Talk:American mutilation of Japanese war dead

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Talk:American mutilation of Japanese war dead/Archive 1


Contents

[edit] Neutrality tag

I added the tag due the the comments raised by other editors raised on this talk page - the tone of the article seems slanted and non-neutral. My main concern is that the article doesn't indicate how common this kind of behavior was before discussing it in detail - there's really only a single sentance on the extent to which this happened, and it's vauge. While it obviously isn't going to be possible to find any hard data on the incidence of this, the article needs to be much more explicit on just how big a problem it was - any cases of clear cut war crimes like this are going to greatly concern military officials and the media so it's not enough to simply say that it occured on "a scale large enough to concern the Allied military authorities throughout the conflict and was widely reported and commented on in the American and Japanese wartime press". My more specific concerns on the article include:

  • The 'Context' section is hopelessly biased as it basically states that the US military frequently committed war crimes against Asian opponents during the 20th Century (again, how common were these crimes?) and the Japanese war crimes against the Allies, which were a key driver of Allied soldiers attitudes towards Japanese troops, are relegated to single sentances in different parts of the article - this section basically states that these war crimes fit an established and underlying pattern of behaviour in the US military.
  • "Some Japanese were also guilty of mutilating U.S. corpses, but this was neither as widespread as the American practice nor for the purpose of taking trophies" given that from August 1942 onwards the Japanese very rarely captured the locations where battles were fought against US troops (and hence the bodies of the men killed in the battle) this is a dubious comparison, especially as Japanese troops were subjected to similar types of propaganda and, occassionally, resorted to canablism of Allied corpses on some occasions (which also sparked very deep horror among Allied troops).
  • the claim that this "contributed to a preference to death over surrender and occupation, shown, for example, in the mass civilian suicides on Saipan and Okinawa after the Allied landings" is dubious: Japanese troops were routinely fighting to the death rather than surrendering when faced by greatly superior forces from the early months of the war (eg, the Battle of Tulagi and Gavutu-Tanambogo and Battle of Buna-Gona) and there's considerable evidence that many of the civilian suicides at Saipain and Okinawa were the result of the Japanese military pressuring civilians to avoid the 'dishonour' of capture. This behaviour seems to have been more the result of Japanese beliefs and the culture of the time rather than a reaction to US war crimes, and it's also worth noting that the Japanese government invented Allied war crimes to terrorise the civilian population.
  • The 'Dehumanisation' section is also troublesome as a) it doesn't provide any link between propaganda and these particular crimes and b) there seems to be no reason to include the discussion of the small number of Japanese who tried to surrender and the even smaller number whose surrender was accepted (and Oct 44 isn't a great month to use given that it was shortly after the Cowra breakout in which 231 Japanese POWs were killed while trying to escape - the number of POWs at this single camp also makes me doubt the number claimed in the article given that there were also Japanese POWs at other camps in Australia, New Zealand, India and the US).
  • The article states that the US high command at every level issued directions against mutilating Japanese bodies, but does not state what impact this had - surely at least some US troops were punished if the directions were "partially" obeyed? - what impact did this have? --Nick Dowling (talk) 11:54, 28 April 2008 (UTC)


