Dick Rigatti has seen the snapshots of nude Iraqi prisoners with their American captors grinning in the background. It makes him angry.
The former prisoner of war recalls 1945, when he watched his German captors become defeated captives. He and his fellow soldiers had a chance for revenge, but didn't take it, he said. They knew better.
"An officer could have stood over me and beat me with a whip, and I would never have done that," Rigatti, 80, of Fox Chapel, Allegheny County, said Tuesday. He believes the American soldiers accused of mistreating the Iraqis "should get the works. They should be hung for doing these things to these guys."
Rigatti is among a chorus of former war prisoners who expressed anger -- or at least bewilderment -- at the actions of the American soldiers and the sexual humiliation photographed at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
"It sounds so unreal what's happened there and the pictures they're shooting," said Mike Dobda, 82, of Kennedy, whose B-26 was shot down while bombing a railroad bridge in Euskirchen, Germany, on Feb. 13, 1945. "I've never seen anything like that."
Rigatti, Dobda and other World War II and Korean War-era POWs remember suffering from hunger, cold, beatings and mostly fear. It was a period of their lives when any future was uncertain.
James Lippke spent nearly three years in a Chinese prison camp after being captured in 1950 north of the 38th Parallel in Korea. His first year of imprisonment was marked by extreme hunger and cold.
"A lot of guys died from dysentery, not enough food," said Lippke, 71, of Penn Hills. "When you went to sleep, your teeth would chatter. You didn't know if you would wake up or not."
Today, he turns on the television only to turn away when news of the captured Iraqis comes on.
"It's bad enough to go through, but to see somebody else go through it is terrible, too," said Lippke, his voice breaking with emotion. "They shouldn't have been doing that. It's not right to do that to any human being."
Lippke said abuses happen in war.
"If you see your buddy killed beside you, you want to go and just tear them to pieces," Lippke said of the enemy. "It's a natural instinct in a way. But it isn't the correct thing to do."
Frank Kravetz, 80, of Chalfant, still carries 100 pieces of shrapnel in his left leg and ankle from a 20mm shell that hit his B-17 Flying Fortress. Because he was too injured to abandon the plane on his own, crewmates strapped Kravetz into a parachute and tossed him out.
He landed safely near Hanover, Germany, and spent nearly three months hospitalized behind enemy lines. He later was moved to a prison camp and endured a forced march to Moosburg, Germany.
Kravetz is withholding judgment on U.S. soldiers in Iraq. "Atrocities are committed in wartime," Kravetz said. "Sometimes bad judgment does develop. I don't know yet. I'd like to hear some more."
Howard Lowenberg, 78, of Penn Hills, came to America when he was 10 because he was denied schooling in his German homeland. He's Jewish, and his parents were killed in the Holocaust. He fought for the United States and was captured in the Battle of the Bulge. He was held in two prison camps from December 1944 to May 1945.
"I'll grant you, we all had some kind of mistreatment," Lowenberg said. "But I never heard of anything going as far as what they did over there."
Additional Information:
Treatment of prisoners of war
The Third Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war includes bans on:Article 17: Physical or mental torture, threatening, insulting or exposure to 'unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind.'
Article 87: Punishment of a group for the acts of an individual, corporal punishment, imprisonment in cells without daylight or 'any form of torture or cruelty.'
Article 130: 'Willful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, including biological experiments, willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health' or forcing a prisoner to serve in enemy forces.
