SLEEP TIGHT AMELIIA EARHART

  

This mystery began in broad daylight,  on Tuesday, 2  July 1937, when the Lockheed Electra lifted off the grass airfield (above) before climbing eastward out over the Solomon Sea.  Almost 90 years later, we still don't know what happened to either the plane or it's pilot,  Amelia Earhart,

The Electra 10 - E,  identification NR 16020 - serial number 1055 -  was built specifically for Earhart. The standard Lockheed Electra 10 had three years of dependable service, a 55 foot wingspan and was powered by 2 Pratt and Whitney 9 cylinder Wasp Junior engines with two 9 foot bladed Hamilton Standard propellers.     

As modified for her "round the world flight" it carried 1,151 gallons of fuel in ten tanks in the wings and fuselage - directly behind the cockpit. It also carried 80 gallons of lubricating oil for the engines in four tanks.   

A single Western Electric model 13C radio transmitter and a Model 20B receiver (above) were installed above the fuel tanks, with a navigators work station created mid-fuselage behind the fuel tanks.  

With a full fuel load the Electra 10-E would become airborne at 177 miles an hour, and have an maximum estimated range of 4,500 miles, at 5,000 feet.  As the NR 16020 lifted off the ground in Lae, it had 181 hours and 17 minutes successful and safe flying time.  

Five hours after take off the thirty year old aviatrix reported back to Lea, via her 50 watt transmitter, that she was crossing 150 degrees east longitude, and 7 degrees south of the equator at 10,000 feet. 

The Electra's estimated ground speed was 140 knots (160 mph), the air temperature was 90 degrees Fahrenheit and visibility limited only by the humidity. She signed off with her call sign, KHAQQ. Three hours later, in the dark and right on time, Earhart's Electra flew over the United States Navy tug, Ontario. But it was here that things started to go wrong.

The tug was right where it was supposed to be, at 165 degrees 20 minutes east, and 2 degrees 59 minutes south, approximately the half way point for this leg of Earhart's round the world flight. The seas were calm, and the Ontario reported visibility of at least 40 miles, cloud cover of only 20 - 40%. But Amelia was expecting the Ontario to broadcast the letter “N” in Morse code (dash -dot) for five minutes, beginning ten minutes after the hour, on 400 kilocycles. However the Ontario was instead broadcasting the letter” A” (dot-dash), every hour on the half hour, at 7500 kilocycles. They never contacted each other, but at 0800 GMT, Amelia reported back to New Guinea, that she was at 12,000 feet, on time and on course.

Despite the miscue, we know Amelia and her navigator, Fred Noonan, were on time and close to being on course because they overflew the tramp steamer Mytlebank, about a hundred miles northeast of the Ontario. The third mate heard the plane to his starboard, at just about the same time the ship's radio operator heard Amelia broadcast, “Ship in sight, ahead”. That encounter, ten hours out of New Guinea, had Earhart and Noonan flying into the rising sun of 2 July, 1937, well over half way toward their destination across the international date line, where it was still Tuesday morning on tiny Howland Island.

It was a curious target. The kidney shaped coral atoll was just a mile long and about a half mile wide. It's highest point was just nine feet above the surf. To spot it from the air, you had to practically be parked on its crushed coral runway.  But it was United States territory, its bird droppings mined by American nitrate companies since the middle of the 19th century. 

Howland was occupied in three month rotations by four students of an Hawaiian boys school, and they called their tiny collection of huts Itascatown, after the 250 foot long Coast Guard cutter that supplied the outpost. And it was the USGC Itasca, anchored just outside the western reef , commanded by Walter Thompson, that was supposed use it's two hundred foot mast to make radio contact and guide Earhart's plane to a safe landing.

The sun rose over Howland Island at 17:15 GMT. Forty-five minutes later, with Amelia reporting she was within 100 miles of the Itasca, radioman 3rd class William Galten heard Amelia' asking, “Please take bearings on us and report in half an hour."  It was a simple request, but Galten would be unable to comply, because the Itasca's CGR-321 transmitters did not have any directional capability or meters on 3105 frequency to indicate her signal strength.

Rather, Galten estimated the Electra's distance based on the volume of Amelia's voice, which Galten labeled as a four out of a possible five. She was close, but it was purely a subjective measurement. To get direction to her signal and thus a better distance, required the use of a separate unit on the Itasca's bridge, operated by radio man third class George Thompson. But he found Amelia's broadcasts were too short to give him a fix.  At its core, the problem was not merely technical, but generational.