I will deal with your concerns one by one, it may take some days. I think a good start would be to point to other aspects of American criminal behavior, such as the fact that rape was general practice by U.S. soldiers against Japanese women. I will also expand on the Japanese reactions to the U.S. crimes, and on the U.S. motives for the crimes. But let me first just make a note on the:
"I added the tag due the the comments raised by other editors raised on this talk page".
As far as I can tell the comments you refer to are,
1. "The editors must hate Americans." Hardly a constructive comment and it should have been deleted a long time ago.
2. Ridiculous to have an article on the topic. At least 2 other editors have stated their disagreement to that opinion. Please don't tell me you agree with it?
3 I seem to remember on veteran recalling that they would stab Japanese soldiers as they passed because earlier, Japanese soldiers had pretended to be dead and then shot American soldiers in the back. This certainly is not the type of mutilations this article is about. It is more about this type of mutilations: the following is a description of color footage available of mutilations, taken by U.S. troops/reporters:
In another scene on the Japanese island of Okinawa a year later, a US soldier is filmed dragging a wounded enemy from a hiding place. Although the man has his ankles tied together, two bullets are fired into his knees and then, while he is still moving, shots are fired into his chest and head.
Other footage from Hell in the Pacific shows American soldiers using bayonets to hack at Japanese corpses while looting them. Former servicemen interviewed by researchers spoke of the widespread practice of looting gold teeth from the dead - and sometimes from the living.
4 Yes, I agree the article should be deleted, It is just as collection of sensationalist reporting a few occasional accidents to make a synthesis. I think my response to that particular comment should have been enough. If not, perhaps you will understand after checking these two comments. [1], [2].
Cheers --Stor stark7 Speak 13:35, 30 April 2008 (UTC)
What is your source for the claim that "rape was general practice by U.S. soldiers against Japanese women"? Everything I've read suggests the opposite: on the only occasions during the Pacific War when US troops encountered Japanese civilians (mainly on Saipan and Okinawa) the civilians were treated fairly well. The US occupation troops in Japan after the war also generally behaved well, and seem to have actually behaved better than the troops on occupation duties in Western Europe. Nick Dowling (talk) 03:44, 4 May 2008 (UTC)
I reply in detail on the rape question in the rape section below. Some quick and dirty answers to some of your other points follow here.
  • "other editors" -Dealt with.
  • "Tone seems slanted". I'm sorry you feel that way, I've done my best to be completely neutral. In fact I fear I may have gone overboard to the other side, since I haven't mentioned mutilations of living prisoners, the common practice of trading in body-parts etc.
  • "Extent" I think the section is quite large and good, for example mentioning the 60% figure.
  • Japanese war-crimes being the "key driver" for U.S. motives. I'm sorry, but that sounds like wishful thinking to me. The sources used mention it, but do not consider it to be a "key driver". They consider U.S. dehumanization of the Japanese to be the "key driver " for the mutilations. Funnily it seems to be partially the other way around, the U.S. authorities were afraid that knowledge of the mutilations would lead to Japanese atrocities against Allied prisoners, which perhaps it did. But sure, you find a source that identifies Japanese atrocities as a "key" instead of "secondary/tertiary" cause for U.S. mutilations, then by all means include it. The section would then have to include the names of the authors; A and B state that atrocities was the main reason, while C and D state that dehumanization was the main cause. Given that Americans were being issued theese (from here)...... (see also Jap hunts)
  • Japanese taking trophies. You have a point in that after the initial capture of the Philippines etc, i.e. after 1942 the Japanese would themselves had little opportunity to take G.I. heads home as decoration. Nevertheless, considering that for example the Australians and other Commonwealth troops were also taking heads, surely the Japanese would not have been so racist as to discriminate between the Allies if they themselves had such inclinations. Surely we would know of some headless Allied corpses from the Burma Campaign??? And note that the Americans were collecting heads as soon as they even got the chance.
  • "Japanese troops were routinely fighting to the death rather than surrendering." How convenient to state that. Hmmm... In 1943 it was noted in a secret intelligence report that "only the promise of ice cream and three days' leave would suffice to induce American troops not to kill surrendering Japanese."[1] I wonder why the Japanese seldom chose to try to surrender, hmmmm?
