Imagine warriors marching into battle

wearing necklaces of human ears. Teeth

being pulled out of fresh corpses as

souvenirs.

Men boiling the flesh off the seed heads

of their enemies so they can keep the

skulls as trophies. You're probably

imagining a clan of ancient barbarians

fighting Rome or an obscure tribe deep

in the Amazon jungle. In fact, this was

the behavior of the United States of

America in the Second World War.

Throughout the Pacific campaign against

the Japanese, American troops developed

a reputation for gruesome trophy

hunting. Countless bodies were

desecrated by American soldiers who took

pieces of their fallen enemies home as

war trophies. Every soldier knew what

happened, and almost everyone back in

America knew, too. But the truth was

quickly buried after the war ended. The

fact that American troops dismembered

corpses didn't fit into the neat

narrative of heroic America, marching

off to save the world from the evil

Japanese Empire. Today, on a day in

history, we'll show you the gruesome

truth about American trophy hunting in

the Second World War. Why did they do

it? How? Keep watching to find out.

Taking trophies in war is nothing new.

Archaeology has found evidence for it

stretching back at least 15,000 years.

Trophy hunting for animals is even older

and has probably been with humanity for

as long as we've been capable of complex

thought. Human societies continue to

practice long after settling into

complex civilizations in every corner of

the world. For example, the ancient

Egyptians would cut off the hands or

fallaces of their enemies as trophies

and help count casualties, while the

Aztecs constructed entire walls from the

skulls of their defeated enemies. Such

practices were well known in America,

too, for centuries before the Second

World War. The collecting of human

scalps, for example, was a common part

of Native American warfare that white

Americans also adopted with bounties

being paid out for Native American

scalps well into the late 19th century.

War trophies act as symbols of the

victorious warrior's skill and serve as

a final humiliation to the defeated

enemy. This psychological appeal is

powerful and has been felt by people

across cultures and across time. But by

1941, the United States had surely moved

past such behavior. Modernity had

radically changed human morality. And

things like slavery or trophy hunting

were not unthinkable evils that society

would never allow, even if past

societies had accepted them without

question. Human war trophies were not a

widespread issue in the First World War,

for example. So why would it be any

different in the Second? Well, there

were a few reasons why the Americans

were so brutal to the Japanese. The

first is obvious. The Japanese were also

horrible to their enemies. The Imperial

Japanese Army was legendary for its

cruelty towards civilians and prisoners

alike, be they American, Chinese, or

anyone else. The list of Japanese war

crimes is excruciatingly long. Wholesale

massacres like at Nank King, the mass

sexual abuse of comfort women, the

monstrous experiments of unit 731, or

the horrific list of torture techniques

including bamboo torture and

waterboarding. You can check out our

other videos of Japanese war crimes for

more. But it's undeniable that Imperial

Japan was capable of terrible things.

These tactics weren't just brutal, but

were seen by the Americans as

underhanded and treacherous. The

Americans expected a certain level of

morality in the war, such as fair

treatment of prisoners and respect for

surrender, something that the Germans

and Italians broadly followed in the

European theater, at least for the

Western Allies. But the Japanese

blatantly ignored these unwritten rules.

They tortured and killed anyone who

surrendered and would often abuse these

expectations for their own gain.

Japanese troops were known to pretend to

surrender only to ambush the Americans

when they got close or play dead before

springing up to attack the Americans.

Nor did the Japanese care for

battlefield rules of respecting the

dead. Hiding explosives on the corpses

of fallen Americans or displaying their

mutilated remains to frighten their

comrades was a common practice. Then

there was the fact that Japan began the

war with an undeclared surprise attack

on Pearl Harbor that killed thousands of

sailors, soldiers, and civilians without

warning. Many American soldiers decided

that if Japan wasn't going to play by

any rules, they shouldn't. He

desecrating bodies was outlawed by the

1929 Geneva Convention. After every

engagement, the belligerent who remains

in possession of the field shall take

measures to search for wounded and the

dead and to protect them from robbery

and ill treatment. Unfortunately, the

Geneva Convention was often one of the

first casualties in any wartime

encounter. We also can't avoid talking

about racism. The mostly white American

forces saw the Japanese as racially

inferior and not entitled to the same

respect as the Germans or Italians

America were fighting in Europe.

Japanese Americans were forced into

concentration camps during the war and

wartime propaganda was full of racist

caricatures and stereotypes about them.

American propaganda referred to the

Japanese as rats, monkeys, insects, and

other dehumanizing terms with British

reports on the American war attitude

concluding that Americans saw the

Japanese as a nameless mass of vermin.

Racist stereotypes of misshapen men with

yellow skin and buck teeth became

ingrained in the minds of US soldiers.

