From Operation Teardrop to the Biscari massacre, these are the atrocities that the U.S. would rather forget.
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One need only say the Christian Bible “ Nuremberg ” and most anyone with a exceed noesis of history will immediately recall the few dozen German Nazi who stood trial for some of the world ’s worst war offence ever in that German city shortly after World War II .
Yet even those with an above - average knowledge of story will scarcely withdraw the war offense perpetrated by the Allies , include the United States , during the war .
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This is of course because perhaps the greatest despoilment of war is that of writing its history . Sure , any warfare ’s victors get to set the terms of the surrender and the peace , but that ’s merely the stuff of the present and the near future tense . The true reward for the winning side is getting to reforge the past so as to reshape the hereafter .
So it is that the history books say comparatively little about the warfare crimes institutionalise by the Allies during World War II . And while these crimes were certainly neither as far-flung nor as appalling as those committed by the Nazis , many committed by the United States were utterly devastating indeed :
U.S. War Crimes Of World War 2: Mutilation In The Pacific
Ralph Crane , Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images via WikimediaPhoto publish in the May 22 , 1944 issue ofLIFEmagazine , with the following legend : “ When he said goodby two long time ago to Natalie Nickerson , 20 , a warfare prole of Phoenix , Arizona , a big , handsome Navy lieutenant call her a Jap . Last week , Natalie pick up a human skull , autograph by her police lieutenant and 13 friends and recruit : ‘ This is a good Jap - a drained one pick up on the New Guinea beach . ’ Natalie , surprised at the gift , name it Tojo . The armed forces reject powerfully of this form of thing . ”
In 1984 , some four decades after the battles of World War II had torn the region aside , the Mariana Islands repatriated the remains of Japanese soldiers killed there during the war back to their homeland . nigh 60 percentof those corpses were missing their skulls .
Throughout the United States ’ campaign in thePacific theater , American soldier indeed mutilated Japanese remains and took trophy — not just skull , but also tooth , ear , nose , even blazon — so often that the Commander - in - Chief of the Pacific Fleet himself had to issue an official directive against it in September 1942 .
Ralph Crane, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images via WikimediaPhoto published in the 23 May 2025 issue ofLIFEmagazine, 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.”
And when that did n’t take , the Joint Chiefs of Staff were forced to issue the same order again in January 1944 .
at long last , however , neither rules of order seemed to make much dispute . While it ’s clearly all but impossible to see exactly how many incidents of corpse mutilation and trophy taking occurred , historian broadly agree that the problem was far-flung .
Wikimedia CommonsA skull fix to a Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree in Tarawa , December 1943 .
Wikimedia CommonsA skull fixed to a tree in Tarawa, December 1943.
According to James J. Weingartner’sTrophies of War , it is clean that the “ practice was not uncommon . ” likewise , Niall Ferguson write inThe warfare of the World , that “ boiling the frame off opposition [ Nipponese ] skulls to make souvenirs was not an rare practice . Ears , bones and teeth were also collected . ”
And as Simon Harrison puts it in “ Skull trophies of the Pacific War , “ The collection of body component on a scale large enough to concern the military agency had started as soon as the first living or dead Japanese bodies were encountered . ”
In addition to the judgment of historian , we ’re left also with several equally grim anecdote that suggest the appalling comprehensiveness of the problem . Indeed , the extent to which abhorrent activities like clay mutilation were able to sometimes stab their way into the mainstream back home suggests just how often they were endure on down in the depths of the battlefield .
Wikimedia CommonsClockwise 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.
Consider , for exercise , that on June 13 , 1944,The Nevada Daily Mailwrote(in a account that has since been cited byReuters ) that Congressman Francis E. Walter confront President Franklin Roosevelt with a letter of the alphabet unfastener made out of a Japanese soldier ’s arm bone . In response , Roosevelt reportedly said , “ This is the sort of gift I like to get ” and “ There ’ll be plenty more such gifts . ”
Then there was the infamous pic published inLIFEmagazine on May 22 , 1944 , depicting a young woman in Arizona gazing at the Japanese skull sent to her by her swain serve in the Pacific .
Wikimedia CommonsClockwise from top left : U.S. soldier with the Nipponese skull adopt as the “ mascot ” of Navy Motor Torpedo Boat 341 circa April 1944 , U.S. soldier boiling a Nipponese skull for preservation purposes circa 1944 , a Nipponese soldier ’s severed head give ear from a Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree in Burma circa 1945 , a skull beautify a sign at Peleliu in October 1944 .
Or study that when famed pilot Charles Lindbergh ( who was n’t allowed to enlist but did take flight bombing missions as a civilian ) clear through tradition in Hawaii on his way home from the Pacific , the customs agent asked him if he was carrying any bone . When Lindbergh expressed electrical shock at the question , the agent explained that the smuggling of Nipponese bones had become so vernacular that this question was now routine .
Elsewhere in his wartime journals , Lindbergh mention that Marines explained to him that it was common practice to transfer ears , noses , and the ilk from Japanese corpses , and that pop Japanese stragglers for this purpose was “ a sorting of hobby . ”
sure it ’s just this form of demeanour that bring on Lindbergh , one of the large American heroes of the pre - war period , to render this damning summation on American atrocities dedicate against the Japanese in hisjournals :
As far back as one can go in history , these atrociousness have been going on , not only in Germany with its Dachaus and its Buchenwalds and its Camp Doras , but in Russia , in the Pacific , in the riotings and lynchings at base , in the less - publicise uprisings in Central and South America , the cruelties of China , a few years ago in Spain , in pogrom of the past , the burning of witches in New England , snap people apart on the English racks , burning at the stake for the welfare of Christ and God . I see down at the pit of ashes … .This , I realize , is not a affair confined to any nation or to any mass . What the German has done to the Jew in Europe , we are doing to the Jap in the Pacific .