  • Japanese military pressuring civilians to avoid the 'dishonour' of capture. Let me point out two things here. 1. The article only says that the topic of the article contributed to the suicides, not that it was the sole cause of them (I will expand the article on that point nevertheless), and 2. Where do you get "dishonor" from? The closest thing I can find relating to what you may be talking about is this "Japanese soldiers used civilians as shields against the Americans, and persuaded locals that victorious American soldiers would go on a rampage of killing and raping."[3] Apparently nothing about "dishonor", more about the soldiers urging the civilians to choose death in order to be spared the fate of ending up in American hands, figuratively as in mass rapes (see section below), or literally as in letter openers (see the article we are discussing)....Granted, suicide doesn't necessarily keep the second thing from happening, but then perhaps dying from your own method is preferably to being killed by whatever methods Americans willing to turn parts of you into souvenirs might be inclined to use.
  • "This behaviour seems to have been more the result of Japanese beliefs and the culture of the time rather than a reaction to US war crimes, and it's also worth noting that the Japanese government invented Allied war crimes to terrorise the civilian population." Do you have any sources for those statements, particularly the "invented" part?
  • Prisoner numbers. If you really want I can provide you with more detailed numbers. Otherwise perhaps you will settle with knowing that once the value of prisoners was realized the U.S. command took efforts to stamp out the U.S. "take no prisoners" attitude. From Niall Fergussons paper on prisoner killing:
Similar efforts were made to encourage Japanese soldiers to surrender. ‘Surrender passes’ and translations of the Geneva Convention were dropped on Japanese positions, and concerted efforts were made to stamp out the practice of taking no prisoners. On 14 May 1944 General MacArthur sent a telegram to the commander of the Alamo Force demanding an ‘investigation . . . of numerous reports reaching this headquarters that Japanese carrying surrender passes and attempting to surrender in Hollandia area have been killed by our troops’.190 The Psychological Warfare Branch representative at X Corps, Captain William R. Beard, complained that his efforts were being negated ‘by the front-line troops shooting [Japanese] when they made an attempt to surrender’.191 But gradually the message got through, especially to more experienced troops. ‘Don’t shoot the bastard!’ shouted one veteran when a Japanese emerged from a foxhole waving a surrender leaflet.192 By the time the Americans took Luzon in the Philippines, ‘70 percent of all prisoners surrendering made use of surrender passes or followed exactly the instructions contained in them’. The Philippines had been deluged with over 55 million such leaflets, and it seems plausible to attribute to this propaganda effort the fall in the ratio of prisoners to Japanese dead from 1:100 in late 1944 to 1:7 by July 1945 (Figure 8). Still, the Japanese soldier who emerged with six surrender leaflets – one in each hand, one in each ear, one in his mouth, and one tucked in a grass band tied around his waist – was wise to take no chances.193
  • Impact - "surely at least some US troops were punished". Ha, god knows. A slap on the wrist perhaps. The soldier responsible for the notorious "Life Magazine picture of the week" that did so much P.R. damage was in the end, very reluctantly by the army/navy, tracked down. I'll expand on it in the article. Nimitz reluctantly recommended that he be given a "letter of censure" whatever that means. Doesn't sound very serious. And, there is no information on whether he received even that punishment. I'd say that taking skulls home from dead enemies during WW II seems to be a fairly non-risk business, probably the worst that'll happen is that the skull in question gets confiscated. Not really something that would keep people from getting a fresh one.
--Stor stark7 Speak 20:25, 5 May 2008 (UTC)
Those comments don't adress my concerns, or the concerns of other editors who you choose to dismiss - I agree that some of the above comments don't warrant any kind of response, but those made by Grandpafootsoldier and Molobo seem valid. Your statement that the 'Extent of practice' section is satisfactory is where I think that I disagree with you the most. This critical section is vauge and appears to be the main reason this article is criticised on grounds related to WP:UNDUE. In short, the article does not establish that this was a widespread problem before it then goes on to imply that it was and attribute this to US troops being brainwashed into violent racism and aparantly routine war crimes. Even the one bit of quantitative data you quote is unacceptably vauge: "In 1984 Japanese soldiers remains were repatriated from the Mariana Islands. Roughly 60 percent were missing their skulls" How many Japanese soldiers were repatriated? (thousands? a few?) and what evidence is there that the reason they lacked their heads was due to head hunting? If your sources state that Japanese attrocities had little impact on Allied troops opinions I think that you may need to widden your reading - for instance, attrocities were a key factor which lead to Australian troops developing a deep hatred for their Japanese opponents. I'm not going to bother debating the inncidence of Japanese troops attempting to surrender with you, though I do agree that Allied troops rarely accepted individual Japanese surrenders (this wasn't restricted to the Pacific War though - historically invididual soldiers attempting to surrender during battles have a high chance of being killed in the process, and such killings weren't uncommon in the European theatre of the war). Nick Dowling (talk) 11:18, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Rapes