As one Marine veteran said, "We had been

fed tales of these yellow thugs,

subhumans with teeth that resembled

fangs. If a 100,000 Japs were killed, so

much the better." This idea of the

Japanese as animals was a dominant theme

in US propaganda. In some ways, US

soldiers were taught to see the Pacific

theater not as a war against equals, but

to hunt against beasts. Around 25% of

American men hunted for sports at the

time, and it was an activity that could

be found among rich and poor men and in

almost every corner of the country. So,

the analogy had mass appeal. The US

Marines even put out recruitment ads

offering a Japanese hunting license and

declaring open season on the enemy with

free ammo and equipment by joining the

Marines. Hunters rarely take prisoners,

and the same was true of US soldiers

fighting the Japanese. The Japanese

rarely surrendered, and the Americans

rarely accepted it when they did.

According to one source, there were only

ever 5,424

Japanese PS held by the Allies

throughout the entire war, and most of

those were taken in 1945.

It was also in a hunter's nature to take

trophies. Instead of antlers or pelts,

American soldiers would have to make do

with other gruesome souvenirs.

Ears were probably the most common type

of trophy. Easy to remove and easy to

keep. It was so common that almost every

unit had at least one man with a

collection of ears he built up over his

deployment. They were usually pickled in

brine to prevent them rotting. Some

would arrange them onto necklaces and

wear them into battle. Ear necklaces

weren't technically allowed, but no one

cared about enforcing those rules for

men on the front lines. Ear trophies

were accepted as inevitable by most

soldiers. As one account in a Marine

magazine from mid1943 said, "The other

night Stanley emptied his pockets of

souvenirs.

11 years from dead Japs. It was not

disgusting as it would be from the

civilian point of view. None of us could

get emotional over it." The American

public also learned about this grizzly

habit. A January 1943 issue of Yank, a

popular magazine aimed at soldiers,

poked fun at the practice in a cartoon

showing two happy parents receiving a

necklace of severed ears from their son

fighting in Asia. Teeth were another

easy trophy. They were even easier to

extract and keep hidden than ears, so

long as you didn't mind prying them out

of a corpse's gums. Of course, taking

the teeth while the victim was still

alive could double as a torture method,

too. One Marine veteran who served

during the invasion of Pelleu in summer

1944

vividly recalled a fellow Marine cutting

open the cheeks of a still living

Japanese soldier and holding the man's

mouth open as he pulled out his golden

tooth fillings.

Trophy hunting became a game for the

soldiers. One officer recorded that his

men kept a communal sack of teeth with

gold fillings during the Marshall

Islands campaign. The men in the unit

would add to it over the course of the

campaign, turning it into a grim record

of their kills. Bones were less

convenient. But when the opportunity

presented itself, the Americans could

treat themselves to pieces of the

skeleton. One sailor recalled how his

crew mates took various pieces from the

bodies of Japanese pilots after a wave

of kamicaz attacks in November 1944.

One of the Marines cut the ring off the

finger of one of the dead pilots. One of

the fellows had a [ __ ] scalp. It looked

just like you skinned an animal. One of

the men on our gun mount got a [ __ ] rib

and cleaned it up. He said his sister

wants part of a [ __ ] body. One fellow

from Texas had a knee-bone and he was

going to preserve it in alcohol from the

sick bay. Gifting human trophies during

the war wasn't even limited to soldiers.

In June 1944, Pennsylvania Congressman

Francis Water sent President Roosevelt a

letter opener fashioned from the bone of

a dead Japanese soldier sent to him by a

constituent. Roosevelt declined the gift

and asked Water to give the bone a

proper burial instead. The most

difficult and controversial trophies

were skulls. These grizzly prizes were

usually taken from long deadad Japanese

soldiers whose bodies had already begun

to decompose, but reports of freshly

severed heads are also known. Skulls

weren't as convenient as teeth or ears.

They had to be skinned and cleaned, a

process which even frontline soldiers

would find too gruesome. Still, soldiers

had their ways of doing it. In 1944, one

officer remembered a soldier who had

taken a severed head from a fallen

enemy. He was trying to get the ants to

clean the flesh off the skull. The

officer wrote in his journal, but the

odor got so bad we had to take it away

from him. This soldier's method was

unusual. The usual process was to boil

the skull so the flesh simply melted

off. Remaining strips of flesh would be

scrubbed away later. Sailors would tie a

line through some of the skulls and drag

them behind the boat for a while,

letting the salt water and fish clean

away the mess until a clean skull was

all that remained. These skulls made for

impressive and frightening souvenirs,

but they weren't as convenient to carry

as necklaces of ears or teeth. Instead,

skull trophies might be pitched on a

stick outside camp or used as a grim

hood ornament for a jeep or tank. Some

skulls were kept as personal souvenirs

and went home with their soldiers or was

sent home as gifts to the family. Gifts

of human remains were common enough that

soldiers were quite casual about it. "Do

you want a [ __ ] skull?" one soldier

stationed in India wrote back to his

family in 1944.

Now that I'm better acquainted with

mailing ways, I'll try to ship home

something better than I already have.

During the Guadal Canal campaign, a

minor scandal occurred in military

circles when photographs claiming to

document the process of cooking and

scraping the heads of dead Japanese

soldiers were circulated among soldiers.

