WWII Veteran was First American MIA in War Against Ho Chi Minh's Forces

WWII Veteran was First American MIA in War Against Ho Chi Minh's Forces

August-September 1996 Issue
By Ted Sampley
U.S. Veteran Dispatch

Lt. Col. Peter Dewey of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), became the first American MIA in Vietnam on September 26, 1945, when he was ambushed by Ho Chi Minh's forces (Vietminh). During World War II, the OSS, predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), trained and armed Vietminh guerrillas in the jungles of northern Vietnam to fight the Japanese.

Ho had just organized a "broad" communist front of "patriots of all ages and all types, peasants, workers, merchants and soldiers," to drive both the Japanese and French out of Vietnam. His new organization, led by communists, appealed to many Vietnamese with nationalist sentiments. After the Japanese surrendered, Ho used the Vietminh as a power base for a Vietnamese nationalist movement to prevent the French from reestablishing colonial rule. Dewey, the son of a conservative Republican Congressman from Chicago, was the head of a detachment of seven OSS agents assigned to Saigon to search for and liberate Allied prisoners of war still being held by the Japanese.

He alienated the French and British hierarchy by making contact with the Vietminh. Major General Douglas D. Gracey, commander of a British force in Vietnam assigned there to disarm the Japanese, suspected Dewey of "conniving" with the Vietminh and ordered him out of the country. Before leaving, Dewey summed up the situation in Vietnam: "Cochinchina is burning, the French and British are finished here, and we [the United States] ought to clear out of Southeast Asia." Dewey and a colleague, Capt. Herbert J. Bluechel, headed for the Saigon airport in a jeep with Dewey driving.

Dewey took a shortcut past the Saigon golf course, where he encountered a barrier of logs and brush blocking the road. After braking to swerve around it, he noticed three Vietnamese in the roadside ditch. He shouted angrily at them in French. Presumably mistaking him for a French officer, the Viet Minh replied with a burst of bullets that, according to Bluechel, blew off the back of Dewey's head. Bluechel, unarmed, ran from the scene with a bullet knocking off his cap as he fled. Dewey's body was never recovered. French and Viet Minh spokesmen blamed each other for his death.

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