This section is in reply to Nick Dowlings' question.

An estimated 10,000 Japanese women were eventually raped by American troops during the Okinawa campaign. H-Net review of The GI War against Japan: American Soldiers in Asia and the Pacific during World War II. According to Peter Schrijvers, rape was "a general practice against Japanese women".H-Net review of The GI War against Japan: American Soldiers in Asia and the Pacific during World War II According to a New York Times article from June 1, 2000 regarding the 1998 discovery of the corpses of 3 U.S. rapists killed by Okinawan villagers after repeated rape-visits by the group: "rape was so prevalent that most Okinawans over age 65 either know or have heard of a woman who was raped in the aftermath of the war." "3 Dead Marines and a Secret of Wartime Okinawa" New York Times, June 1, 2000

Okinawan historian Oshiro Masayasu (former director of the Okinawa Prefectural Historical Archives) writes based on several years of research:

Soon after the US marines landed, all the women of a village on Motobu Peninsula fell into the hands of American soldiers. At the time, there were only women, children and old people in the village, as all the young men had been mobilized for the war. Soon after landing, the marines "mopped up" the entire village, but found no signs of Japanese forces. Taking advantage of the situation, they started "hunting for women" in broad daylight and those who were hiding in the village or nearby air raid shelters were dragged out one after another.

Japan's Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution During World War II By Yuki Tanaka, Toshiyuki Tanaka, page 111

You should read the sources provided for the above paragraphs, they have much more additional information to give on the U.S. rapes of Japanese women.

You can also further read the books by Yuki Tanaka and John Dower. You can also check Joanna Bourke, An Intimate history of Killing, London, Granta Books, 1999, p. 354.

The following two books, with some pages available from Google Books, tell of continuing rapes during the years of Allied occupation.

The first book speaks of Japanese women being raped in the fields and in the U.S. military bases.

The later book tells the experience of a black soldier of the forces of occupation, a few years into the occupation.

The saddest thing was that some of the brothers also called the Okinawans gooks. They adopted the superior attitude of the american white man and they, too, though thought they were better than the Okinawans. They, too, did some of the things the whites did, especially to the women of Okinawa. Not so much, but enough to open my eyes.

There came a night when several men in my barracks whent out and brough back an elderly woman from a nearby village. They pulled a train on her, passing her from one bunk to another.

How could you put that gun to that womans head and then rape her like the white soldiers were doing all over the island of okinawa? When you heard about what the white soldiers were doing, how could you not think of slavery and what the man did to our women? How could you adopt the white man's way? How could you go out and kill brown men by day and rape brown women at night? How could you?--Stor stark7 Speak 08:33, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

