Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found

by Frances Larson

  There was, sometimes, a kind of seasoned curiosity that motivated soldiers to study body parts more closely, even in the most gruesome circumstances. When an army doctor reprimanded Eugene Sledge for eyeing up enemy teeth on the battlefield, Sledge retorted, ‘Well, my dad’s a doctor, and I bet he’d think it was kinda interesting.’

  If medics could treat dead bodies as biological matter, then so could soldiers. James Fahey was a seaman first class on the light cruiser U.S.S. Montpelier, a young man described by the historian Paul Fussell as a civil, patient, unbloodthirsty Roman Catholic from Waltham, Massachusetts. In November 1944, when the Japanese unleashed hundreds of kamikaze suicide planes on the American fleet in the Leyte Gulf hoping to prevent an invasion of their main islands, the Montpelier was one of their targets. In the midst of this battle, the American anti-aircraft fire was so intense that parts of planes and Japanese pilots’ bodies literally rained down on the decks of the ship. Fahey described how, during a lull in the action, the men would look around for souvenirs. He took part of a plane. The deck was covered with ‘blood, guts, brains, tongues, scalps, hearts, arms etc.’, and the men started to pick pieces up to examine them. One man picked up a man’s scalp – ‘it looked just like you skinned an animal’ – another took a knee bone; Fahey picked up a tin plate with a man’s tongue on it and marvelled at how long it was, with parts of the man’s tonsils and throat still attached.

  ‘What a mess,’ Fahey wrote, but the American troops seemed to be trying to comprehend the mess as best they could, and even, in one case, set about transforming it into a token of love: one of Fahey’s crewmates took a rib bone and cleaned it up because, he said, his sister wanted part of a Jap body. Extraordinary as it sounds, it was not uncommon for bones to be sent home to loved ones as gifts. Soldiers wrote casually in their letters home about requests for skulls from family and friends – ‘I thought of sending Pack his Jap skull’ or, ‘Do you want a Jap skull?’ – and in the privacy of people’s homes, a skull could become the object of affection, particularly if there were children in the house, who grew up to accept these things as normal. One veteran from Guadalcanal had brought home a skull, signed by the members of his unit and nicknamed Oscar. When the skull was found, decades later, and repatriated to the Japanese government, his niece felt sad about having to give it away:

  Anybody that knew the family or went in [the] house saw it … Whenever you walked in that house, it was right there in the middle of the shelf … It was just somebody that was dead, and this was the way my uncle felt about it. Yes, nowadays people would be outraged about it. But then, we didn’t know any better, it was no big deal. It was war. Uncle Julius just thought he was doing what he was supposed to do over there.

  Skulls were often given pet names, like Sam or Charlie, but when one of these gifts was featured in the American press, it brought international condemnation.

  In May 1944, Life magazine’s ‘Picture of the Week’ showed a young woman called Natalie Nickerson at her desk writing a letter to her boyfriend who was serving in the Pacific with the Navy. Natalie was gazing dreamily at the gift he had sent her: a Japanese soldier’s skull, polished clean and inscribed with the names of fourteen American servicemen. The skull was engraved with the words ‘This is a good Jap – a dead one picked up on the New Guinea beach’. According to the caption, Natalie had been surprised by the gift, but nevertheless she had named the skull Tojo after the Japanese prime minister.

  Phoenix war worker Natalie Nickerson penning her Navy boyfriend a thank-you note for sending her a Japanese soldier’s skull he gathered as a souvenir while fighting in New Guinea. Life magazine, Picture of the Week, May 1944.

  Readers of Life wrote in to condemn the photograph of Natalie and the skull, calling it ‘revolting and horrible’, and pointing out that if the situation had been reversed, and a prominent magazine in Tokyo had published a photograph of a young Japanese girl gazing at an American soldier’s skull, it would cause uproar at the depravity of the Japanese.

