In that post from what I remember the person also raised the idea that the "aircraft" wreckage might instead have been lighter structural bits from the Norwich City which was still pretty much intact at the time which had been washed to the north of the wreck. As an ill-informed observation on my part this does seem to have some merit because I really do have difficulty in accepting that the islanders at that time would have much idea of what an aircraft wreck looked like. But if they had heard that Mr Gallagher thought that the stuff he was looking at might have belonged to a missing flyer then any lighter looking or odd shaped bits of ship wreckage might be construed as being the airplane as the rumour developed. Perhaps they even did tell him but he didn't bother to mention it in his reports because to him it was clearly parts of the ship. The island was a small community and like most small towns I bet there wasn't much to talk about and so rumours would get improved upon
Emily Sikuli said she saw debris that her father told her was "part of an airplane" on the reef edge roughly 100 meters north of the shipwreck. Her father could have been mistaken and the debris could have been from the ship, although in historical photos and in our own experience debris from the ship travels exclusively southeast. Similarly, former island residents who remember "part of a wing" on the reef flat southeast of the shipwreck and "airplane parts" washed up on the beach in the 1950s could have been seeing unusual shipwreck debris and making unwarranted connections to an old legend. John Mims is harder to dismiss.
Between December 1944 and February 1945 Ensign John Mims, assigned to Patrol Aircraft Service Unit (PATSU) 2-2 based at Canton Island, made eight trips to Gardner as co-pilot of U.S. Navy PBY-5 BuNo 08456. On one of those visits the settlers proudly showed him a large fish they had just caught. Mims was astonished to see that the hook in the fish’s mouth was crudely fashioned from aircraft aluminum and the “leader” on the fishing line was a control cable from an aircraft smaller than a PBY. As Mims wrote in a March 1995 letter to the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum:
“I asked the native about the hook and leader, and he promptly informed me that it came from a wrecked plane that was there when he arrived some three years earlier (apparently no one lived on the island prior to 1941).
The first work party of the Phoenix Islands Settlement Scheme arrived in December 1938 so Mims’ supposition that his informant arrived with the first settlers was incorrect, but the story does suggest 1941 as a not-later-than date for the discovery of airplane debris. When asked where the wreck was located Mims’ informant just shrugged. Apparently by 1944 the wreck had either disappeared or whatever wreckage had washed up had been salvaged.
In addition to heavy-duty fishing tackle, Mim’s saw the islanders on Gardner using …”crude knives made from aluminum by grinding it with seashells and sand. At the present time I still have some jewel boxes and outriggers with inlaid diamond, heart, and star-shaped pieces of aluminum that they said came from the wrecked plane.” TIGHAR had one of the inlays tested. It’s aircraft–grade aluminum.
Ensign Mims was puzzled by what he had seen and the story he had been told. He couldn’t imagine where an aircraft at Gardner in 1941 could have come from unless… When he returned to Canton Island he asked the District Officer if the British had lost a plane at Gardner.
“He replied that no British planes had been there and neither had the Americans lost any planes there. I asked him if this could be a part of Amelia Earhart’s plane and he said it could well be, but he had little interest in a story of a lost pilot since the war was in progress. Also, he joked that the woman was American and that the 4th of July and Thanksgiving with the Americans was about all the American history he could take.”
Coast Guardsman Glen Geisinger was stationed on Gardner from late 1945 until the closing of the Loran station in May 1946. Like Mims a year earlier, Geisinger bought or traded for carved wooden boxes and model canoes that featured metal inlays said by the islanders to have come from “the downed plane that was once on the island.”
So the legend of the downed plane is more than stories of debris on the reef that might have been ship wreckage.