Ex-POWs conflicted on treatment of detainees

Buck Turner served on the burial detail, helping carry as many as 40 bodies a day to mass graves at the infamous Japanese Cabanatuan POW camp in the Philippines during World War II. Turner said he doesn't want detainees killed or bones broken, but "if we can put a little pain on one of them and get the information that we need that maybe might save lives, we need to do that."


Ex-POWs conflicted on treatment of detainees
By John O’Connor - The Associated Press
Posted : Sunday Oct 21, 2007 14:55:41 EDT

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — Marion Oltman spent the last eight months of World War II in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp, and tears still fill his eyes when he recalls those desperate days.

After working all day to fill craters left from Allied bombing, each prisoner got a boiled potato and a slice of bread with sawdust used as filler. Oltman was given the task of slicing the bread to feed 12 men.

“You don’t know what it’s like to look in the eyes of guys that are that hungry,” the 89-year-old Pekin, Ill., resident said, his voice breaking.

The experience gave Oltman a unique perspective about the treatment of prisoners during wartime. As a national debate continues about the role of torture to get information from suspects in the war on terror, Oltman and others attending an ex-POW conference said that the United States should set an example for the world in the humane treatment of detainees.

“I don’t believe in torture,” Oltman said this past week at the 60th annual conference of the American Ex-Prisoners of War. “I’ve seen what humans can do to humans. I’ve lived through some of it. And that’s not right.”

But what constitutes humane treatment is less clear — and even those who have been in the hands of the enemy themselves don’t always agree. While they say they wouldn’t kill or physically harm a detainee, many struggle with the question in a world where it appears terrorists have changed the rules.


Rest of article at: http://www.armytimes.com/news/2007/10/ap_powtorture_071021/

My husband's uncle, Herbert Ott, was in the same POW camp with him. They are Bataan Death March survivors.

Uncle Herb died in 2003.

I am rather surprised to hear a Cabanatuan survivor say something like this. The treatment there was brutal. Uncle Herb went to all the reunions that the could. The survivors all hate the Japanese, but Turner's statements still surprise me.