Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found

by Frances Larson

  If the Allied troops had become ‘savages’, in their eyes the Japanese were hardly human at all. The Japanese were thoroughly dehumanized in the minds of the American public and the armed forces. They were portrayed in propaganda and the press as warriors with irrational suicidal tendencies and an affinity for jungle warfare that was incomprehensible to the Americans. They were referred to as ‘mad dogs’, ‘yellow vermin’, ‘living snarling rats’, monkeys, insects and reptiles.

  New recruits heard stories about the enemy: ‘They hide up in the trees like wildcats. Sometimes when they attack, they scream like a bunch of terrified cattle in a slaughter house. Other times they come on so quiet they wouldn’t scare a snake.’ One marine remarked, ‘I wish we were fighting against Germans. They are human beings, like us … But the Japs are like animals … They take to the jungle as if they had been bred there, and like some beasts you never see them until they are dead.’ It was popularly believed that the Japanese could see in the dark, and survive on a diet of only grubs and roots. And one War Department pamphlet, adapted from a training film and entitled The Jap Soldier, informed readers that marines in the Solomon Islands believed they could detect the presence of the enemy from their odour, which they described as the ‘gamey smell of animals’.

  If the Japanese were animals, some Americans saw themselves as stalking prey. In some parts of the United States, official-looking ‘hunting licenses’ were distributed to young men to encourage them to enlist. ‘Open Season. No Limit. Japanese Hunting License. Free Ammunition and Equipment! With Pay. Join the United States Marines!’ Just like big-game hunters, some of them came home with trophies to prove their prowess.

  There is usually a strong racial element at work when warriors take trophy heads in modern warfare. British and German troops brought back heads from South and East Africa during the wars of the nineteenth century, but white Europeans rarely collected the heads of other white Europeans. All the World War II trophy skulls so far recorded by forensic scientists in America are Japanese, and there is no record of trophy heads taken in the European theatre. Racism is not the only reason soldiers take enemy heads – after all, men are trained to behave murderously in battle and all opponents are dehumanized to a certain extent – but it is a common factor. Trophy-taking increased in the twentieth-century wars in Vietnam, Korea and the Pacific, partly because of the terrain and terms of engagement, but also because of the intense racial prejudices that informed these conflicts. In these wars, soldiers often equated their job to hunting animals in the jungle.

  The anthropologist Simon Harrison has traced the history of trophy-taking in colonial warfare in Africa. He tells how a Belgian officer, fighting for King Leopold in the Congo in 1891, came back to camp carrying the head of a local king, Msiri, and exclaimed, ‘I have killed a tiger! Vive le roi!’ Similarly, when Bambata, a chief leading the last Zulu revolt against the British, was killed in 1906, his head was removed and placed in a tent under armed guard where it could be shown to his followers in an attempt to force their surrender. Although official reports stated that Bambata’s head and body were later buried together, in 1925 a photograph in a South African armed forces magazine showed a human skull mounted on a plaque, in the style of a hunting trophy, with the caption, ‘The bottom photograph shows the actual skull of the rebel leader, Chief Bambata, who was slain at the Mome Gorge, and decapitated for identification purposes.’

  Harrison, who has undertaken an exhaustive survey of the subject, argues that trophy-taking tends to take place when men’s virility and power is expressed through hunting metaphors. For example, listing successful ‘kills’, and even the notion of ‘body counts’, a concept the US Army used in Vietnam to prove that they were winning the war, suggest a culture reminiscent of stalking prey. One US reconnaissance platoon in Vietnam in 1969 kept a skull on top of its radio: its forehead had been covered in coloured ribbons, each with a date and a number, commemorating the body count in their engagements. And, as with hunting trophies, in the barracks human teeth and ears conferred status on their owners. One combat paratrooper who served in Vietnam in the late 1960s, Arthur E. ‘Gene’ Woodley, Jr., wore about fourteen ears and fingers on a string around his neck, and he ‘would get free drugs, free booze, free pussy because they wouldn’t wanna bother you ’cause this man’s a killer … it was, so to speak, a symbol of combat-type manhood’. Adornments like these imparted power: they demanded attention, they were shocking and they symbolized skill. They were self-affirming accoutrements.