  These letters were printed on 12 June 1944. The next day, the New York Mirror reported that a Pennsylvania Congressman had presented President Roosevelt with a letter-opener fashioned from the arm bone of a Japanese soldier. Apparently the Congressman had apologized for presenting the President with ‘so small a part of the Japanese anatomy’. Japanese commentators pounced on the President’s hypocrisy: he ‘tears a page out of the book on the culture and freedom of humanity, of which he is in the habit of speaking’. Then, a few days later, the photograph of Natalie and her skull reached the Japanese press, to be received with vitriolic fury. ‘Even on the face of the American girl can be discerned the beastly nature of the Americans,’ wrote a journalist for Japan’s most widely circulating daily. ‘Let us all vow the destruction of American savagery from the face of the earth.’

  Only then, with fears growing for the safety of American prisoners of war and civilian internees, did President Roosevelt return the letter-opener and suggest the bone be given a proper burial. The Navy’s response to the photograph in Life was to launch a half-hearted and ultimately inconclusive investigation into the ‘alleged’ actions of the lieutenant involved – Natalie’s boyfriend.

  Desecration of enemy war dead was a blatant violation of international law according to the 1929 Geneva Convention. It contravened the customary rules of warfare as well as the spirit of an existing bilateral commitment between Japan and the USA regarding the treatment of those killed in battle, but the naval high command was sluggish in its response. The War Department confirmed that the desecration of Japanese dead was a ‘grave violation of law and decency’, but at the same time the reason it discouraged the publication of stories about ‘souvenirs’ was that they might lead to reprisals on the battlefield. It emphasized the need for discretion as much as, if not more than, it saw the need for decency.

  Meanwhile, commanders were ordered to take all steps necessary ‘to prevent such illegal and brutal acts’ and to investigate and discipline offenders, and the story of the Life photograph reached troops serving in the Pacific. In October 1944, John Gaitha Browning, a thirty-year-old artist who had enlisted in 1942, picked up a skull near Hollandia on New Guinea. He brought it back to camp, left it on a friend’s bed, and everyone took photographs of it, but he knew the censors would make sure that they never saw the photos again. ‘The army has gotten the holy jitters about the skull question, and we receive repeated warnings of court martial, death, and any number of absurd threats for possession of Japanese bones, teeth, etc.,’ he wrote in his diary. The story in Life, he thought, ‘didn’t help any’. But Browning and his peers did not take the ‘absurd threats’ very seriously.

  Their commanders, charged with steering their country to victory in a war that had ended millions of lives, regarded ‘the skull question’ as relatively unimportant. Some officers expected their men to behave viciously; others chose to ignore the evidence: in the spirit of the carnival, picking up a skull from the battlefield often counted as an ‘authorized transgression’. The problem of getting men to behave violently ‘on demand’ has long challenged the military, particularly since the rise of massive conscripted armies in the twentieth century. Training regimes are designed to strip recruits of their identity through prolonged physical and verbal abuse. Soldiers enter a world where sergeants have unlimited power, where aggression is highly valued, where outsiders are dehumanized, and where every detail of their lives is programmed by others. Harsh training strategies help to erode civilian values and create more efficient killers. One marine in Vietnam remembered his instructions on finding enemy wounded: ‘You would just, like, if you had fixed bayonets, reach down, and in the instructor’s own words again, “Cut his head off” or “Pump a few rounds into him for good measure”.’ If men could not kill the wounded, they were psychologically unfit for battle.

  It is a delicate balance to strike. Soldiers are expected to react viciously under the stress of combat but then resume a peaceful life when their
military contributions are no longer required. In the mid-twentieth century commentators acknowledged that ‘the guy who gives you the most trouble in peacetime’ was the best guy in battle. Actions that could put you in jail as a civilian won you a medal as a soldier. Decorating your enemy’s head and carving your name into the bone would never win you a medal, but there was a tacit acknowledgment within the armed forces that activities like these eased the psychological demands of warfare.

