During World War II, some members of the United States military mutilated dead and injured (hors de combat) Japanese service personnel in the Pacific theater. The mutilation of Japanese service personnel included the taking of body parts as "war souvenirs" and "war trophies". Teeth and skulls were the most commonly taken "trophies", although other body parts were also collected.
The phenomenon of "trophy-taking" was widespread enough that discussion of it featured prominently in magazines and newspapers. Franklin Roosevelt himself was reportedly given a gift of a letter-opener made of a Japanese soldier's arm by U.S. Representative Francis E. Walter in 1944, which Roosevelt later ordered to be returned, calling for its proper burial. The news was also widely reported to the Japanese public, where the Americans were portrayed as "deranged, primitive, racist and inhuman". This, compounded by a previous Life magazine picture of a young woman with a skull trophy, was reprinted in the Japanese media and presented as a symbol of American barbarism, causing national shock and outrage.
The behavior was officially prohibited by the U.S. military, which issued additional guidance as early as 1942 condemning it specifically. Nonetheless, the behavior was infrequently prosecuted and it continued throughout the war in the Pacific theater, and has resulted in continued discoveries of "trophy skulls" of Japanese combatants in American possession, as well as American and Japanese efforts to repatriate the remains of the Japanese dead.
Trophy-taking A number of firsthand accounts, including those of American servicemen, attest to the taking of body parts as "trophies" from the corpses of Imperial Japanese troops in the Pacific Theater during World War II. Historians have attributed the phenomenon to a campaign of dehumanization of the Japanese in the U.S. media, to various racist tropes latent in American society, to the depravity of warfare under desperate circumstances, to the inhuman cruelty of the Imperial Japanese forces, lust for revenge, rage, outrage, or any combination of those factors. The taking of so-called "trophies" was widespread enough that, by September 1942, the Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet ordered that "No part of the enemy's body may be used as a souvenir", and any American servicemen violating that principle would face "stern disciplinary action".Paul Fussell. Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War. 1990, page 117
Trophy skulls are the most notorious of the souvenirs. Teeth, ears and other such body parts were also taken and were occasionally modified, such as by writing on them or fashioning them into utilities or other artifacts.
Eugene Sledge, a corporal in the 1st Marine Division, described several instances of fellow Marines extracting gold-plated teeth from the Japanese in his memoir With the Old Breed, later adapted into the HBO miniseries The Pacific. This includes one instance, also adapted in the show's seventh episode, of a Marine cutting the teeth out of a Japanese soldier who was still alive:
But the Japanese wasn't dead. He had been wounded severely in the back and couldn't move his arms; otherwise he would have resisted to his last breath. The Japanese's mouth glowed with huge gold-crowned teeth, and his captor wanted them. He put the point of his kabar on the base of a tooth and hit the handle with the palm of his hand. Because the Japanese was kicking his feet and thrashing about, the knife point glanced off the tooth and sank deeply into the victim's mouth. The Marine cursed him and with a slash cut his cheeks open to each ear. He put his foot on the sufferer's lower jaw and tried again. Blood poured out of the soldier's mouth. He made a gurgling noise and thrashed wildly. I shouted, "Put the man out of his misery." All I got for an answer was a cussing out. Another Marine ran up, put a bullet in the enemy soldier's brain, and ended his agony. The scavenger grumbled and continued extracting his prizes undisturbed.(With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa. p. 120
U.S. Marine Corps veteran Donald Fall attributed the mutilation of enemy corpses to hatred and desire for vengeance: On the second day of Guadalcanal we captured a big Jap bivouac with all kinds of beer and supplies ... But they also found a lot of pictures of Marines that had been cut up and mutilated on Wake Island. The next thing you know there are Marines walking around with Jap ears stuck on their belts with safety pins. They issued an order reminding Marines that mutilation was a court-martial offense ... You get into a nasty frame of mind in combat. You see what's been done to you. You'd find a dead Marine that the Japs had booby-trapped. We found dead Japs that were booby-trapped. And they mutilated the dead. We began to get down to their level.
Another example of mutilation was related by Ore Marion, a U.S. marine who suggested that soldiers became "like animals" under harsh conditions: We learned about savagery from the Japanese ... But those sixteen-to-nineteen-year old kids we had on the Canal were fast learners ... At daybreak, a couple of our kids, bearded, dirty, skinny from hunger, slightly wounded by bayonets, clothes worn and torn, wack off three Jap heads and jam them on poles facing the "Jap side" of the river ... The colonel sees Jap heads on the poles and says, "Jesus men, what are you doing? You're acting like animals." A dirty, stinking young kid says, "That's right Colonel, we are animals. We live like animals, we eat and are treated like animals—what the fuck do you expect?"
