A. Peter Dewey

Also, 2005's Fatal Crossroads: A Novel of Vietnam 1945 is based on Dewey's time and death in Vietnam and written by journalist and Dewey family friend Seymour Topping. Topping dedicated the book to Dewey and his O.S.S. colleagues. He also had returned to visit Vietnam with Dewey's daughter Nancy and her husband.

Dewey is not listed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. because the United States Department of Defense has ruled that the war officially started, from a U.S. perspective, on November 1, 1955, after the U.S. took over following the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu.

Dewey arrived on September 4, 1945, in Saigon to head a seven-man OSS team "to represent American interests" and collect intelligence. Working with the Viet Minh, he arranged the repatriation of 4,549 Allied POWs, including 240 Americans, from two Japanese camps near Saigon, code named Project Embankment. Because the British occupation forces who had arrived to accept the Japanese surrender were short of troops, they armed French POWs on September 22 to protect the city from a potential Viet Minh attack. In taking control of the city, the French soldiers were quick to beat or shoot Vietnamese who resisted the reestablishment of French authority.

Dewey is also remembered in an inscription on one of the walls in the National Cathedral, Washington, DC, which states that he was killed in action Indo-China 1945.

On August 10, 1944, Dewey parachuted into southern France as the leader of a 10-man team from the United States Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Operating behind enemy lines for six weeks, he transmitted intelligence reports on German troop movements. For his service, General William "Wild Bill" Donovan personally awarded him the Legion of Merit and the French gave him the Legion of Honor and a second Croix de Guerre.

On August 1, 1942, Dewey married Nancy Weller. The couple had one child, a daughter, Mrs. Nancy (Charles) Hoppin. Dewey's widow, Nancy, married John Pierrepont in 1950.

In May 1940, during the Battle of France, Dewey enlisted as a lieutenant in the Polish Military Ambulance Corps with the Polish Army fighting in France. Following the defeat of the French army, Dewey escaped through Spain to Portugal, where he was interned for a short time.

After his graduation from Yale in 1939, Dewey worked as a journalist for the Chicago Daily News in its Paris bureau.

Albert Peter Dewey (October 8, 1916 – September 26, 1945) was an American Office of Strategic Services operative shot to death in a case of mistaken identity by Communist aligned Viet Minh troops on September 26, 1945. Dewey was the first American fatality in French Indochina, killed during the 1945 Vietnamese uprising.