Research Note: Testing Claims of Douglas Dietrich

In researching the culpability of Franklin Roosevelt in the bombing of Pearl Harbor, we came across an interesting character by the name of Douglas Dietrich who claimed that

·         Durham White Stevens (1851 – 1908) was an American dictator of Korea after the American Civil War

·         the Japanese had developed an atomic bomb by the end of World War 2

·         the United States sued the Japanese for peace to end World War 2

We reject all of these statements as either false or unsupportable from the historical record.

Dietrich makes many other unconventional statements of equal controversy, and does so in a convincing, at times erudite, fashion. He often challenges his listeners to do the research themselves to prove that he is right. We took up the challenge only to report disappointment for our revisionist historian.

 

Much of Dietrich’ authority rests upon his alleged access to massive quantities of American official archive documents he was assigned to destroy while a librarian assistant at the Presidio during the 1980s. He states that these documents stretched back to the Spanish American War and were backlogged at the military base by incompetent military and civilian staff who refused to the do the dirty work of destroying the records. Through various connections as a military brat, he obtained his position at the age of 16.

 

While his stories and analyses are quite entertaining, they often lack any factual basis, or rest upon dubious evidence - Durham Stevens being one such example. More specifically, Dietrich’s claims about Stevens are made to demonstrate that Americans have been brainwashed or its leaders have hidden the truth about their nation’s imperial aggrandizement in Asia, specifically Korea.

 

Stevens was an obscure American diplomat who served in the State Department in Tokyo after graduation from law school in 1873. In 1883 the Japanese government hired him for its legation in Washington, DC. In 1904 Japan appointed him as foreign advisor to the Emperor of Korea, during which time the New York Times reported that he was known by some as the “American dictator of the Hermit Kingdom.” While visiting San Francisco in 1908, he was assassinated by a group of Korean students from which wounds he died.

 

The point is that Stevens assumed his Korean post in 1904 – not in the early 1870s as Dietrich reports. More importantly, Stevens was not an American dictator of Korea installed by the American government in a takeover of the country. Rather, he was working for the Japanese when he earned the sobriquet as American dictator, a moniker which the New York Times reported to illustrate the influence he had in Korean affairs on behalf of the Japanese.

 

Turning to the subject of Japan and World War 2, Dietrich cites an article in the October 3, 1946 Atlanta Constitution reporting that Japan had developed an atomic bomb which it had tested in Konan Korea at the close of World War 2. The author David Snell cites a pseudonymous Japanese Captain Wakabayashi who related details about the Japanese atomic program which had been moved to Korea to avoid the American B29 air raids. Five days after the bombing of Hiroshima, the Japanese detonated their bomb at sea to avoid capture by the Soviets, according to the report filed by Snell who was working with the Army’s 24^th Criminal Investigation Detachment.

 

Snell reported his findings to the US Army intelligence team in Korea which censored details of the information which were contained in the article.

 

A book entitled Hungnam and the Japanese Atomic Bomb: Recent Historiography of a Postwar Myth by Walter Grunden reviews the claims of the article in detail, along with a review of the Japanese nuclear program, to demonstrate that the story is false.

 

If Dietrich wishes to credibly contradict the findings of this book and other researchers who failed to substantiate Wakabayashi's story, he needs to produce evidence of greater weight than this 1946 newspaper article.

 

Dietrich’s larger point that the Japanese detonated the bomb to intimidate the Soviets fails because they occupied the northern part of the Korean peninsula in spite of the alleged detonation.

 

Regarding the final assertion by Dietrich – that the United States sued Japan for peace – we only offer our pity. The United States has occupied Japan since the end of the war and MacArthur’s vice regency of the island is well documented. The emperor of Japan did not step down because of the Japanese triumph in the war.

References

New York Times, D W Stevens Shot by Korean Assassin, March 24, 1908

Snell, David (3 October 1946). "Japan Developed Atom Bomb; Russia Grabbed Scientists". Atlanta Constitution (cited in Wikipedia)

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/10/the-real-reason-america-used-nuclear-weapons-against-japan-to-contain-russian-ambitions.html

Copyright 2013 Tony Bonn. All rights reserved.