As a SACO man, he was part of a top secret network of Navy men, along with a handful of Marine and Army personnel, who worked hand in hand with the Nationalist Chinese to fight the Japanese occupation of China.
SACO is Sino-American Cooperative Organization
They were sent to China, beginning in 1943, to spy on the Japanese and collect weather data for the U.S. Pacific Fleet
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The Japanese weren’t the only threat: the operation was undermined from the very beginning by factions within the U.S. Army, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and the State Department — which demanded to know what the hell the Navy was doing on the ground in China.
But by the end of the war, some 2,500 SACO men had served in China, not only cracking intercepted Japanese code and gathering crucial meteorological information but blowing up enemy supply depots, laying mines in rivers and harbors, rescuing downed American pilots, and training thousands of Chinese peasants in guerrilla warfare.
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