  There was also a theatrical element to such grisly trophies. In many cases, the circumstances surrounding their acquisition were mythologized. Most trophies were taken in the aftermath of battle. Heads, for example, were rarely hacked from freshly slaughtered soldiers in the heat of a fight, although sometimes it happened in a fit of fear or rage, when a ‘kid went crazy’ on the frontlines. Mack Morriss, who worked for the Army magazine The Yank, met a soldier on Guadalcanal in January 1943 who was ‘loaded down with Jap souvenirs’ and who said he had decapitated two wounded Japanese fighters. One was a Japanese officer, and when the American had reached down to steal his sword, the wounded man had grabbed him: ‘the kid went wild, partly, he said, because he’d had a buddy killed, and partly, I think, because he was scared to death. He broke loose, grabbed his knife and stabbed the Jap in the gut, chest, back, cut off the left cheek of his ass and then decapitated him.’ Morriss was not particularly shocked by the story – ‘Okay, so the kid went crazy and cut a couple of guys’ heads off. C’est la guerre’ – but he continued to think about it for days, and wondered whether he should give the soldier the benefit of the doubt about the nature of the attack.

  Morriss was more disgusted by the army chaplain who hovered around his young charge saying, ‘Nothing can stop the American boy’ and, ‘My isn’t he blood-thirsty’; but even Morriss, who went to war armed with a reporter’s notepad instead of a gun, knew that gruesome mementos could confer status on their owner. Perhaps because of his ‘outsider’ status as a journalist, and in an effort to disguise his horror at the war, Morriss took to carrying around a tooth, supposedly from a Japanese fighter who died at Guadalcanal. One evening he showed it off during dinner, and he was enjoying the reverential reaction it brought until someone pointed out that it was not a human tooth. Morriss, who had drunk too much bourbon, swelled with rage and embarrassment, and then sulked, while everyone at the table laughed. ‘What a sophomore!’ he wrote in his diary. ‘The curse of an aching ego.’

  Most infantrymen looked with scorn on the ‘rear-echelon glory hunters’ who scavenged souvenirs when they had not seen a day of fighting between them, but teeth, and even skulls, were not simply showpieces – they could also be cause for reflection and helped some men to cope with the extreme environment in which they were trapped. One such man was Sy Kahn, a member of the US Army Transportation Corps who toiled at loading and unloading ships on the coast of New Britain. He was nineteen when he went to war, with several spare pairs of spectacles, and by his own admission he was ‘infinitely more comfortable with a book or a violin in [his] hands than [he] was with a rifle’. He was convinced that he would never return.

  In February 1944, a few months into his tour of duty, Kahn ventured into the forest with a friend to explore an abandoned Japanese hospital and camp. The forest was thick and swampy and full of insects, and the ground was littered with ammunition, guns, rations and medical equipment. It was a ‘foreboding and mysterious’ place to be. They picked up a few souvenirs – cans with Japanese writing on them and woven baskets – but on the trek home they stumbled across something far more compelling: human bones. First a leg bone, then two ribs, and then Kahn spotted a skull. He could not be certain that it was Japanese, but he assumed it was from ‘the high position and prominence of the cheek bones’. Part of the skull had been blown away, the lower jaw was missing, and the flesh had all gone. Kahn wrapped the skull in a piece of cloth and took it back to camp, where he washed it clean in the o
cean and let it bleach dry in the sun. He and his friend used it as a candleholder. It took pride of place in their newly arranged room, a sanitized little refuge they had created, half underground, lined with sandbags, looking out to sea, and furnished with a desk, a few books, pictures and cigarettes, and the skull. It was ‘a clean and isolated place’ they could enjoy.

