Try to put yourself in the shoes of the captain of the USS Colorado (size
10½, brown). This is your final trip as captain of the battleship. It’s
the annual ROTC training cruise and you started from the West Coast with
196 college kids and 4 university VIPs. You sailed to Hawai’i and stopped
at Hilo where they threw a big farewell party for you. Your next job will
be at Pearl Harbor as assistant to the admiral who is in charge of the
14th Naval District. (There’s a rumor that Pearl will soon be made the
home of the Pacific Fleet.) At the Lahaina Roads firing range you let the
kids fire the ship’s big guns and you had just tied up at Pier 2 in Honolulu
for four days of liberty when the word came down that Amelia Earhart had
gotten herself lost someplace 2,000 miles to the south and the Navy was
going to try find her and – guess what? – yours is the only capital ship
in the Pacific. Swell.
You round up your people, call your airplanes back from scheduled maintenance
at Fleet Air Base, and move the ship over to Pearl for fueling. Meanwhile,
you get together with other senior officers and try to figure out where
you should look. Everybody agrees that she should be somewhere on the line
of position she said she was on. Next day you head south at flank speed,
slamming through heavy seas and taking water over the number two turret.
Most of the college kids are sick as dogs.
For the next couple of days, as you travel south, half the world seems
to be hearing unintelligible distress calls from the lost airplane. At
one point, the Navy in Hawai’i interprets one message to mean that the Electra
is floating in the ocean 281 miles north of Howland. The Itasca and
a British steamer are sent to check it out but find nothing. Then Lockheed
says that if the plane is transmitting it has to be on land. Pan Am says
that some of the signals seem to be coming from the Phoenix Islands. This
reinforces your original opinion that the plane is on the line of position
but now you decide that it makes the most sense to search land areas rather
than the ocean. After about six days at sea you finally reach the area
of the first possible land to be searched. Something called Winslow Reef
is supposed to be right over that way a few miles. You don’t get too close
because you don’t want to risk putting this battleship aground on a reef
....