Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found

by Frances Larson

  Trophy Heads

  In 1945, headhunting enjoyed a temporary resurgence in the north central uplands of Borneo. This time, people’s heads were taken, not only in the cause of ancient tribal tradition, but in the name of a global and modern war.

  Australian troops, preparing for a final assault on the Japanese, who had occupied Borneo since early 1942, were mystified when local tribesmen turned up at their headquarters with offerings of Japanese heads in June 1945. One Australian soldier wrote in his diary:

  A Dyak [tribesman] who reached ‘C’ Company from the Tutong River area reported that some days ago a party of 18 Japs reached their village and asked for guides to Tutong. Result: 36 Dyaks, 18 Japs less bodies arrived at destination. The Dyaks offered to deliver the heads to ‘C’ Company but said that they would prefer to keep them as they had a party on. Permission granted to keep heads.

  Presumably, the Australians were rather glad to be rid of this particular gift of support from the locals, but they weren’t about to refuse Dyak assistance, however unsavoury their methods. Headhunting had been outlawed by the colonial government for decades, and successfully eradicated for twenty years. Suddenly, the Dyaks had started taking heads again. What the Australian troops did not know was that many of these headhunters had been armed by British and Australian special operatives working secretly in the jungle.

  In March and April, three Allied intelligence parties had parachuted into the jungles of north central Borneo, unsure exactly what they would find. ‘Operation Semut’ had been tasked with gathering intelligence on Japanese positions in Borneo and winning the support of the indigenous people for Allied interventions. They need not have worried on this account. The locals had suffered three years of food shortages and heavy-handed administration under the Japanese and were eager to exact their revenge – so eager, in fact, that Operation Semut quickly became a guerilla campaign, manned by indigenous fighters who were armed and coordinated – to a greater or lesser extent – by the Allied men, aimed at harassing and attacking the enemy.

  Working in small groups, the Semut operatives ambushed the Japanese while they went about their daily life doing such things as cooking in their camps, trekking through the forest or loading rations into boats on the river. One British soldier remembered that before the Japanese could take defensive positions in the jungle, the guerillas would rise out of the bushes and decapitate them. They were armed with their own parang (swords) and sumpit (blowpipes), because Allied weapons had been slow to arrive and ammunition was in short supply; and in any case, with only a few hours’ training, the Dyaks were not skilled gunmen. They did not all take heads, and some officers forbade headhunting, but in parts of the jungle headhunting became integral to the Allied operation against the Japanese.

  Some of the Allied soldiers were little more than witnesses to the fervour of their local fighters. There are stories of tribesmen carrying out headhunting raids while their Allied commanders were still back at base camp planning the attack, such was their enthusiasm for the job. Captain Bill Sochon remembered the following scenario: ‘As we were trying to get some sense of the highly excitable natives, more Dyaks came out of the jungle. The less flamboyant of them had the delicacy to carry the gruesome spoil in their sacks – proof of battle prowess as they tipped up the sacks and a cascade of heads tumbled on the ground.’

  In situations like these, commanders found it hard to persuade their men to refrain from taking heads, and in any case it did not always suit them to try. Many Allied soldiers were complicit in head-taking raids, even if they did not wield the parang themselves. They led raids when heads were taken and witnessed the decapitation of Japanese prisoners and wounded men by their Dyak men. Like the Australians from ‘C’ Company, they accepted heads as a declaration of allegiance. Some were guests of honour at traditional headhunting celebrations after a successful skirmish; others sealed alliances by giving Japanese heads as gifts to neighbouring tribes or posed for photographs holding the smoked heads of their enemy. In parts of the jungle, heads became part of the currency of warfare, cementing alliances and boosting morale, and decades of colonial censure of such ‘primitive savagery’ were temporarily disregarded.

  Some of the Allied men were horrified by the violence of the natives – one Australian officer almost fainted on seeing the headless trunk of a Malay prisoner on the ground – and banned the practice outright, but others seemed to have accepted it as an inevitable part of their mission. And they were not alone. Allied troops all over the Pacific became inured to trophy heads during World War II, and in many cases it was not the indigenous islanders who were responsible for taking Japanese heads, but the Allied troops themselves.