The grizzly photos made it all the way

up the chain of command. The Joint

Chiefs of Staff radio General Douglas

MacArthur, commander of the entire

Pacific theater, asking him to crack

down on trophy hunting. But nothing came

of it. A directive issued in January

1944, ordering US commanders to crack

down on human trophies did nothing to

stop the practice. Skulls and other

remains continued to be taken, and

troops stationed at Guadal Canal

afterwards were known to sell Japanese

skulls to curious merchant semen who

stopped by. An even larger controversy

erupted in May 1944

when Life magazine published a photo of

an American woman smiling at the skull

of a Japanese soldier sent to her by her

boyfriend overseas.

This is a good [ __ ] A dead one picked up

on the New Guinea beach, the commentary

read. It was one thing for soldiers to

talk about the desecration of bodies,

but for it to appear in the pages of a

major civilian magazine was quite

another. The photo triggered a wave of

angry letters from the public who called

it cruel and insensitive. Surely if such

a photo had been published of a Japanese

girl smiling at an American skull, the

Americans would have been outraged and

held it up as proof of Japanese

depravity.

Several religious organizations also

condemned it as uncchristian.

In response to the life article

controversy, the army denounced trophy

taking as repugnant to the sensibilities

of all civilized peoples and ordered

commanders to do everything in their

power to stamp out the practice.

Military authorities warn that soldiers

caught desecrating the dead might be

charged with a crime. The more practical

concern that public displays of these

mutilated remains might encourage

retaliation from the Japanese was

probably a more persuasive argument to

the average soldier. Indeed, the

Japanese media and public leapt on the

controversy. In August 1944, a

government spokesman harshly condemned

the mutilation of Japanese bodies. They

compared it to the actions of African

head hunters and said it proved that

America was not the defender of human

decency, honor, and righteousness that

it claimed to be. When copies of the

Life magazine skull photo reached Japan,

every major newspaper covered it with

righteous indignation.

There was obviously a lot of hypocrisy

here. The Japanese were more offended at

the treatment of their dead than they

ever were about their own treatment of

millions of living people across East

Asia and the Pacific. The controversy

passed in a few weeks. However, the

Japanese media moved on and the

investigation that US authorities opened

into the life article skull decided that

the officer responsible be sent a

harshly worded letter, but nothing more.

The largest war in history was still

raging, and there were bigger problems

to solve than the mistreatment of a few

enemy corpses. Trophy hunting continued

uninterrupted for the rest of the war.

During the bloody Eoima campaign in

early 1945,

so many Japanese skulls were taken as

trophies that a Buddhist priest from the

island issued a formal request in 1985,

appealing to veterans to return them to

the island where, in the name of

humanity and the honor of warriors, they

belong and can rest in peace.

Skulls were still being taken by the

hundreds during the final battle at

Okinawa.

After the war, this darker aspect of the

conflict was quickly buried. Had the US

lost the war, American trophy hunting

and the mass mutilation of dead soldiers

would probably be as infamous as the

crimes of the Japanese are today. But

history is written by the victor. And

there was no way that the United States

would have welcomed home its victorious

soldiers with investigations or charges

for mistreating their enemies. How could

one even think to punish a soldier for

slicing the ear off a dead enemy when

the US government had signed off on the

annihilation of entire cities full of

innocents?

The truth about American trophy hunting

was forgotten by most people over the

years. Aside from the veterans and their

families who might ask about the strange

skull on the family mantelpiece, most

people forgot it ever happened.

Awareness resurfaced briefly in Vietnam,

where American troops engaged in similar

trophy hunting, but soon faded again

after that war. It was as the World War

II veterans began to die off that

attention returned to the trophies. Some

of the veterans came to regret their

treatment of the bodies in their final

years and voluntarily returned to Japan.

Other trophies were returned by family

members after the veteran's death. A few

have turned up in odd places. For

example, a drought in Illinois in

January 2000 led to the discovery of an

unidentified skull at the bottom of Lake

Springfield. Police were called and

after forensic investigation, it was

found to have belonged to a Japanese

soldier. It had been taken by a marine

during the Battle of Okinawa. He'd

passed it down to his grandson, who

decorated it for his bedroom before

deciding it was too creepy. Not knowing

what else to do with the human skull, he

tossed it into the lake, but came

forward after it was rediscovered. The

skull was returned to Okinawa in 2003.

A bit more attention in recent decades

and have made interesting discoveries.

Perhaps the most obvious is the racial

element of these trophy skulls. Out of

all the known trophy skulls from the

Second World War in the United States,

every single one has been of Japanese

soldiers and never German or Italian.

Most US soldiers never took human body

parts as trophies. Bullets, patches,

helmets, and other trinkets were by far

the more common trophies of war.

However, many thousands of Japanese

soldiers had their remains taken by

their victorious enemy, and many of them

are still lost, sitting in a veteran's

attic or hidden among family heirlooms

long after the person who took it has

passed away. We can only hope that some

of these lost remains are finally given

the respect that all dead people deserve

and provide some closure to this dark,

forgotten chapter in the history of the

Second World War.