Themes
Twiss POW Transcripts
Admiral Sir Frank Twiss describing brutality towards prisoners within the Ofuna prisoner of war camp
Transcript: "I think I should say that it was really a punishment camp. We were not prisoners of war and the treatment there was at times extremely rough. It was a place called Ofuna and became quite notorious. The guards were a very rough lot and particularly on Saturday nights they used to get very drunk and line up all the prisoners and find some excuse for objecting to one or more of them and beat them up. It was extraordinary, alarming and unpleasant to be fallen in two ranks, or something, on a sort of half square and the guards would find fault with somebody or ask them some question and you didn’t answer it and then beat you over the head with their bamboo sticks and things as a form of Saturday entertainment. I suppose perhaps the most difficult thing was that if one of your friends was being beaten up a couple of paces from you, it was extraordinarily difficult not to try and interfere, not to try and go to his rescue in which case you’d be battered to the earth, so to speak, as well as him. It was clearly stupid to interfere and if you were the one being beaten up, so to speak, you were that Saturday’s offering."