The established military and shipping industry, traveling at ten to twenty miles an hour, still relied on Morse code, because it provided longer range at lower power (and lower frequencies). But aviators, like Earhart, traveling at over a hundred miles an hour, preferred the shorter range of higher frequency voice communications. This mismatch manifested itself when Galten was forced to tell Amelia, “Cannot take bearing on 3105 (kilocycles)...Please send on 500 (kilocycles) or do you wish take bearing on us?” At 18:58 GMT Amelia asked Itasca to send signals at 500, but three minutes later radioed, “We received your signals but unable to get a minimum. Please take bearing on us and answer 3105 with voice.” But he had just told her, he could not do that!

Nothing was working, and panic began to mount on the Itasca. Forty minutes later Earhart was reduced to telling Galten, “We are on the line 157, 337. Will repeat this message on 6210”. Now she was introducing a third, even higher frequency, on which the Itasca equipment could not broadcast voice. The frustration was palpable. One five seven and three three seven were north, south compass headings, and both passed directly over Howland Island. Amelia seemed so close and yet out of reach.

Captain Thompson (above) felt the urge to do something, to move. At 22:10 GMT, when Thompson figured Amelia's fuel would have run out, Itasca raised anchor and made steam toward the north and west, where Thompson thought there was enough cloud cover that might have hidden Howland Island from Amelia's eyes. But after three fruitless days, he switched his search to the north and east of Howland Island. 

When that also failed, the battleship USS Colorado (BB-45) was ordered to take over the search, using her Vought 0S2U Kingfisher search planes.

Joined by biplanes from the aircraft carrier Lexington, and even two Japanese ships, the searchers spent 19 days covering some 94,800 square miles in a surface search, and another 167,481 square miles by air. It was not until a week after Amelia disappeared that a search plane from the Colorado, piloted by Lt. John Lambrecht, flew over a small island on the 157 line, 360 miles south east of Howland. The pilot reported, “signs of recent habitation were clearly visible” despite the island having been uninhabited for forty years. However “repeated circling...failed to elicit any answering wave...” That tiny oasis was named Gardner Island, and no one inspected it on foot for another 30 months.

After 19 days, and $4 million (64 million in today's dollars), the search was called off. Amelia Earhart was legally declared dead on 5 January, 1939.  And on 20 December of that same year, 20 Gilbertese natives were landed on Gardner Island, for the same reason the Hawaiian students had occupied Howling - to establish a legal international claim.

It was the British government's last attempt at empire expansion, and was headed by colonial officer Gerald Gallagher. The next year (1940) Gallagher reported finding 13 human bones, a partial skeleton “possibly that of a woman," and “an old-fashioned sextant box” on the island's southeast corner.  Back in Britain, Nazi planes were bombing London, and the report was given little thought. The bones were shipped off to colonial offices on Fiji, where they were given a cursory examination by Doctor D.W. Hoodless,  He judged them to be those of a short, stocky European man. They were then put in storage, and during the Second World War, were lost.

Were the bones those of Amelia Earhart? Maybe. Amelia stood 5 feet six or seven inches tall, and when Richard Jantz, from the University of Tennessee, compared the ratio of the skeleton's humerus to the radius bones he got a figure of 0.76 - exactly that of Amelia, based on bare armed photos taken before the flight. Added to the apparent campsite found on the island, the remains of make-up and a pocket knife, and "credible" reports of 47 messages heard by professional radio men six hours after she went missing, the case is enticing, better than believable.  But unless the coral encrusted remains of her Electra reside 600 feet below the waves breaking along the reef surrounding Gardner Island, we will never know for certain. And maybe not even then.

There have been no humans living on Gardner Island since 1963, and after 1979 its name was changed to Nikumaroro, as the British Empire finally retreated from the Pacific. Its new native governors abandoned the atoll to its large land crabs and birds. And if they know what happened to Amelia Earhart, they are not talking.

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LABOR DAY Chapter Four

 

The engine's stealthy approach to Kennisinton station was unmasked with a deafening burst of steam. The startled crowd shouted obscenities. A fireman leapt from the engine and ran toward the black switching stand between the tracks. 

Individuals broke from the throng to stop him and he was forced to swing his switching rod to ward them off. Another handful of figures bolted for the engine and mail car.  The railroad agents aboard shouted a muddled threat. 

