Page 143 - 2020 JSOM Winter

I Was a Stranger

Hackett JW. I Was a Stranger. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company; 1978. ISBN: 0-395-27087-1 and
ISBN-13: 978-0395270875. 220 pages, hardback.
Review by COL (Ret) Warner “Rocky” D. Farr, MD, MPH

hen I found this volume, I realized that I had has to be one of the higher ranking officers to be cap-
previously read a book by this author. Long tured and then successfully escape.
Wafter this World War II paratroop
survival, escape, resistance, and evasion The Dutch underground was made aware
personal narrative, the author wrote The of his capture, and a German Army sur-
Third World War: The Untold Story in the geon saved his life with surgical treatment
1980s while he was the vice commander in a Dutch hospital controlled by the Ger-
at NATO (ISBN-13: 978-0553236378 and man army where Hackett was taken. Al-
ISBN-10: 0553236377). It was a first-class though not fit for movement, the Dutch
effort to portray a fictionalized account of resistance managed to move him and care
NATO versus the Warsaw Pact in World for him en route to a family in a neigh-
War III in the middle Europe Fulda Gap boring town where he was secreted. After
scenario. It was popular reading in the several months of recuperation and as the
American Army as we contemplated what Germans tightened their grip on occupied
such a war would be like. Holland, he again joined the Dutch resis-
tance and eventually escaped into allied
General Sir John Hackett was a regular hands through a complicated route involv-
soldier for nearly 40 years and went on to have a suc- ing rivers and canoes.
cessful writing and teaching career after his retirement
from the British army. All those strengths are evident in This account shows a picture of courage of both Gen-
this, an account of his actions as the 4th Parachute Bri- eral Hackett and the brave Dutch citizens of the under-
gade commander at Arnhem. As a paratroop brigadier ground who both cared for, hid, moved, and ultimately
in 1944 in World War II’s Market Garden operation, he liberated him into allied hands.

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