Review of "We Stole to Live," by Joe “Fingers” Brown

 Review of

We Stole to Live, by Joe “Fingers” Brown

Five out of five stars

A POW story that is a bit different

 The author was captured by the Japanese early in the conflict between the United States and Japan. His rendition of his years of captivity is similar to other accounts in that they were subject to deprivation in both shelter and food. In his case the last years were spent in Japan where he and his fellow captives were put to work as manual laborers.

 What makes this story different is that the men became experts at stealing food from the Japanese stores and their guards were not the brutal sadists that the guards in places like the Philippines where. One wonders regarding the reason, it is possible that the Japanese used as guards in the homeland were the least warlike and so retained some of their basic humanity.

 In any case, this book sometimes reads with a hint of “Hogan’s Heroes,” in that the prisoners get away with a lot of misdirection and theft of food from the Japanese. It seems impossible that the guards could not figure it out, it also seems clear that in many cases the guards simply did not want to carry out the draconian punishments being inflicted on Allied POWs in other theaters of the war.

 This is one of the most interesting accounts of American POWs of the Japanese in World War II. Most accounts recount the brutality of the Japanese guards while this one depicts them with a touch of humanity.

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