongo, commissioned in 1913) along with technical information so that they could build three more sister ships.
Debunked: http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/12/asia/amelia-earhart-photo-japan/index.html
It appears in a book in 1935, 2 years before their disappearance.
And there we have it.
And not surprisingly, this continues the decline of the history channel since the early '00s from being a channel which appeared to turn out decent…though limited history to being one which seems to be centered on aliens, supernatural, and conspiracy theories one would usually find on front headlines of your supermarket tabloid,
Maybe they’ll next work with the tabloid which always has the latest headlines on “Batboy”…
Personally, I love the History Channel. Ancient Aliens is my fav.
I don’t think anyone actually believes that history goes on HC. AHC has some good history programs though.
I find this decline in actual veritable history…even if popularized to be irritating…especially considering what i remembered of it earlier.
I wouldn’t have felt as annoyed if they changed the name of the channel to something like the Aliens, supernatural, and conspiracy theory channel or in short, the National Enquirer channel. 
That’s not to say I don’t like aliens as I do enjoy sci-fi movies. Just feel it’s wrong that they are doing so under the “History Channel” name considering it used to air well…actual history programs…albeit popularized.
The Kongo was the last Japanese battleship built by foreign shipbuilders. Every IJN ship afterwards were built domestically.
The British were Japan’s main supplier of Naval hardware and training in their first few decades. Not too surprising considering the IJN made it a point to organize/model themselves after the British Royal Navy and the Anglo-Japanese Alliance from 1902-1920.
Towards the end of that alliance, the British sent a mission to help the IJN establish their Naval Air Service which would eventually play a key role in Pearl Harbor and the rapid defeat of the British armed forces in East/SE Asia a few decades later.
One of the key officers involved in that mission Lord William Forbes-Sempill was later caught as a spy working on behalf of the Japanese. However, due to his aristocratic status, the authorities felt it was better to discreetly force him to retire from public office and keep his treasonous activities secret until records pertaining to his spying activities were released to the public in the early '00s