  It was not particularly hard to find human heads on display during the Pacific Campaign of the Second World War. On the islands of New Guinea and the Solomons almost everyone had a story about a skull or a severed head. Skulls were hung from bulletin boards and lashed to the front of US tanks and truck cabs as macabre mascots.

  Lieutenant E.V. McPherson, of Columbus, Ohio, with a Japanese skull which served as a mascot aboard the United States Navy motor torpedo boat 341. Alexishafen, New Guinea, 1944.

  In Bougainville in May 1944, Charles Lindbergh, the American aviator, drove past rows of Japanese heads on poles that lined a new American road. They had been placed there after the bulldozers had reopened shallow graves. Mack Morriss, an American war journalist, noted that a skull had been fixed on a pole in the centre of an engineering tent on Guadalcanal; it was wearing a helmet with the words ‘Made in Tokyo’ painted across the front.

  It is hard to know how many trophy heads were taken during the Pacific War. One forensic report estimated that the heads were missing from 60 per cent of the Japanese dead repatriated from the Mariana Islands in 1984. And a Japanese priest who visited Iwo Jima regularly in the decades after the war to conduct ceremonies for the dead reported that skulls had been taken from many of the remains. Trophy-taking was significant enough for United States naval commanders to threaten servicemen with ‘stern disciplinary action’ as early as September 1942 if any of them took enemy body parts as souvenirs. Customs officials in Hawaii, the gateway home for returning American troops, routinely asked soldiers whether they had any bones in their bags, and on one occasion at least found two ‘green’ Japanese skulls during their searches. On the ground, most soldiers knew it happened and accepted it as inevitable under the circumstances: after a few weeks on duty, they had seen far worse.

  ‘Souvenir hunting’ or ‘field stripping’ was ubiquitous. ‘If the Japs didn’t know before, they know now what the American Army’s fighting for – it’s souvenirs,’ one American serviceman joked to Mack Morriss. ‘Up there they’ll shoot a Jap and he’ll jump in the air and before he hits the ground they’ll be all over him, frisking him for souvenirs.’ It was true – sometimes the Americans did not bother to wait until their victims were dead before they methodically emptied their pockets and packs, took their guns and knives, flags, helmets, photographs, identity tags, knocked out their teeth, and sometimes cut off their ears, their fingers and, occasionally, their heads. Eugene Sledge, a marine who fought on Peleliu and Okinawa and who wrote one of the most famous memoirs of the war, described the efficiency of men who ‘stripped’ their victims in the aftermath of battle. They ‘gloated over, compared, and often swapped their prizes … It wasn’t simply souvenir hunting or looting the enemy dead; it was more like Indian warriors taking scalps.’

  The harvesting of teeth and fingers lay at one end of a continuum of trophy-seeking that has always occurred on the battlefield. Buttons, epaulettes, medals and helmets taken from dead men are the most common spoils of war. During the Second World War there was a great demand for Japanese souvenirs, not only among the soldiers serving in the Pacific, but also back at home in America. One soldier remembered his job as ‘materiels censor’, which required him to visit all the military units in the area once a week to clear souvenirs for shipment home. Some of th
e men who scavenged along the frontlines were in it for the money. Dean Ladd, an American marine of the Second Division, told the story of a ship full of marines sailing towards Hawaii that was transformed into a ‘floating workshop’ as soldiers set about crafting fake Japanese dog tags out of wooden orange crates and small Japanese flags from sheets to sell back in the States.

  Japanese flags and identity tags were far more common than body parts, but it was not unusual for soldiers to collect enemy teeth. Human trophy-taking escalated in the Pacific War, and in later wars in Korea and Vietnam, where there were more opportunities for small patrols to scavenge in heavily forested terrain. Human trophies also betray the physicality of these conflicts. They suggest face-to-face fighting and raw struggles at close quarters, where physical prowess and mental strength set the victor apart. The classic image of the triumphant warrior holding his enemy’s head aloft on the battlefield draws its power from the intensity of the contest, because man to man it might have unfolded differently. In this war, the jungle separated soldiers from their comrades and thrust them together with their enemies, and trophies like teeth and skulls, that were paraded in camps and sent back home to loved ones as proof of having been there and survived, were stark reminders of the fierce intimacy of battle.