On February 1, 1943, Life magazine published a photograph taken by Ralph Morse during the Guadalcanal campaign showing a severed Japanese head that U.S. marines had propped up below the gun turret of a knocked out Japanese tank. Life received letters of protest from people "in disbelief that American soldiers were capable of such brutality toward the enemy." The editors responded that "war is unpleasant, cruel, and inhuman. And it is more dangerous to forget this than to be shocked by reminders." However, the image of the severed head generated less than half the number of protest letters that an image of a mistreated cat in the very same issue received, suggesting that American backlash was not significant."War, Journalism, and Propaganda" Years later, Morse recounted that when his platoon came upon the tank with the head mounted on it, the sergeant warned his men not to approach it as it might have been set up by the Japanese in order to lure them in, and he feared that the Japanese might have a mortar tube zeroed in on it. Morse recalled the scene in this way: "'Everybody stay away from there,' the sergeant says, then he turns to me. 'You,' he says, 'go take your picture if you have to, then get out, quick.' So I went over, got my pictures and ran like hell back to where the patrol had stopped."
In October 1943, the U.S. High Command expressed alarm over recent newspaper articles covering American mutilation of the dead. Examples cited included one where a soldier made a string of beads using Japanese teeth and another about a soldier with pictures showing the steps in preparing a skull, involving cooking and scraping of the Japanese heads.
In 1944, the American poet Winfield Townley Scott was working as a reporter in Rhode Island when a sailor displayed his skull trophy in the newspaper office. This led to the poem The U.S. sailor with the Japanese skull, which described one method for preparation of skulls for trophy-taking, in which the head is skinned, towed in a net behind a ship to clean and polish it, and in the end scrubbed with caustic soda.
Charles Lindbergh refers in his diary entries to several instances of mutilations. In the entry for August 14, 1944, he notes a conversation he had with a Marine officer who claimed that he had seen many Japanese corpses with an ear or nose cut off. In the case of the skulls, however, most were not collected from freshly killed Japanese people; most came from already partially or fully decayed and skeletonised bodies. Lindbergh also noted in his diary his experiences from an air base in New Guinea, where, according to him, the troops killed the remaining Japanese stragglers "as a sort of hobby" and often used their leg-bones to carve utilities.
Moro Muslim guerrillas on Mindanao fought against Japan in World War II. The Moro Muslim Datu Pino sliced the ears off Japanese soldiers and cashed them in with the American guerrilla leader Colonel Fertig at the exchange rate of a pair of ears for one bullet and 20 centavos ().
Extent of practice According to Weingartner it is not possible to determine the percentage of U.S. troops that collected Japanese body parts, "but it is clear that the practice was not uncommon". According to Harrison only a minority of U.S. troops collected Japanese body parts as trophies, but "their behaviour reflected attitudes which were very widely shared". According to Dower, most U.S. combatants in the Pacific did not engage in "souvenir hunting" for body parts. The majority had some knowledge that these practices were occurring, however, and "accepted them as inevitable under the circumstances". The incidents of soldiers collecting Japanese body parts occurred on "a scale large enough to concern the Allied military authorities throughout the conflict and was widely reported and commented on in the American and Japanese wartime press". The degree of acceptance of the practice varied between units. Taking of teeth was generally accepted by enlisted men and also by officers, while acceptance for taking other body parts varied greatly. In the experience of one serviceman turned author, Weinstein, ownership of skulls and teeth were widespread practices.
There is some disagreement between historians over what the more common forms of "trophy hunting" undertaken by U.S. personnel were. John W. Dower states that ears were the most common form of trophy that was taken, and skulls and bones were less commonly collected. In particular he states that "skulls were not popular trophies" as they were difficult to carry and the process for removing the flesh was offensive. This view is supported by Simon Harrison. In contrast, Niall Ferguson states that "boiling the flesh off enemy [Japanese] skulls to make souvenirs was not an uncommon practice. Ears, bones and teeth were also collected". When interviewed by researchers, former servicemen recounted that the practice of taking gold teeth from the dead—and sometimes also from the living—was widespread.Film exposes Allies' Pacific war atrocities Horrific footage shot during battle with Japanese shows execution of wounded and bayoneting of corpses. Jason Burke The Observer, Sunday June 3, 2001
The collection of Japanese body parts began quite early in the campaign, prompting a September 1942 order for disciplinary action against such souvenir taking. Harrison concludes that since the Battle of Guadalcanal was the first real opportunity to take such items, "Clearly, the collection of body parts on a scale large enough to concern the military authorities had started as soon as the first living or dead Japanese bodies were encountered." When Charles Lindbergh passed through customs at Hawaii in 1944, one of the customs declarations he was asked to make was whether or not he was carrying any bones. He was told after expressing some shock at the question that it had become a routine point, because of the large number of souvenir bones discovered in customs, also including "green" (uncured) skulls.
In 1984, Japanese soldiers' remains were repatriated from the Mariana Islands. Roughly 60 percent were missing their skulls. Likewise it has been reported that many of the Japanese remains on Iwo Jima are missing their skulls.
It is possible that the souvenir collection of remains continued into the immediate post-war period.
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