I'm not convinved that those sources are sufficent to justify the statement that "rape was general practice by U.S. soldiers against Japanese women" (as this implies that most US troops were rapists), but am willing to conceed that I may have been wrong about the US troops on Okinawa. It's worth noting that over 7,000 Japanese prisoners were taken during this campaign, which suggests that the US Army and Marines weren't mindless murderers. --Nick Dowling (talk) 11:20, 6 May 2008 (UTC)
Gracious of you to concede that you "may have been wrong about U.S. troops on Okinawa". How about the U.S. troops in the rest of occupied Japan?: as stated in the H-NET review: "A figure that does not seem unlikely when one realizes that during the first 10 days of the occupation of Japan there were 1,336 reported cases of rape of Japanese women by American soldiers in Kanagawa prefecture alone".
As to the "It's worth noting"; We should also note that only 12,500 American soldiers were killed, while 66,000 Japanese soldiers were killed in Okinawa. We should also note that by this time the campaign to teach U.S. soldiers that prisoners were valuable for intelligence gathering reasons and therefore should be taken and kept alive had been ongoing for quite some time. As Ferguson writes: "it seems plausible to attribute to this propaganda effort the fall in the ratio of prisoners to Japanese dead from 1:100 in late 1944 to 1:7 by July 1945".
As to "...though I do agree that Allied troops rarely accepted individual Japanese surrenders"; I don't like the implied statement that you agree with something I've allegedly stated. I have not restricted myself to individual surrenders, nor claimed that it was a question of "not accepting surrender". It is a question of killing everyone, whether during individual or mass surrender attempts, and also of killing prisoners in the few cases such were taken. As Ulrich Straus writes; When prisoners nevertheless were taken, many times these were shot during transport because "it was too much bother to take [them] in".
And to further challenge preconceptions, lets quote the Research of another professor. Richard Aldrich:[4]
"the soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army were far from the cruel, mindless troops of popular legend" "Prof Aldrich has found Japanese diaries that belie the common perceptions that soldiers or even low-ranking officers were automata devoted fanatically to their emperor and the codes of bushido, hara-kiri and kamikaze." ""One young officer praises America and its ideas of democracy and modernity, while on another occasion a Japanese soldier voices out loud his envy of some Germans who had set up a sort of peacenik camp on New Guinea to get away from the war,""
"We have this stereotypical idea that the Japanese were all cruel and robotic while the Allied forces were tough but fair in their treatment of the enemy. But I was very surprised by much of what I found and had to rethink all those stereotypes." "Prof Aldrich found several examples confirming what became an American policy in some parts of the Pacific theatre not to take prisoners of war."
On one occasion he commented to a group of senior officers that very few Japanese seemed to be taken prisoner.: "Oh, we could take more if we wanted to," one of the officers replied. "But our boys don't like to take prisoners.
"It doesn't encourage the rest to surrender when they hear of their buddies being marched out on the flying field and machine-guns turned loose on them."
his allegations are supported by other American diarists, who report that the US marines, in particular, did not take many prisoners. Prof Aldrich also discovered new diaries showing that American generals worried about the abuse of human remains by their troops.
They were particularly concerned that the skulls of dead Japanese soldiers were often displayed as gruesome mascots by some units, while US marines made a speciality of collecting ears.
Australian troops are also shown not to like taking prisoners. Prof Aldrich quotes the 1943 diary of Eddie Stanton, an Australian posted to Goodenough Island off Papua New Guinea. "Japanese are still being shot all over the place," he wrote. "The necessity for capturing them has ceased to worry anyone. Nippo soldiers are just so much machine-gun practice. Too many of our soldiers are tied up guarding them."--Stor stark7 Speak 16:11, 7 May 2008 (UTC)
Am I correct in reading your above post to mean that you believe that very substancial numbers of Japanese attempted to surrender but were killed while trying to do so, and that this is a more important reason which explains the small number of Japanese POWs taken by the Allies than the Japanese military's hostile attitudes towards surrender? Nick Dowling (talk) 06:27, 8 May 2008 (UTC)
You are only partially correct. Yes, substantial numbers of Japanese were killed when trying to surrender. But, also, substantial numbers of Japanese were killed after surrendering, when they were POW's. And, yes, I believe this indirectly explains the small number of Japanese POW's. But this is not something I needed to figure out on my own. This comes from reading works focusing on the topic such as Niall Fergusson:
"it was not only the fear of disciplinary action or of dishonor that deterred German and Japanese soldiers from surrendering. More important for most soldiers was the perception that prisoners would be killed by the enemy anyway, and so one might as well fight on." (He is referring to Germans on the Eastern front, by the way). This is from "Prisoner Taking and Prisoner Killing in the Age of Total War: Towards a Political Economy of Military Defeat", War in History, 2004, 11 (2): p.176.
Judging by your surprise about the massive rapes, and comments such as "it's also worth noting that the Japanese government invented Allied war crimes to terrorise the civilian population." and " "on the only occasions during the Pacific War when US troops encountered Japanese civilians (mainly on Saipan and Okinawa) the civilians were treated fairly well. The US occupation troops in Japan after the war also generally behaved well, and seem to have actually behaved better than the troops on occupation duties in Western Europe." I'm not at all confident about the NPOV or scholarly quality of the sources you've read to give you your impression of the Pacific conflict.--Stor stark7 Speak 10:12, 8 May 2008 (UTC)
As noted above, I don't intend to engage in a debate with you on the topic of prisoner killing, especially as you seem to hold an unusual view on the subject (eg, that lots of Japanese wanted to surrender but were prevented from being able to successfully do so) and I agree with your basic point that Allied troops generally didn't take prisoners in the Pacific - though the reason for this is more complex than just racism (blue eyed and blond haired members of the Waffen SS were also lucky to be taken prisoner in Europe). I still maintain that this article does not establish that "American mutilation of Japanese war dead" was a serious problem or is attributable mainly to violent racism, and you have not added further sources to prove this point. Nick Dowling (talk) 03:53, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Borneo

