Lovely article. But I have my doubts. Were these prisoners really outwitting their guards, or might it have been the other way around?
Is not instructing their captors in engineering subjects, navigation and astronomy, which all have substantial military applications, clearly disloyalty to the Allies at the time?
Is this not just a story about how the Japanese were able to gain military intelligence on Western manufacturing and machine shop techniques from these brilliant craftsmen with their "secret" lathe?
We have all seen the movie The Great Escape and various other prisoner/POW movies, but that's not how things were. Assuming that the bunkhouses were separate from the workshop facilities, and fully under Japanese control, I assume that the Japanese were able to inspect each and any of these marvelous technical works in progress at their leisure.
The most cynical take is that it appears no effort was spared in sharing decades or even centuries of technological progress and advancement in various technologies with the Japanese, who at the time were at war with the Allies.
In other words, you can be pretty smart, but pretty stupid. Or, as a POW you just need to do what you can to survive, and you're also smart enough to rescue yourself from court martial at the end.
The Japanese entered the Second World War with a fleet of aircraft carriers and submarines. Before the war, they were importing Swiss machine tools and exporting watches to Europe and America. A craft-made lathe would have revealed no secrets to a country that already had a highly developed manufacturing industry.
> Is this not just a story about how the Japanese were able to gain military intelligence on Western manufacturing and machine shop techniques from these brilliant craftsmen with their "secret" lathe?
Seems pretty unlikely; simple machine tools as described in this article were already an old and widely known technology at the time.
Is not instructing their captors in engineering subjects, navigation and astronomy, which all have substantial military applications, clearly disloyalty to the Allies at the time?
Is this not just a story about how the Japanese were able to gain military intelligence on Western manufacturing and machine shop techniques from these brilliant craftsmen with their "secret" lathe?
We have all seen the movie The Great Escape and various other prisoner/POW movies, but that's not how things were. Assuming that the bunkhouses were separate from the workshop facilities, and fully under Japanese control, I assume that the Japanese were able to inspect each and any of these marvelous technical works in progress at their leisure.
The most cynical take is that it appears no effort was spared in sharing decades or even centuries of technological progress and advancement in various technologies with the Japanese, who at the time were at war with the Allies.
In other words, you can be pretty smart, but pretty stupid. Or, as a POW you just need to do what you can to survive, and you're also smart enough to rescue yourself from court martial at the end.