Ex-POWs Plan to Help Gulf Captives : Veterans: It is a mistake to stay quiet about experiences in captivity, they say. Former prisoners have formed a 33,000-member support group.

Leonard Rose had been married for 10 years when he finally told his wife he had been a prisoner of war during World War II.

“It was something you just didn’t talk about,” said Rose, 66, who was an Air Force staff sergeant and a gunner on a B-24.

“We were told when we went home, don’t talk about it. Why? I don’t know. Maybe they didn’t want the American people to know what went on over there.”

Rose found that when he did talk about the year he spent in a German prisoner of war camp, Stalag Luft 4 in Poland, he didn’t like the reactions he got.

“They’d either say, ‘Boy, that’s hard to believe,’ or they’d feel sorry for you,” he said. “I didn’t want anybody feeling sorry for me, and if they didn’t believe me, I figured I’d just forget about it.”

Rose said he expects prisoners of war in the Persian Gulf to face similar problems, but he hopes POWs who return from Iraq will talk about their experiences with members of American Ex-Prisoners of War, a nationwide support group to which he belongs.

Many former POWs have nightmares and flashbacks, said Joyce Mullins, a psychiatric social worker at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Huntington, W.Va.

“A lot of these guys have had to suppress their feelings for so long. It’s difficult to talk about it with their families. You want to protect those close to you,” said Mullins, who works with support groups for POWs from World War II and Korea.

She said many former prisoners “faced threats of being killed at any time.” Some underwent psychological as well as physical torture.

Rose started talking about 15 years ago, when he joined the American Ex-Prisoners of War, which has about 33,000 members. Now on the group’s 16-member Board of Directors, Rose is an outspoken advocate for POWs.

Rose worked with Harry Reuss for 20 years at the Ford Motor Co. plant in Indianapolis before they learned they had been at the same POW camp. Rose saw a picture of a B-24 on Reuss’ desk, and they started talking about the war.

“There were 10,000 prisoners there,” Rose said. “It was like a small city.”

Rose was on his 28th mission when his bomber was damaged over a refinery in Czechoslovakia on Aug. 29, 1944. The 10-man crew bailed out over Yugoslavia, was captured and taken to Budapest and from there by train to the POW camp.

Reuss, 70, also was a staff sergeant and manned a top turret gun on his B-24. His plane was shot down on Sept. 10, 1944, on only his third mission, a bombing run over a tank factory in Vienna.

The men were liberated in May, 1945, shortly before V-E Day.

Television scenes of allied pilots captured in the Persian Gulf war brought back many memories for Rose and Reuss. Both said they were beaten by their captors for information. Neither was coerced into any propaganda efforts, however, unlike many U.S. prisoners in later wars.

“They were going after the electronics on the plane,” Reuss recalled. “We were so green, we didn’t know anything about them. If I did, I probably would have told them.

“That name, rank and serial number stuff is nice for the movies. . . . But you say what you need to say to eliminate beatings or whatever.

“Once you bail out, your job from then on is survival. And that’s pretty hard to do.”

“It brings back bad memories. I’m not watching anymore,” said Joseph A. Mays, a resident of Huntington, W.Va., and a POW during World War II.

Mays said he weighed only 87 pounds when liberated. A piece of black bread and potato peel soup had been his daily diet.

An Army private first class when he was captured Dec. 16, 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge, Mays said he still has nightmares of being in captivity.

O. K. (Karl) Shook, also of Huntington, was shot down on his 50th bombing raid during World War II.

“I gave them my name, rank and serial number. That was it,” he said. “I got the daylights knocked out of me a time or two. That was after I cussed them. I didn’t think they knew English.”

It wasn’t until 1981 that Congress passed the first major legislation aimed exclusively at former POWs, guaranteeing them physical and psychological help when they return to everyday life.

Rose said many men never made that adjustment.