John Hackett
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Sir John Winthrop Hackett (1910 - September, 1997) was a British Army officer and author.
Hackett was educated at Oxford University and was posted to the 8th (King's Royal Irish) Hussars. He fought with the British Army in World War II in Syria, where he was wounded, and in North Africa, where he was wounded again when his Stuart tank was hit.
In 1944, Hackett commanded the 4th Parachute Brigade in the Allied assault on Arnhem, Netherlands in Operation Market Garden. Then-Brigadier Hackett was wounded yet again and captured. Once he was healed, he escaped and was hidden by Dutch civilians. He wrote about this experience in his book I Was A Stranger in 1977.
General Hackett's postwar career included, Commandant, Royal Military College of Science, Shrivenham, 1958-1961; Deputy Chief of the General Staff, 1963-1964, and Commander in Chief, British Army of the Rhine, 1965-1966. He later became Commander, Northern Army Group, in NATO.
In 1978, General Hackett wrote a novel, The Third World War, August 1985, which was a fictionalized scenario of World War III based on a Soviet invasion of West Germany in 1985. The novel was highly successful, though criticized for being dry and impersonal.
His (British) military decorations included the: Knight Grand Cross, Commander of the British Empire, Distinguished Service Order and Bar, Military Cross, Twice Mentioned in Despatches.