And as the host reached for a handhold, shots rang out. The fireman broke free and was pulled back aboard as the black beast laboriously retreated whence it had come, leaving two dead and several wounded on the ground.

Also a victim of this brief confused shoot out at Kennisinton station was the American Railroad Union and it's president, Eugene V. Debs. And amazingly, yet another victim, shot in the foot actually, was the Democratic Party and its President of the United States, Stephen Grover Cleveland.

Just after dawn the day before, President Debs had been awakened by Federal Marshals, delivering the injunction issued by Judge Grosscup. The court order said while the owners of the railroad could act in unison, the workers must not. Reluctant to support the strike in the first place, Debs and the other leaders of the A.R.U. had sent over 4,000 telegrams urging the 125,000 strikers on 29 separate railroads  across the nation, to remain peaceful. Now they were forbidden to speak at all. That afternoon, on 4 July, when the injunction was publicly read out by Federal Marshals, the crowds at the Grand Crossing were unimpressed.

Also hearing the injunction on that Wednesday, were 2,000 members of the U.S. 15^th infantry regiment, with artillery and cavalry support, ...

...all under the command of the vain and ambitious Major General Nelson Appleton Miles. His soldiers first occupied the empty Pullman factory. 

 The soldiers had no training in policing, but that suited General Miles, who saw his mission as a war against unions in defense of western civilization.  Miles broke his men into squads and paired them with equal sized posses of railroad agents wearing badges - men the U.S. Marshal for the northern district of Illinois, John W. Arnold, called “worse than useless”.

Just before 4:00pm, Thursday, 5 July, one of Mile's joint posses approached Kennistion station again, this time aboard a Burlington and Ohio train. 

As the engine, tender and mail car approached 47th street and Loomis, they encountered an even larger crowd, angered by the morning's deaths and intent on blocking the tracks with railroad cars and a locomotive purposely derailed. Rocks were thrown, immediately, and again the “authorities” joined the violence - the soldiers firing from 2 to 6 rounds apiece while the marshals emptied their revolvers into the the crowd. Six more were killed on the spot.

According the Chicago newspapers, among the 20 or so wounded were “Henry Williams, shot in the left arm, Tony Gajewski, shot in the right arm, John Kornderg, stabbed with a bayonet and not expected to live, an unidentified woman, shot in the right hip, an unidentified man, shot through the liver and not expected to live, and an unidentified 17 year old boy shot in the stomach and expected to die.

Now that blood had been drawn, on Friday, 6 July, General Miles reformed his men into battalions and dispatched one to the 375 acre Chicago Stock yards. Their presence allowed trains, and Pullman Cars to pass. As night approached, a frustrated mob of 6,000 vented their anger instead on the smaller less protected northern extension called the Panhandle Yards. It earned it's nickname because the Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chicago and St. Louis Railroad, which owned and operated the property, was based in the southern suburbs of Pittsburgh – in the northern panhandle of West Virginia. 

On this Chicago site hundreds of mostly empty cars were resting, guarded by just 12 policemen. The officers were shoved and bullied, but none were seriously injured, and no shots were fired. The rioters systematically set the entire rolling stock ablaze.

Two companies of the 15^th Infantry fired volley after volley and then charged into the crowd. Several blocks away, saloon owner John Kerr, was wounded while tending to his customers. That bullet had passed through four walls to strike him. Innocent spectator William Anslyn, was over a city block from the confrontation when he was shot in the back. Two days later he died. Another spectator, elderly Charles Klynenberg, was standing in front of his own home at 4847 Loomis Street when a soldier charged toward him. Klynenberg ran toward his front door but was stabbed three times in the back. He died within minutes. A young woman, standing on her roof a block away was shot and fell dead, into her brother's arms.

Validation for the worker's version of the Pullman shootings of 1894 could be found in the Presidential Commission on the 4 May, 1970 shootings at Kent State University. 

Under similar conditions, 28 members of the Ohio Nation Guard unleashed 67 rounds on about 2,000 angry, rock throwing protesters - a similar situation to the strikers of 1894.  In 1970, four were killed on the spot, another 9 were wounded. The closest wounded demonstrator to the soldiers was Joseph Lewis Jr. He was 71 feet away from the soldiers, and was, of course, unarmed and had thrown no rocks. 