  Kahn found himself meditating on the skull. He could not help it. He wrote about it in his diary. He wondered about the dead Japanese man it had belonged to, about his life and family; he wondered whether the man had been good or evil, and whether he had killed many Americans. In contrast to the soldiers who displayed trophy skulls in public to dehumanize their enemy, Kahn’s skull became the focus of private moments of reflection. It left him seeking a relationship with his nameless, faceless foe, and gave him the space to see this particular ‘Jap’ as an individual. He wondered at the circumstances that brought them together ‘alongside a jungle stream’ on the other side of the world, and in these moments of solidarity, he thought about the arbitrariness of war and death. Why should this particular man’s skull end up as a candleholder on an American soldier’s desk? But Kahn did not feel pity, because he knew it might just as easily be him. After all, as he noted in his journal, men on both sides were being ‘blasted before my eyes’. The skull was tragic, it was ridiculous, and ultimately it was inconsequential.

  In Kahn’s hands, the skull was transformed into a memento mori. He thought about the irreducible physicality of death. The dead soldier was now a ‘bodiless thing’. He felt this physicality with his fingers: ‘toying with this recently living-and-thinking head, running my hand around the inside of the smooth, hard shell where once there were brains and living matter, fingering his gaping eye sockets and nose, and pulling at the loose teeth’. Kahn played with death like a toy, trying to come to terms with it, trying to tame it.

  Taken off the field of battle, where it merged into an amorphous sea of dead bodies, and brought into a new, more intimate and more domestic context, a single human body part – a skull or a finger or an ear – could provide rare space for reflection. Up close and personal, soldiers were stunned into silence. They had to face the cruel fate they shared with their enemy, whether they liked it or not. There is, perhaps, an expression of solidarity in taking trophy heads despite the piercing hatred that fuels such behaviour. There are limits to the fiction of an inhuman foe. In the end, combatants recognized that they were fighting because they had to, and so were the Japanese. What’s more, in some ways it was better to know that the enemy was human because, although it brought feelings of guilt and remorse, those feelings in themselves proved that you were still human too, and that the war had not yet stripped you of your humanity.

  Soldiers on both sides in the Pacific left their own belongings on the enemy corpses they found. Photographs and unit badges were slipped into the lifeless hands of the fallen. This reaching out to the dead betrays a sense of personal identification across enemy lines and the feeling that something profound had been shared in battle, that everyone was facing loss and the terror of death. The teeth and ears that were made into necklaces and worn as ornaments denoted prestige, but also a deep identification with the realities of death that everybody had been forced to confront.

  Eugene Sledge, fighting in the bitter battle for Peleliu in 1944, was shocked when a friend of his removed a package from his combat pack and proudly unveiled his souvenir, a partly mummified human hand. Sledge was disgusted, as were the other marines who came over to see what was going on, and he told his buddy in no uncertain terms to get rid of it, which he did, but not before Sledge had reflected on his own mortality. ‘I thought how I valued my own hands and what a miracle to do good or evil the human hand is.’ Sledge also questioned his reaction to seeing the hand in someone’s pack; after all, there were body parts everywhere they turned, and almost everyone collected human teeth, ‘but somehow a hand seemed to be going too far’. Teeth were impersonal, each one looked pretty much like any other. Teeth are rarely a person’s distinguishing feature, and once extracted they are practically interchangeable, but a hand was different. A hand was fleshed and organic, a hand had history and personality. Sledge described his friend as a ‘twentieth-century savage’ (albeit a ‘mild-mannered’ one), but as far as teeth were concerned, he had ‘gotten used to the idea’.

  The same was true of skulls. Skulls were less objectionable than severed heads because they were hard and dry, and they did not look much like a living person. That was one of the reasons that Kahn spent so long meditating on his skull, pondering the awesome difference between the inanimate shell on his desk and a living, breathing human being fighting in the jungle. As Sledge had sensed, to appropriate a fleshed hand was macabre, immoral and audacious; but to appropriate a tooth or a skull showed, despite everything, a certain aesthetic sensibility.

  The sheer tedium of the war led men to use dead people’s bones for entertainment. Soldiers whittled away at bones to pass the time, carving them into trinkets or engraving them with their names. Charles Lindbergh heard that the Fighter Control personnel on the island of Noemfoor in New Guinea ‘often bring back the thigh bones from the Japs they kill and make pen holders and paper knives and such things out of them’. One Australian soldier carved his Japanese skull into a tobacco jar. Skulls, long bones and ribs were the most popular bones for carving into objects. Skulls were often inscribed with the words ‘This is a good Jap’, and signed by members of the unit. Kahn was not unusual in using his skull as a candleholder: some men inserted candles into the vault of the cranium, others stuck them on the crown of the skull.

