Word: saipan
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Marine, who became known as "the father of modern amphibious warfare" when he commanded the Fleet Marine Force in the Pacific during World War II; of a heart attack; in San Diego, Calif. A stocky, sulphurous, onetime Alabama lawyer, Smith personally led the bloody Marine assaults on Tarawa, Saipan and Iwo Jima, and dismissed criticism of heavy casualty rates (3,200 casualties at Tarawa alone) with "Gentlemen, it was our will...
...failed. Financed by CBS, the Scripps newspaper chain, the San Mateo (Calif.) Times and the Associated Press, he made four trips to the islands of the western Pacific to gather evidence of evildoing. In 1960, he returned from the Pacific with a bagful of airplane parts dredged out of Saipan harbor. These, he believed, were the remains of Earhart's twin-engined Lockheed Electra.* No such luck; the collection turned out to be parts from a Japanese plane. In 1964, Goerner got a flash of headlines by producing seven pounds of human bones and 37 teeth. The flyers? Nope...
...couple. They were taken aboard and later transferred either to the Japanese seaplane tender Kamoi or to the survey ship Koshu, which was known to be in the region. From his talks with natives, Goerner concludes that the flyers were taken first to Jaluit, then Kwajalein, and finally to Saipan, Japan's military headquarters in the Pacific; a number of Saipanese say that they saw a man and a woman who resembled Noonan and Earhart. Goerner quotes native sources as saying that Earhart probably died of dysentery and that Noonan was beheaded, but he does not document the fact...
Along the way, Goerner does infect the reader with some nagging points. He has found two U.S. Marines who claim that they exhumed the flyers' bodies in Saipan in 1944, and says that the remains were either secretly reinterred or are today in the possession of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. And he quotes no less a personage than Admiral Chester A. Nimitz, who told Goerner in March 1965: "I want to tell you Earhart and her navigator did go down in the Marshalls and were picked up by the Japanese." Alas, Nimitz told him no more than...
Like It Is. It was another 15 years before he was to distill all of these experiences into a running narrative capable of recollecting an era. Going from Memphis to New York to Saipan, Cloar skipped from cartooning to lithography to painting pinup girls on the fuselages of B-29s. Returning from the service, he got a Guggenheim fellowship for oil painting, was ready to throw in the towel when he discovered the technique of tempera. About the same time he settled in Memphis. Somehow, medium and milieu matched each other perfectly and Cloar, now 53, was soon the master...