The closest fatality was Jeffrey Miller, who was 265 feet away. The commission concluded, “...the indiscriminate firing of rifles into a crowd...were unnecessary, unwarranted, and inexcusable.” And the same could be said for the 1894 official murders committed in the name of protecting railroad property, and crushing workers seeking justice for fellow workers.

That night, General Miles told the press, “...the injured men are alone to blame....The firing...was strictly in accordance with orders from this office, (and) was necessary for the public welfare and justified by the circumstances. I think now that the mob knows that the troops will fire without hesitation when ordered. The trouble is nearly over.” And it was, for the railroads.

Said Col Thomas A. Anderson, “The army is not an enemy of Labor nor a friend of Capital. It is simply an instrument of popular power.” But nobody believed that version of reality anymore.

A lot of railroad property was destroyed in those first days of July, but not all of the arson was committed by strikers. Some, perhaps even most of the fires, were set by company thugs, to justify the armed response.  And the most notorious fire of 6 July, the burning of the Columbia Exposition's "White City, made of plaster and wood..” was probably set by young boys playing with matches.

Almost from the day it opened, the Columbia fair grounds had suffered numerous fires, including one on 11, July 1893, in which 16 had died. Large sections burned again in January of 1894. Still, without any evidence, the press in July of 1894 , and most historians since, have blamed the strikers.

The quality of the deputized “Marshals” would be shown the very next day, Saturday, 7 July, when Deputy Marshal T.J. Ketcham accidentally shot and killed fellow deputy marshal Donald G. Goodwin while in the safety of their offices. But the truth did not matter much anymore.

The General Managers practice of attaching Pullman cars to even coal trains had brought rail traffic to a halt across much of the nation. Factories were closing, because of disruptions to the supply chains, putting millions out of work. Seeing public support for the Pullman workers evaporate, Eugene Debs offered a sad compromise, asking only that his A.R.U. members be rehired. Instead the G.M.A. hired scabs.

On that Saturday afternoon came yet another bloody confrontation at 49th and Loomis Streets. Hit with rocks the 2nd Regiment of the Illinois National Guard fired a hundred rounds into a mob and followed it up with another bayonet charge. When the mob finally dispersed, they left a hundred dead and wounded on the ground, with an unknown number of wounded were carried off. 

On Wednesday, 11 July, 1894, Debs and three other A.R. U. officials were jailed, charged with conspiring to “interfere with the transport of the mails, and violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act", which had been intended to be used against corporations, like the railroads. They were also charged with violating the injunction. The strike then quickly fell apart, and by the middle of August it was all over. The railroads lost over a million dollars in damages to equipment (all insured)  and another $80 million in lost revenue. But they smashed the A.R.U. and set worker's rights back for another half century. 

Although defended by Clarence Darrow, Debs was sentenced to 6 months in federal prison. He came out a proud socialist, calling not for strikes but revolution. 

Grover Cleveland tried to sooth enraged workers with the creation of a worker's holiday, Labor Day. But the memories of murder and betrayal ensured that Cleveland would be last Democratic President until 1912, when Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose party split the Republicans and let Woodrow Wilson slip into the White House. But after that brief aberration, it would take the Great Depression to break the Republican stranglehold on the Presidency,

The man who had started it all, George Pullman, died three years later, on 19 October, 1897. He was so fearful of workers seeking to insult his body that it took two days to pour the 18 inches of steel reinforced concrete which still protects his coffin,

Working conditions on railroads after the strike would be shown by the fate of Howard F. Collins, the youngest son of Grand Crossing Superintendent Thomas Collins, who had tried to talk the switchmen out of striking on 25 June, 1894.  After graduating High School in May of 1896, 12 year old Howard went to work as a conductor.  Westinghouse had patented a pneumatic braking systems back in 1869, but like many railroads, the Illinois Central refused to pay the royalties to use. So, like all conductors, young Howard was required to clamber from car to car, to turn the brake wheel on each car in turn.

And on the Saturday night of 12 September, Howard was applying brakes for a train approaching the Grand Crossing, when,  near 76th Street,  he slipped and fell between the cars. The boy was dragged 36 feet.  His right arm and collar bone were broken, his was spine severed. He died three days later, on 15 September. In gratitude for his father's sacrifice the Illinois Central carried the boy's broken body back to the family plot, in Ontario, Canada, for free. The Illinois Central did not fully use Westinghouse brakes until well into the 20th Century, when it was finally required to by law.

                       - 30 -