  There were practical considerations too. Teeth lent themselves to collection, because they were small and light and they could be knocked out and cleaned pretty easily. Fingers, ears and heads were another matter. They had to be hacked off, and they were messy and smelly: the practicalities were enough to put most people off. One group of American marines returning from the frontlines in early 1944 had dug up a dead Japanese soldier and hacked off his head, because ‘Jack wanted a Jap skull’, but the head did not come off cleanly, the jaw was broken, and it smelled so badly that the marines settled for taking its three gold teeth instead. Lindbergh told a similar story of a man who had tried to get ants to clean the flesh of a Japanese soldier’s head, until his comrades took it away from him because it smelt so bad. Mack Morriss saw an ear being passed around in one division, but said that the men did not have much stomach for it.

  There were, however, a few men who were unfazed by the horrors of de-fleshing a human head. In October 1943, the US Army’s high command was alarmed at newspaper reports concerning a soldier ‘who had recently returned from the southwest Pacific theater with photos showing various steps “in the cooking and scraping of the heads of Japanese to prepare them for souvenirs”’. Today, it is easy to find photo graphs online of Allied soldiers boiling human heads in old fuel drums to remove the flesh, and pictures of severed Japanese heads hanging from the trees. Nonetheless, most of those soldiers who took Japanese heads scavenged skulls from deserted battlegrounds, or came across them in the jungle, by which time the tropical conditions had done the work for them and cleaned them to the bone. Generally, a dry skull made a more attractive, and more manageable, trophy than a rotting human head.

  Soldiers arriving on the Pacific Islands for the first time in the 1940s had to adjust to the ubiquity of trophies and souvenirs, and, initially at least, new recruits were shocked by the behaviour of some of their cohorts. Dean Ladd – recently landed on the hot, forested and sandy coastline of Guadalcanal island in the South West Pacific, about to fight in one of the fiercest battles of the campaign, and only one month away from his twenty-third birthday – watched in astonishment as ‘a kid from the 1st Marine Division ambled by swinging a length of rope weighted with the bleached skull of a Japanese soldier’. The marine’s clothes were in tatters and he was emaciated, as were all combat troops serving in Guadalcanal, but when he saw the fresh rookies staring at him, he simply grinned and twirled the skull over his head. Had the war driven him mad? ‘Well, yes – and no,’ Ladd concluded. ‘Mostly no. Later, but soon, we would understand that the kid was doing just fine, in the circumstances.’

  A week later, while he was eating, eager for hot food, even though he was surrounded by the stinking remains of hundreds of putrefying Japanese corpses, and with machine gun and mortar fire and shell explosions in the distance, Ladd’s eyes fell on the booted foot of a Japanese soldier sticking out of the ground nearby. The body was barely covered with earth. He ignored it and continued to eat. And he ignored the news that Japanese dead were floating in the Matanikau River, just upstream from where he had filled his canteen. He drank the water anyway. ‘Like that kid twirling the skull, I was acclimating to conditions on Guadalcanal. I had been on the island seven days.’

  The historian Joanna Bourke has written about the euphoria of killing in battle and the carnivalesque atmosphere that warfare can foster. The combat gear, the face paint and the ‘endless refrain that men had to turn into “animals”’ all represent a kind of exhilarating inversion of the moral order. These rituals seem alien when taken out of context – they seemed alien to the new troops arriving to fight – but they provide a way to cope with the shocking realities of combat. It is hard to comprehend conditions for combat troops on Guadalcanal in 1942. Even the service troops, behind the front line, had little idea what it was like to be plunged into the ‘meat grinder’, where time had no meaning and there was no hope of escape: if it did not kill you, it sent you insane.