  One or two old trophy skulls, from the Pacific War, Vietnam or Korea, come to light every year in the United States and are sent to forensic scientists for identification. Occasionally, they are found by chance when the police are searching a property for other reasons, but usually they are turned in, or thrown out, by their owners who feel an uneasy ambivalence about keeping them in the house. In America, or Australia, or the United Kingdom, a trophy skull has no accepted place in the domestic setting. Even if, in the aftermath of a bloody war, they were welcomed into a serviceman’s home as his just rewards, decades later most have become aberrant and abhorrent, even to those who took them in the first place. Occasionally, family members think of them affectionately, but many – particularly, it seems, veteran’s wives – find them distasteful and unnerving. The war-torn world that forged a place for them is gone and they have become misfits.

  Surviving trophy skulls are eerie fragments from conflicts that are, and have always been, beyond words. As physical testament to the horrors of war, they seem – as many of the men who collected them must have felt – out of place back at home. Both concrete and indeterminate, these ‘trophy heads’ attest to experiences, sharply bound by time and space, that cannot easily be shared. Although the dead are often invisible in histories of wars, they are mentioned repeatedly in soldiers’ diaries because they were everywhere. Death was omnipresent, and so it became part of daily life in a way that is alien to outsiders. Perhaps this is one of the reasons old trophy skulls are unsettling today: they bring that world of death into the here and now and challenge us to try and comprehend the incomprehensible.

  Although trophy skulls seem incongruous in civilian society, in the field of battle they performed many different functions. As heterogeneous as the soldiers who acquired them, they could symbolize fury or fear. Some were treated like hunting trophies, but others were transformed into tokens of love, mascots, psuedo-scientific specimens or playthings. And they were as likely to inspire moments of introspection as as they were to encourage displays of bravado; after all, a human skull is the shell of a person that sits deep within us all. It is little wonder that soldiers, so close to death in more ways than one, were drawn to human skulls.

  Trophy skulls were the enemy tamed, and as such they could evoke nurturing feelings: skulls were given hats and helmets, and cigarettes or pipes to smoke. Like Yorick, they were born anew, taking on personalities and affectionate nicknames; but the playful effort that went into reanimating people’s bones also served to underscore their lifelessness. First and foremost, trophy heads attest to the power of a man who kills another, and who deigns to make a human being into an artefact. The skulls American servicemen sent home from World War II and Vietnam had been thoroughly cleaned and polished. All the rot of death had been washed away, and something white and sterile had been created in its place. The enemy had been stilled. Human trophies were expressions of a determination to survive, and of solidarity with the members of your unit upon whom your life depended. Even when they invited a soldier’s nurturing instincts, they were still ruthless expressions of his supremacy. They helped soldiers regain a sense of empowerment, because the trophy head, held aloft, is an assertion of control in the chaos of battle. The same could be said of the executioner who holds up a traitor’s head on the scaffold: order is declared anew.

  3

  Deposed Heads

  The scaffold is the ultimate stage, where, for centuries, life and death were acted out for real. In the mid-eighteenth century, Edmund Burke observed that theatregoers enjoying a royal tragedy would have raced to the exit at the news that a head of state was about to be executed in a nearby public square. Our fascination with real misfortune, he pointed out, is far more compelling than our interest in hardships that are merely staged. He might have said the same today, but in the digital age, the internet mediates our view of grisly executions, simultaneously keeping us at a distance and giving us front-row seats. Today, severed heads are held up for the camera and the spectators can watch at home. During the Iraq War, the extraordinary allure of beheading videos was proved for the first time, and in no uncertain terms.

  As the American and British ‘war on terror’ moved across Afghanistan and into Iraq in the years following the September 11th terrorist attacks, a new mode of killing took the media by surprise: Europeans and Americans were taken hostage by Islamic militant groups, held for ransom and then beheaded, on camera. Throughout history, criminals have been decapitated for their crimes; now, the criminals were decapitating civilians in terrifying circumstances, and graphic videos of their deaths were circulated online for anyone to see.

  The first American victim was Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was kidnapped in Pakistan in January 2002. His captors demanded the release of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, in what was to become a typically unrealistic ultimatum. They beheaded Pearl on 1 February. A few weeks later the video of Pearl’s death emerged. It started to circulate online in March, and in June the Boston Phoenix newspaper provided a link to it from their website, a move which proved extremely unpopular with commentators in the United States who scorned the paper’s ‘callous disregard for human decency’, but the Boston Phoenix site nonetheless spawned a wave of further links to the video, and discussions about the rights and wrongs of viewing Pearl’s brutal death proliferated online.

