In addition to the many soldiers, Marine, and Navy men who saw or knew of the presence and destruction of Amelia Earhart and her Lockheed Electra on Saipan, three U.S. flag officers later shared their knowledge of the truth with Fred Goerner, acting against policy prohibiting the release of top-secret information, likely in order to encourage the long-suffering Goerner in his quest for the truth. <\/p>\n
In late March 1965, a week before his meeting with Gen. Wallace M. Greene Jr. at the U.S. Marine Corps headquarters in Arlington, Virginia,\u00a0former fleet admiral Chester W. Nimitz called Goerner in San Francisco.\u00a0\u201cNow that you\u2019re going to Washington, Fred, I want to tell you Earhart and her navigator did go down in the Marshalls and were picked up by the Japanese,\u201d Goerner said Nimitz told him.<\/p>\n The admiral\u2019s revelation appeared to be a monumental breakthrough for the determined newsman, and is known to many observers of the Earhart matter.\u00a0\u201cAfter five years of effort, the former\u00a0commander [of the] U.S. Naval Forces in the Pacific was telling me it had not been wasted,\u201d\u00a0Goerner wrote.<\/p>\n In November 1966, several months after\u00a0The Search for Amelia Earhart\u00a0was released, retired general Graves B. Erskine, who, as a Marine brigadier general, was the deputy commander of the V Amphibious Corps during the Saipan invasion, accepted Goerner\u2019s invitation to visit the radio studios of KCBS in San Francisco for an interview.\u00a0While waiting to go on the air with Goerner, Erskine told Jules Dundes, CBS West Coast vice president, and Dave McElhatton, a KCBS newsman, \u201cIt was established that Earhart was on Saipan. You\u2019ll have to dig the rest out for yourselves.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n General Alexander A. Vandegrift, the eighteenth commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, privately admitted the truth to Goerner in a handwritten, August 1971 letter. <\/p>\n \u201cGeneral Tommy Watson, who commanded the 2nd Marine Division during the assault on Saipan and stayed on that island after the fall of Okinawa, on one of my seven visits of inspection of his division told me that it had been substantiated that Miss Earhart met her death on Saipan,\u201d the handwritten letter states.<\/p>\n \u201cThat is the total knowledge that I have of this incident. In writing to you, I did not realize that you wanted to quote my remarks about Miss Earhart and I would rather that you would not.\u201d<\/p>\n Vandegrift\u2019s claimed source for his information, former lieutenant general Thomas E. Watson, died in 1966\u2014very possibly the reason Vandegrift shared the truth with Goerner in that way. Legally speaking, Vandegrift\u2019s letter is hearsay, and he probably assumed it would afford him a level of protection against any ramifications he might face for breaking his silence with Goerner.<\/p>\n In assessing Vandegrift\u2019s credibility, a sterling career culminating in his selection as the Marine Corps\u2019 first four-star general is impressive enough. But Vandegrift also received the Medal of Honor and the Navy Cross for his actions at Guadalcanal, Tulagi, and Gavutu in the Solomon Islands in 1942.\u00a0In those days, receiving his country\u2019s highest award for valor conferred upon its bearer the gravest moral responsibilities, and it\u2019s safe to presume that the word of a Medal of Honor awardee, especially a former commander of the world\u2019s greatest fighting force, was as good as gold. Moreover, Vandegrift had nothing tangible to gain from telling Goerner that Earhart had died on Saipan, and had no obvious reason to do so.<\/p>\n Pagan pinchers<\/strong><\/p>\n The U.S. Navy\/U.S. Marines were outed recently by an Open Government Act request that found a secret document. What a surprise. It was found that they still lust after Pagan Island and the northern half of Tinian even though they have denied it publically. Do they want to improve the economy by opening a Navy base? No, they want full-scale live fire training facilities so U.S. Marines and the military of other countries can blow the crap out of both islands, likely making them uninhabitable as they have already done with Farallon de Medinilla. Bombs, tanks, strafing, cannons, live fire on a massive scale.<\/p>\n Their claim is that Pagan and Tinian are the \u201conly\u201d options they have. Hogwash. Guam is more than twice the size of all 14 islands of the CNMI combined and much of it is undeveloped. Needless to say, there is some pushback from Guamites about blowing up their island so what the Department of Defense wants to do is move the troops and all the money to Guam and send the PCB\u2019s and the depleted uranium ammunition and the destroyed reefs and the toxic wasteland to us here the CNMI. Thanks but no thanks. If you want an island to blow up, try Cocos Island. Think of the money you\u2019ll save on transportation.<\/p>\n The previously secret document reveals they want to lease Pagan, the whole island. Since they will undoubtedly ruin it for all time and since they have a big gun to use in getting their way, I suggest that we lease it to them at $1.2 billion per year ($1,200,000,000). A billion dollars go to the NMD land trust and $200 million goes to supplement the CNMI central government\u2019s operating expenses as an administrative fee. <\/p>\n Remember, once they destroy Pagan, there is no getting it back. What is a pristine tropical black beach island worth over the lifetime of the Northern Marianas? Probably more than even a billion a year will provide. Don\u2019t take a penny less. It\u2019s a tiny fraction of DOD\u2019s massive budget and it will forever transform the CNMI into a self-sustaining, moderately rich nation as small political entities go. \u201cA billion two or go blow yourself up.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIntelligence and war are games, perhaps the only meaningful games left. If any player becomes too proficient, the game is threatened with termination.\u201d \u201cWar is where the young and stupid are tricked by the old and bitter into killing each other.\u201d Below are more excerpts from Mike Campbell and Marie Castro\u2019s book, Marie Castro: My Life…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":305167,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-305166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=305166"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305166\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/305167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/Bruce-pix3.jpg\")
<\/a><\/a><\/a>
\n\u2015William S. Burroughs<\/p>\n
\n\u2014Niko Bellic<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"