  Famously, the Japanese refused to surrender and the Americans refused to take prisoners, so it became a fight to the death. In Biak, New Guinea, Japanese soldiers occupying a system of limestone caves had reportedly tried to surrender, but the Americans told them to ‘get the hell back in and fight it out’. Meanwhile, the Japanese fired on stretcher-bearers, tortured Americans to death and mutilated their bodies. Some prisoners were beheaded, and there were reports of Japanese eating the flesh of their enemies, and of their own men. In these conditions, there was no hope of escape: you must either kill or be killed.

  Soldiers who fought on the frontlines were easy to spot. They were filthy and covered in coral dust and rifle oil; their uniforms were in tatters and had been stiffened by weeks of rain, sweat and sun; they were thin and haggard, unshaven, with bloodshot eyes, and their hands were blackened and calloused; they were hungry, thirsty, exhausted, smelly, and, more often than not, they were suffering from ‘jungle rot’, fungal growths between the fingers and toes and in the ears; they had sores on their limbs from the filth, insect bites, and many of them were suffering from malaria or other tropical fevers. In short, human skulls were the least of their problems.

  All the troops serving in the Pacific faced hunger, illness and hard labour in heat and heavy rain. The humidity rotted everything, from guns and clothes to people’s bodies: the rain turned men’s skin white and puffy. Camps were often flooded or submerged in mud, and men had to cut their way through the thick vegetation with machetes, walking in a single line. It was said that in some places, where the jungle was particularly dense, if a man didn’t keep his eyes on the feet of the soldier in front, he could be lost.

  There were mosquitoes and leeches, spiders, lizards, snakes and maggots. There was no running water or electricity, and despite the legion of hard-working service personnel, there were inevitable supply problems, which meant regular food and water shortages. When water did arrive, it might be delivered in an old oil drum, foul-tasting, stomach churning, full of rust with a blue greasy film, but the soldiers drank it anyway because they were so desperate. It is hardly surprising that there were outbreaks of typhus and dysentery. The vast majority of those who died in the Pacific succumbed to disease, heat, accident and famine; during some phases of the campaign these casualties outstripped combat fatalities by as many as 100 to one.

  Then there was the ‘reek of mass death’, as Ladd remembered. ‘Never mind the heat, the smell alone was enough to drop a strong man in his tracks.’ The dead were all around, in every stage of decomposition. Mangled bodies hung from barbed-wire entanglements, floated in rivers, and lay by the thousand where they had fallen, ensnared by the forest, protruding from the muddy ground and shallow graves. Many had been mutilated by the explosions that k
illed them, blown into pieces, burned by napalm attacks, and blackened by exposure to the tropical elements. It was not unusual to see headless bodies and bodiless heads on the battlegrounds, and horrific accidents happened behind the frontlines too. A snapping cable on a ship could decapitate a man, as could the propeller blades of an idling aeroplane. One member of the US Army Transportation Corps, enduring months of backbreaking work on the supply vessels, fell into the lower hold of a ship during a blackout and hit a strong hook on the way down which severed his head. He was brought up again in a basket.

  Eugene Sledge wrote that the ‘fierce struggle for survival … eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all’. There was a feeling that the habitat had caused a kind of social degeneration. Human body parts were commonplace, and enemy bodies were there for the taking. In other words, the moral landscape was as surreal as the physical landscape, since soldiers lost all the normal social structures that framed their lives at home. They were surrounded by the dead, they were ordered to kill and they thought they were going to die: in these circumstances, men could, in the words of historian Jonathan Glover, ‘escape the restraints of moral identity’. They became numb to their surroundings.

  Take the instance when Sledge and his unit, fighting their way towards enemy lines on Peleliu, came across a Japanese machine gunner who had been killed in position, so that he looked as though he was about to fire his weapon, still staring along the gun sights, even though the top of his head had been blown off. As Sledge talked to the American gunmen who had been in the fight, he noticed that one of them was lobbing coral pebbles into the dead soldier’s open skull. ‘Each time the pitch was true I heard a little splash of rainwater in the ghastly receptacle.’ But, as Sledge noted, the American might as well have been a little boy playing with stones in a puddle back home, because his movements were so casual, and ‘there was nothing malicious in his action’.