  The second American to be killed in this way, and the first to be beheaded in Iraq, was Nick Berg, an engineer who was kidnapped on 9 April 2004 and killed in early May. This time, two years after Pearl’s death, Reuters made the unedited video available within days, arguing that it was not within its remit to make editorial decisions on behalf of its clients. In contrast to the video of Pearl’s execution, which was only shown on CBS as a thirty-second clip, all the major US television news networks showed clips of the Berg video, although they stopped short of actually broadcasting the beheading itself. The traditional news media refrained from showing the footage in full, but by now television producers were following the crowd rather than breaking the story; it was internet users who, in the privacy of their own homes, dared to watch Berg’s beheading.

  Nick Berg’s execution video quickly became one of the most searched-for items on the web. The al-Qaeda-linked site that first posted the video was closed down by the Malaysian company that hosted it two days after Berg’s execution because of the overwhelming traffic to the site. Alfred Lim, senior officer of the company, said it had been closed down ‘because it had attracted a sudden surge of massive traffic that is taking up too much bandwidth and causing inconvenience to our other clients’. Within a day, the Berg video was the top search term across search engines like Google, Lycos and Yahoo. On 13 May, the top ten search terms in the United States were:

  nick berg video

  nick berg

  berg beheading

  beheading video

  nick berg beheading video

  nick berg beheading

  berg video

  berg beheading video

  ‘nick berg’

  video nick berg

  The Berg beheading footage remained the most popular internet search in the United States for a week, and the second most popular throughout the month of May, runner up only to ‘American Idol’.

  Berg’s death triggered a spate of similar beheadings, by a number of militant Islamic groups in Iraq, that were filmed and circulated online. There were 64 documented beheadings in Iraq in 2004, seventeen of the victims were foreigners, and 28 decapitations were filmed. The following year th
ere were five videotaped beheadings in Iraq, and the numbers have dwindled since. In 2004, those that received the most press attention proved particularly popular with the public. In June, an American helicopter engineer, Paul Johnson, was kidnapped and beheaded on camera in Saudi Arabia, and in the weeks after his death the most popular search term on Google was ‘Paul Johnson’. When the British engineer Kenneth Bigley was kidnapped in Iraq in September 2004 and beheaded by his captors the following month, one American organization reported that the video of his death had been downloaded from its site more than one million times. A Dutch website owner said that his daily viewing numbers rose from 300,000 to 750,000 when a beheading in Iraq was shown.

  High school teachers in Texas, California and Washington were placed on administrative leave for showing Nick Berg’s beheading to their pupils in class. When the Dallas Morning News printed a still image of one of Berg’s assailants holding his severed head, with his face blocked out, it said that its decision had been inspired by interest generated in the blogosphere. The paper’s editorial pointed out that ‘[o]ur letters page today is filled with nothing but Berg-related letters, most of them demanding that the DMN show more photos of the Berg execution. Not one of the 87 letters we received on the topic yesterday called for these images not to be printed.’

  It is, of course, impossible to know how many people actually watched the videos after downloading them, but a significant number of Americans wanted to see them and discuss them, particularly the video of Berg, who was the first American to be beheaded in Iraq, and whose execution was the first to be recorded on camera since Pearl’s, two years earlier. Berg was killed just as public support for the war in Iraq was beginning to decline, and the popularity of the video underlined the extent to which the internet had eclipsed more traditional news media when it came to creating a story. Television news producers may have edited their clips of the video, but it did not matter because people were watching the footage online. The internet allowed people to protest against the perceived ‘censorship’ of the mainstream media, or else simply circumvent the media altogether when the mood took them. Whether people thought it ‘important’ to see Berg’s execution for themselves, or simply watched out of curiosity, there can be little doubt that ‘the crowd’ was taking control, or was out of control, depending on your perspective.