The story of the first American soldier killed in Vietnam: a veteran of the Polish Army

Last Saturday, September 26, marked the 75th anniversary of the death of Albert Peter Dewey, an American soldier with a curious military record.

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He came across the World War II as a correspondent in Paris

Born in Chicago in 1916, Albert was the son of banker and Republican congressman Charles S. Dewey, who served in the U.S. Navy during World War I. Albert received a luxurious education, first at the elite Le Rosey Institute in Switzerland and eventually graduating with a degree in French history from Yale University in 1939, when he began working as a Paris correspondent for the Chicago Daily News. Thus Albert found himself caught up in World War II, perhaps most unexpectedly for an American citizen.

His enlistment in the Polish Army in France

Following the German and Soviet invasion of Poland, many Polish soldiers managed to reach France, creating the so-called Polish Army in France, made up of about 85,000 men, who would contribute to the defense of the country against the German invasion in the spring of 1940. Albert was not Polish and had no Polish roots, but his father had worked in Poland as a financial advisor to the Polish government of Józef Piłsudski between 1927 and 1931. As a teenager, Albert had accompanied his father during that stay in Poland and ended up loving that country. So in May 1940 he decided to enlist in the Polish Military Ambulance Corps in France, becoming an ambulance driver, paying for his own uniform - like other American volunteers.

His return to the United States and his enlistment in the US Army and the OSS

When France fell, Albert managed to escape to Spain and then to Portugal, from there returning to the United States. Once in his homeland, in 1942 he enlisted in the US Army, serving in intelligence missions. As a curious fact, on the left pocket of his American jacket he always wore the eagle of the Polish Army, in memory of his services with it in France.

In 1943 Albert joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the intelligence service that preceded the CIA, and was infiltrated in the south of France to collaborate with the French resistance in the Etoile Mission. For his services there he received the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Merit from the authorities of Free France.

OSS Operation Embankment in Saigon

Albert returned to the United States and was assigned in July 1945 to fly to Ceylon and then to Saigon in Indochina as part of Operation Embankment. Albert’s five-man squadron, then a lieutenant colonel, arrived in a C-47 Dakota at the Japanese airfield at Tan Son Nhut in Saigon on September 4, 1945, two days after Japan’s surrender. Their mission was to investigate war crimes and locate and evacuate Allied prisoners. The small group successfully freed 214 American prisoners of war outside Saigon and took up residence at Villa Ferrier, northwest of Saigon, as the only Allied force in Saigon at the time.

Upon arriving in Vietnam, Albert’s group made contact with leaders of the Viet Minh independence movement, led by Ho Chi Minh, who had declared independence for Indochina on September 2. Albert was the author of the first American report on Vietnamese independence in Saigon on September 7. Albert’s contacts with the Viet Minh so irritated the French and the British that British General Douglas Gracey declared him persona non grata and ordered him to leave the country. This occurred on September 26, 1945. Albert complied with the British general’s order and returned to Villa Ferrier in his Jeep to catch a plane and leave Vietnam.

The ambush in which he was killed

By this time fighting had already begun between French forces and the Viet Minh. On his way back to the airfield, Albert's jeep was attacked in a Viet Minh ambush. Albert was shot dead, and Major Herber Bleuchel, who was accompanying him, managed to escape. The OSS men were besieged by the Vietnamese at Villa Ferrier, until they received relief from a group of British Army Gurkhas.

Albert's death is still surrounded by controversy, as some of his OSS colleagues blamed the British for what happened. The Viet Minh ended up disapproving of what happened, and claimed that Albert's death was due to a mistake, as they took him for a French soldier. Ho Chi Minh even wrote to President Truman to express his condolences and declare his friendship with the United States. The Allied Control Commission even expressed doubts about whether the ambush would have been prevented if the French had not prohibited members of the OSS from flying the American flag on their jeeps. What happened highlighted the tense relations between the Allies in Indochina in the months following the end of World War II.

Albert’s body was never recovered, so in addition to becoming the first American casualty in Vietnam, he is also considered the first MIA (missing in action). In his last report before returning to Saigon airfield, he wrote: “Cochinchina is burning; the French and British are finished here, and we should clear out Southeast Asia.” Twenty years later, in 1965, the US was deeply involved in the Vietnam War, a bloody conflict that would last another 10 years and would represent the country’s first major military defeat.