Skulls, Ears, Noses, And Other Morbid “Trophies” Americans Took From Dead
Japanese In WWII
After Pearl Harbor, Americans took trophy skulls
as they viewed the Japanese as inherently evil and
less than human.
By Katie
Serena | Checked By John
Kuroski
All That's Interesting
Clockwise from top left: U.S. soldier with the
Japanese skull adopted as the “mascot” of Navy
Motor Torpedo Boat 341 circa April 1944,
U.S. soldiers boiling a Japanese skull for
preservation purposes circa 1944, a Japanese
soldier’s severed head hangs from a tree in
Burma
circa 1945, a skull adorns a sign at Peleliu in
October 1944.
Ralph Crane, Time & Life
Pictures/Getty Images via Wikimedia
Years after the end of World War II, the bodies of Japanese
soldiers who had died in the Mariana Islands were repatriated to
their homeland for proper burial.
More than half of the bodies returned home were returned
without their heads.
The heads, it turned out, had been taken by the American
soldiers responsible for the deaths, and kept as
gruesome war trophies.
When soldiers came across the bodies or killed the soldiers
themselves, the heads were likely the first thing to be taken as
a war trophy. The head would then be boiled, leaving just the
clean skull behind to be used as the soldiers pleased.
Some of the heads were mailed home to loved ones, and some
were added to signage or used as macabre decorations throughout
the soldier’s camps.
Eventually, the taking of the trophy skulls got so out of
hand that the U.S. Military had to officially prohibit it. They
ruled that taking the trophy skulls was a violation of the
Geneva Convention for the treatment of the sick and wounded, the
precursor to the 1949 Geneva Convention. However, the ruling
hardly stopped the practice from taking place, and it continued
for almost the entire duration of the war.
Photo published in the May 22, 1944 issue of LIFE magazine,
with the following
caption: “When he said goodby two years ago to Natalie
Nickerson, 20, a war worker
of Phoenix, Arizona, a big, handsome Navy lieutenant
promised her a Jap. Last week,
Natalie received a human skull, autographed by her
lieutenant and 13 friends and
inscribed: ‘This is a good Jap-a dead one picked up on the
New Guinea beach.’
Natalie, surprised at the gift, named it Tojo. The armed
forces disapprove strongly
of this sort of thing.”
Ralph Crane, Time & Life
Pictures/Getty Images via Wikimedia
The taking of the trophies was in large part due to the
widespread idea in America that the Japanese were less than
human. The American media referred to them as the “yellow men,”
or “yellow vermin,” constantly portraying them as having less
intelligence than Americans. Especially after Pearl Harbor, the
anti-Japanese sentiment became more pronounced.
Initially, the United States didn’t even plan to enter the
war, standing idly by while the rest of the world fought. The
attack on Pearl Harbor changed that, putting United States land
directly in the middle of the battlegrounds.
After Pearl Harbor, the American sentiment towards the
Japanese was that they were inherently evil.
A skull fixed to a tree in Tarawa, December 1943.
Wikimedia Commons
This implied hatred of the Japanese drove soldiers who happened
upon dead soldiers, or who killed Japanese soldiers in battle,
to see them as less than human, and thus, dismember them to take
the pieces home as trophies.
The most common trophy was a skull, as most soldiers found
that to be the most exciting piece to take. However other body
parts were not ruled out. Teeth, arm bones, ears, and noses were
often taken as well, and modified to be turned into other items,
such as jewelry or ashtrays.
At the height of the war, U.S. Representative Francis E.
Walter even gifted President Franklin Delano Roosevelt a letter
opener made from a Japanese soldier’s arm bone. The gift sparked
outrage in Japan and a wave of anti-American sentiments.
Roosevelt later ordered that the bone be repatriated and given a
proper burial.
After the war had ended, the trophies were, for the most
part, repatriated to their original homelands. Even 40 years
after the war had ended, efforts were still taking place to
return the trophies to their intended resting places.
[End of article]
Bonus article from the U.S. military's Stars and Stripes
website:
WWII "souvenir" turned over to Okinawa officials
Addendum:
More photos of Japanese
"souvenir" skulls and U.S. desecration of fallen enemies
U.S./Allied mistreatment of Japanese POW:s
U.S. anti-Japanese racist WW II
posters
Jap Hunting Licence - "On
Yellow Belly Japs"
Image: From the Collection of The National
WWII Museum, 2009.236.033.
"Kill japs, kill japs, KILL MORE JAPS!
... kill the yellow bastards"
Sign for incoming ships at the U.S. Navy base on Tulagi, South
Pacific, July 1943:
The U.S. sign reads as follows:
Admiral
HALSEY says
"Kill japs, kill japs,
KILL MORE JAPS"!
You will help kill the yellow bastards
if YOU DO YOUR JOB WELL
Leatherneck,
official monthly magazine of the U.S. Marine Corps, March 1945:
"Louseous Japanicas"
Fortune
magazine, September 1942
(Click to enlarge)
LIFE magazine, December
22, 1941 - How to spot a Japanese!
Endnote by Radio Islam
When you now - for probably the first time - see this,
upsetting, information, ask yourself;
Weren't the Jews who run Hollywood and who already during WW II had the U.S.
Government "by the balls", involved in this racist propaganda
and in the subsequent cover-up of these horrific crimes, through the
hundreds of war movies and TV-series on WW II that they have
saturated the media with?
Note that the All That's Interesting article in the
top of this page is from 2017, and we know that
when we published our article, "U.S.
Atrocities - A Historical Review" just after the U.S. 2001
Afghanistan invasion, the U.S. WW II war trophy subject was non-existant on the
web and as common knowledge.
Now there is even a Wikipedia page dedicated to "American mutilation of Japanese war dead"!
Who decides when these crimes are to be "common knowledge"
and when not?
Also on the story of German
atrocities, real and fake. The Germans are supposed to have documented
everything they do. Isn't it strange that the Germans, whose
"fanatic" crack SS-troops even wore the skull-and-bones
symbol as their insignia, are not caught on pics systematically collecting
human, defleshed, heads?
Who is the real
barbarian in this story and why the cover-up - and who
partook in this cover-up?
And at the end, the question you should always ask youself;
Cui bono?
