Battle of Attu Translation of Japanse Doctor Diary Lot

Battle of Attu Translation of Japanse Doctor Diary Lot
Original WWII unofficial period translation of the captured diary of Japanese Army Surgeon Paul Nobuo Tatsuguchi, who was killed in the battle, but prior to that transcribed a very detailed account of his experiences. After Tatsuguchi's death his Japanese diary, as well as his Bible, a copy of Gray's Anatomy and an address book, were forwarded to the division intelligence section. There, an American Nisei serviceman named Yasuo Sam Umetani drafted the first translation of the diary.Word of the diary's contents spread quickly through divisional headquarters to the other American troops on Attu. Americans were intrigued by the news that an American-trained doctor had been with the Japanese forces on the island and that Tatsuguchi had described the battle from a Japanese perspective. Unauthorized copies of both Umetani's version and subsequent translations, some of which contained variations, were passed around among the American troops on Attu and to military installations on other Aleutian islands. Civilian crews of transport ships in the area who obtained copies of the diary translation took their copies with them across the United States, where it drew the attention of the press and gained wide public exposure.Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr., the US commander of the Alaska Defense Command (ADC), on learning that the diary claimed that the Americans had used poison gas in the Attu battle, was sufficiently troubled to order that all copies of the translations be confiscated. In transit to Buckner's headquarters, the diary original itself vanished without trace, and its whereabouts are unknown to this day. Japanese versions are translated from the English translation. In early September 1943, the ADC's intelligence section reported that efforts to control the distribution of translated copies of the diary had failed.