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SpyCast

The Rice Paddy Navy: U.S. Sailors Undercover in China

SpyCast

SpyCast

Education, News, History

4.41.7K Ratings

🗓️ 3 May 2013

⏱️ 42 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

After the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the US Navy knew it would need vital information from the Pacific. Captain Milton ‘Mary’ Miles journeyed to China to set up weather stations and monitor the Chinese coastline—and to spy on the Japanese. After a handshake agreement with Chiang Kai-shek's spymaster, General Dai Li, the Sino-American Cooperative Organization (SACO) was born. This top-secret network worked hand in hand with the Nationalist Chinese to fight the Japanese invasion of China while erecting crucial weather stations, providing critical information to the US military, intercepting Japanese communications, blowing up enemy supply depots, laying mines, destroying bridges, and training Chinese peasants in guerrilla warfare. Join author Linda Kush as she reveals the story of one of the most successful covert operation efforts of World War II. This event took place on March 5, 2013.

Transcript

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0:00.0

You're listening to the CyberWireriefing from the International Spy Museum.

0:24.7

I'm Mark Stout, the Museum's historian.

0:27.2

Here at the museum we get the most interesting authors including journalists, scholars,

0:31.2

former spies, and intelligence officers coming in to speak with our visitors and answer questions about their latest works dealing with espionage, intelligence, and other national security issues.

0:40.0

Please join me in listening to another of our selected hour-long author debriefings.

0:45.0

My name is Mark Stout. I'm the Museum Historian here. For those of you I haven't had the pleasure of meeting before.

0:51.0

And we're very fortunate today to have with us

0:54.0

Linda Cush. Linda is a freelance journalist and author in the Boston area and her

1:00.0

work has appeared in such varied venues as the Boston Globe and World War II magazine.

1:05.6

But we're here today to talk about her first book, Rice Patty Navy, U.S. Sailors Undercover

1:09.8

in China.

1:10.8

Linda's a fine researcher and writer, as I think this book will show, but perhaps her biggest preparation

1:16.4

or most important preparation for writing about World War II may have been her reporting on zoning

1:21.7

battles in the Boston area, which I know is really serious brutal stuff.

1:26.0

I hope Linda is going to tell us a little bit today about how she came to discover this really interesting enormous amount of

1:35.0

and got inspired to write a book about it.

1:37.0

Really an enormous amount of literature

1:39.0

has been written about intelligence in World War II,

1:42.0

the vast majority of it pertains to the war in Europe and in North Africa.

1:47.0

Relatively little has been written about the war in the Pacific and most of that deals with signals intelligence or perhaps even secondarily from that

1:55.0

intelligence support to General MacArthur. Very few books have been written

1:59.6

about China so Linda's contribution is especially valuable in that regard.

...

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