Chapter 140 Chapter 21 SACO Training Camp

From the perspective of Americans, the core of SACO is its training program.In the three years that Sino-US cooperation existed, a total of 2,500 Americans served in China in rotation, most of them in the navy, and they considered their main task to be to train Chinese guerrillas to fight against the Japanese.Of course, some of them went to work in remote weather stations in the northwest, or engaged in coastal surveillance in the southeastern coastal areas of China.The vast majority of SACO officers and soldiers are assigned to the "Geleshan" headquarters outside Chongqing, or to 14 branch offices across China. They combine a program similar to Boy Scout field training with murder, sabotage, and group combat used in conjunction with the tutorial.

Although only 26,794 students officially graduated from the SACO training camp, the military at its training site, known as Dai Li, trained 40,000 to 50,000 personnel.After the war, Melles asserted that SACO's guerrilla force consisted of 97,000 Chinese and 3,000 American personnel.He declared: This powerful force wiped out 71,000 Japanese. Regardless of the credibility of these claims, the American personnel at SACO believed that their main mission in China was to train the guerrillas to eventually grow into an underground resistance force that would serve the Japanese when regular U.S. troops finally landed on Chinese shores. people attack.Examining every single unit of SACO reveals that their reporting of enemy casualties is inaccurate, but this in no way detracts from the heroism of the Americans who volunteered to work on this mission.When these men look back on their war experiences, they feel pride and love for their subordinates.Since almost all of these Americans knew nothing about China and could not speak the most basic Chinese before going to China to work, their misunderstanding of the environment is often ridiculous at times.We believe that when some of them later learned that during the heyday of SACO, they had participated in the training of the most terrifying members of the Kuomintang regime, who specialized in persecuting progressive elements in the entire "National-controlled area" by means of kidnapping, torture, and killing. They must have been in shock, or in disbelief, when they saw the secret police.