Trophy Skulls and Boiled Bones: How American Troops Mutilated Japanese War Dead
- May 24
- 6 min read
In May 1944, Life magazine ran a photo of a young woman named Natalie Nickerson sitting at a desk, chin resting on her hand, writing a thank-you note. Sitting in front of her was a human skull. According to the magazine, her Navy boyfriend had sent it from New Guinea, signed by him and 13 friends, inscribed: "This is a good Jap — a dead one picked up on the New Guinea beach." Life ran it as their Picture of the Week. American censors passed it without issue. Decades later, a family member of Nickerson's told Snopes the whole thing was a staged photo shoot, she didn't actually have a boyfriend in the Pacific, and she later felt regret about being talked into it. Whether the skull itself was real or a prop remains unknown. But the fact that censors waved it through, and the public largely accepted it, tells you everything about the cultural moment.
It Started at Guadalcanal
The collection of body parts from Japanese war dead began almost as soon as American forces came into contact with the enemy. Historian Simon Harrison, who wrote the definitive academic paper on the subject "Skull Trophies of the Pacific War" concluded that the practice started on a scale large enough to alarm military authorities from the very first engagements, particularly the Battle of Guadalcanal in late 1942.
Teeth and skulls were the most prized items, but soldiers also took ears, noses, fingers, and bones. Skulls were often prepared by boiling the head, then scraping or dragging it behind a ship in a net to clean and polish it. A poet named Winfield Townley Scott, working as a newspaper reporter in Rhode Island in 1944, witnessed a sailor displaying his skull trophy in the office and was so disturbed he wrote a poem about it, "The U.S. Sailor with the Japanese Skull" describing the whole grim preparation process.
By September 1942, the Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet had seen enough. He issued a formal order: no part of the enemy's body could be used as a souvenir, and any serviceman found doing so would face "stern disciplinary action." The Joint Chiefs of Staff had to issue the same order again in January 1944. Neither one made much difference.
Just How Widespread Was It?
The honest answer is: nobody knows for certain. But the evidence that it was extremely common is hard to argue with.
When Charles Lindbergh passed through customs in Hawaii in 1944 on his way back from observing Pacific combat operations, the customs agent asked him point-blank whether he was carrying any bones. Lindbergh was apparently startled by the question. The agent explained it had become completely routine, so many servicemen had been caught smuggling Japanese remains home that bones were now a standard customs declaration category. In his wartime diary, Lindbergh also recorded a conversation with a Marine officer who told him that mutilating Japanese corpses, cutting off ears, noses, and the like, was common practice.
In October 1943, the U.S. High Command grew alarmed after a series of newspaper articles ran in the domestic press. One reported a soldier making a string of beads out of Japanese teeth. Another included a step-by-step photo spread of how to prepare a skull, complete with cooking and scraping instructions. These weren't leaked or suppressed, they passed through military censors.
U.S. war correspondent Edward L. Jones put it plainly in a 1946 piece for The Atlantic: "We boiled the flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter-openers.
The clearest post-war evidence came in 1984, when the remains of Japanese soldiers killed in the Mariana Islands were repatriated to Japan. Around 60 percent of the bodies sent home were missing their skulls. In 1985, a Japanese Buddhist priest who had been conducting funeral rites on Iwo Jima since 1952 reported that most of the bodies he'd worked with over the years had had their skulls removed.
A Letter Opener Made From a Dead Man's Arm
Perhaps the most surreal moment in the whole grim story came in 1944, when U.S. Representative Francis E. Walter presented President Franklin D. Roosevelt with a letter opener. It had been carved from the arm bone of a Japanese soldier.
When the news became public in Japan, it caused a national uproar. The story was reprinted extensively in the Japanese press alongside the Life magazine skull photo, and was used to portray Americans as, in the words of reporting at the time, "deranged, primitive, racist and inhuman." Roosevelt ordered the letter opener to be returned and given a proper burial. It's worth noting he didn't demand to know how such a thing ended up on his desk, he just wanted it gone.
What Made the Japanese Different From Other Enemies
American soldiers didn't do this to German or Italian war dead. That contrast is stark and uncomfortable, and historians haven't shied away from naming it directly.
A December 1944 poll asked American soldiers whether they'd want to kill enemy soldiers. About half agreed when asked about Japanese soldiers. Fewer than 10 percent agreed when the question was about Germans. Historian Niall Ferguson, who specializes in German history, called this pattern one of the most troubling aspects of the entire Second World War, the fact that Allied troops treated the Japanese in broadly the same way that Nazi Germany treated Slavic peoples.
The dehumanization was systematic. U.S. wartime media routinely described Japanese people as "yellow vermin." An official U.S. Navy film referred to Japanese troops as "living, snarling rats." The shock of Pearl Harbor had amplified pre-existing racism, and the propaganda machinery turned it into something that made ordinary men feel comfortable mutilating human remains.
Harrison's research also pointed to another cultural factor: many American servicemen came from hunting backgrounds where keeping animal trophies was normal and even admired. Combined with the dehumanization of the enemy, that mentality translated directly to the battlefield. You treated the dead Japanese body the way you'd treat a deer.
The Long Aftermath
The trophy skulls didn't disappear when the war ended. They went home in duffel bags, sat on mantlepieces, got passed down through families, and occasionally turned up in the most awkward places imaginable. On several occasions, police investigating murder cases had to call in forensic experts after discovering what turned out to be old Japanese war trophies, not evidence of a recent crime.
Repatriation efforts have continued for decades. Japan and the United States have cooperated on returning remains, though the process is slow and complicated by the fact that many families who received skulls either don't know what they have or don't want to come forward. Some bones have been quietly handed over to local officials. In 2010, the U.S. government passed the War Graves Protection Act, tightening restrictions on the trade and ownership of human remains taken as war trophies.
The official line has always been that this was aberrant behavior by a small minority. The numbers from the Mariana Islands suggest otherwise. When 60 percent of returned bodies are missing their heads, that's not a few bad apples. That's policy failure on a massive scale, dressed up in the language of individual wrongdoing.
The Pacific War was brutal in ways that the European theater simply wasn't, and some historians argue the mutilation has to be understood in the context of what both sides were doing. Japanese forces committed documented atrocities throughout Asia and against Allied prisoners of war. Rage, revenge, and the brutalizing effect of months in a jungle combat zone all played a role.
But the scale makes that explanation hard to sustain as a full defence. When 60 percent of repatriated bodies are missing their skulls, you're not looking at isolated breakdowns under pressure. You're looking at something that was tolerated, enabled, and in some cases celebrated. Bones were carved into letter openers and sent to congressmen. Skulls showed up in newspaper offices. Soldiers made strings of beads from teeth. The military banned it twice and prosecuted it almost never.
That's not a few soldiers losing their moral compass in the fog of war. That's a society that had decided a particular enemy didn't fully count as human, and whose institutions quietly agreed.
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