Lovely article. But I have my doubts. Were these prisoners really outwitting their guards, or might it have been the other way around?<p>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?<p>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?<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.