  Severed head of a napalmed Japanese soldier propped up below the gun turret of a disabled Japanese tank. Guadalcanal, January 1943.

  More often than not, when trophy skulls from the Pacific War and Vietnam are found in America today, they are decorated with writing, pictures and paint, often courtesy of the soldiers who took them in the first place, but sometimes thanks to a subsequent owner. One skull, brought home from the Second World War by a Navy medic, was found later by his grandson, who spray-painted it gold, tied a bandana around it and put it in his bedroom, until he became frightened of it and threw it in a lake. Another, brought back from Okinawa and painted entirely in red and silver, was handed over to a forensic team in the United States in the early 1980s. One skull taken from the skeletonized pilot of a crashed plane and brought back to Morgan County, Tennessee, had been enlarged to hold a light bulb at Halloween. Others have been found covered in graffiti and pictures, coloured with crayon, felt pen or paint, and stained with soot and wax from the candles they have held. These processes of domesticating the dead, and turning them from a person into a prop, began on the battlefield.

  While on duty, decorating bones was, at one level, simply something to do, in a world where bones were everywhere. The time invested in this kind of artistry may tell of tedious days spent at base camp, but it also suggests a sense of pride and the desire to layer personal identity onto enemy bones. Perhaps these artefacts were an attempt to take control, to make death more familiar and manageable: to convert the confusing and violent death of another into the reassurance of caring for oneself. There was a catharsis to the craft. Decorated skulls and bones were simultaneously attractive playthings, mementi mori and an assertion of power over the enemy. The act of appropriation could be an expression both of supremacy and, perhaps, of solidarity or even affection.

  Soldiers sometimes took a childlike delight in collecting souvenirs and an almost scientific interest in examining human body parts. Thomas J. ‘Horrible Swede’ Larson served as a naval communicator on Tulagi and described himself as a ‘flamboyant, happy-go-lucky’ kind of a guy. He was quite a collector, using his liberty days to trade with the locals for textiles and crafts, shopping in the towns he visited as a naval officer, picking up Japanese ‘souvenirs’ from dead bodies and downed planes, and exploring the islands for seashells, butterflies and insects. On one occasion he skinned a
seven-foot snake, ‘a beauty’, and, like a little boy, hung it up to scare people; but, like a naturalist, he also planned to tan the skin and keep it for his collection. He relished the chance to visit Guadalcanal and explore the old battlefields along the Matanikau River when an officer offered to drive him up there one day in August 1943. That day he looted a Japanese rifle and helmet which he kept into his old age, and he also gathered up a sack full of skulls. Ants had eaten the brains and soft parts, but Larson still had to scrape off the hair, and presumably wash them, before giving them out to friends and keeping one for himself, which he used for holding his helmet and his pipe.

  Larson wrote about his skulls in the context of his collection. ‘Here I’m known as the local beetle and butterfly, snake, seashell, and lizard authority,’ he began, before describing his ‘sack full of Jap skulls’. It was important to him that they had been found at the scene of a great battle on Guadalcanal, already an infamous place, because this increased their value as authentic relics of the war, and, by extension, his status as a collector. ‘My reputation as such has spread around through the South Pacific.’ He knew that the skulls were controversial as souvenirs went, but he enjoyed the thought of himself as ‘rock happy’: ‘A guy is pretty far gone when he begins to collect enemy skulls,’ he wrote.

  Larson became quite attached to his skull. He filled the eye sockets with plaster of Paris and fitted them with iridescent snail shells and kept it at the head of his bed. On his way home, after eleven months serving on Tulagi left him ‘staggering around like a zombie’, he left most of his souvenirs with friends in New Zealand, but he took the skull and a few other possessions with him when he boarded the Royal Navy ship HMNZS Leander in Auckland as an American liaison officer. Unfortunately the British command was less enamoured with Larson’s skull than he was, and he was forced to leave it behind, giving it to the natural history collection of Auckland Museum, a destination in keeping with the spirit in which it had been collected.