Jens J Wilhelmsen is Norwegian and fought in World War II to free his country from German occupation. After the war, he had the unique experience of spending a decade in two of the countries which lost, in Germany from 1948 to 1953, and in Japan from 1953 to 1958. In both countries he worked with IofC, and distilled his experience in two books: 'Men and Structure' (1982) and 'Eyewitness to the impossible' (2016). The first deals with the inter-action between change in social structures and human attitudes, the second reports on reconciliation and trust-building as a means of solving conflicts.