This reminds me of something I saw when I was reading through old threads in this Forum -- ones that predated my participation -- as a way to get up to speed with the group. This thread -- I don't remember which one or from when -- included a page from a newspaper published in one of the British Pacific islands, whose lead story was the search for Earhart. The story asserted that the British and Japanese had offered their assistance, were helping the Americans in the search, and that all three nations were using the search as an opportunity to check out the others' military installations. The only true-ish part was that some offer of assistance (token at best, along the lines of "if we find her, we'll send her home") had been made. But as we know, only American ships and planes actually searched -- indeed there was something of a missed opportunity in that there was a British scoutplane-equipped cruiser (HMS Achilles) in the region that could perhaps have gotten to the Phoenix Group sooner than the Americans did. Whether out of pride or as a by-product of the sovereignty games being played between the British and Americans over these islands, such help was not accepted or requested.
I wonder if the journalist had a source for this story or simply invented it. What interests me about it is not whether there is any truth to it, but what it indicates, that it was written at all, about the rising tensions in the Pacific between the countries that were not yet at war there. Also it would seem that this is an early seed of later theories about what the Japanese had really been up to in the late 1930s. By 1942 there were Hollywood movies (Blood on the Sun comes to mind) set in the years before Pearl Harbor with that very plotline.
Also demonstrates that while news reports can be useful information sources, everything needs to be corroborated. Most of the coverage got most of teh facts wrong in 1937, but then even those who were supposed to know what was going on mostly didn't.
LTM,
Don