I've been informed that the book "All Elevations Unknown: An Adventure in the Heart of Borneo" might be of interest.[5] Or rather, the older memoir book it often refers too and that forms the heart of the book. "World Within", by Tom Harison, the Memoirs of a British officer parashoted into Borneo. Apparently the Allies recruited local headhunter tribes to form irregular outfits, run by Allied officers, to fight the Japanese. Needless to say, having dedicated headhunters as Allied troops was bound to lead to atrocities. If more scholarly information on the topic is available somewhere it might form part of the context section, or form the basis of its own article.--Stor stark7 Speak 16:11, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

Those guerillas were coordinated and supported by the Australian Z Special Unit, and were indeed encouraged to use their 'traditional' forms of warfare against the Japanese (some of the headhunter tribes of Borneo are still doing this when faced with Indonesian police and soldiers). The Australian-lead New Guinean irregulars also sometimes engaged in head hunting, which is their traditional form of warfare (which is also practiced to this day in the Papuan Highlands). That said, I think that you're grasping at straws if you're thinking of including that kind of material in this article as an example of racist attrocities. Nick Dowling (talk) 22:11, 7 May 2008 (UTC)
Dear Nick Dowling, thanks for the background information, but: "you're grasping at straws"??? Let me explain; this article is about the mutilation of dead Japanese soldiers, and the taking of their body parts as trophies or souvenirs. I further have no need to "grasp straws", I have two excellent scholarly articles on the topic. I'm not the one in need of trying to cherry pick quotes from commercially oriented literature targeted at a western audience which may only mention the topic in passing, and then probably in a not very researched nor accurate manner.--Stor stark7 Speak 10:20, 8 May 2008 (UTC)
There seems to me to be a very large difference between the behaviours of warriors from what were, at the time, pre-modern societies in which mutilation of enemy corpses was considered an entirely routine, acceptable and honourable part of warfare and soldiers from the world's most advanced country in which such behaviour was, at least in theory, a serious war crime. Morover, the topic of the article is "American mutilation of Japanese war dead", so the behaviour of Australian-led tribemen seems a bit out of scope (though I'd welcome expanding the scope of the article, which seems too narrow - War crimes of the Pacific War would help put things in perspective). I'm interested to see that you're dismissing Bergerud, whose book is regarded as a minor classic on the combat behaviour and experiances of American soldiers, as he offers another explation than those advanced in the narrow sources you're using (which includes the very commercially oriented Niall Ferguson, who is in no way a specialist on WW2 or military history). Bergerud is a specialist military historian who interviewed dozens of US and Australian soldiers for his book, which is a frank account of how the war was fought and is in no way a 'Greatest Generation' style history. Nick Dowling (talk) 03:45, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
I've added some information on Australians to the 'context' section to make the point that this behaviour wasn't limited to US troops and, for Australians at least, revulsion at Japanese attrocities was the main factor which lead to war crimes - though racism and a lack of understanding played a key role (I'd argue that Australia was much more racist and anti-Japanese than the US prior to the war and Australian soldiers were subjected to similar propaganda). Nick Dowling (talk) 08:48, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

We already have the article Allied_war_crimes_during_World_War_II#The_Pacific. As to Bergeruds explanation, what does he base it on? As far as I could gather it is mainly a retelling of some soldiers memoirs. Is it a soldiers claim that he his just restating, or has he done a proper analysis of the topic by reviewing multiple sources, as is done in the two main sources for this article: Trophies of War: U.S. troops and the mutilation of Japanese War Dead, 1941 - 1945, Skull trophies of the Pacific War? I'm working on expanding the article as per your request, mainly based on the Japanese reaction. I will add it in a few days. It will f**k up the structure of the article, but that's the way it will have to be for now.As to Fergusson, and the other two sources, at least they have focused their research on the topic of prisoner killing/trophy hunting. They are far more valuable as sources than some author who deigns to mention it in passing without doing any proper analysis first since it is not the focus of his work.--Stor stark7 Speak 15:59, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

Bergerud states that his book is based on "dozens of original interviews with American and Australian veterans of the conflict". The men he interviewed discussed killing wounded and surrendered Japanese in very frank terms (including what seems to have been an incident where sick Japanese in a hospital area were methdologically killed as some of them were holding live grenades - see pages 420-21), and the book's coverage of the factors which drove Allied attitudes towards Japanese and the kinds of incidents which occured runs for 22 pages. Mark Johnson's excellent book on Australian soldiers combat behaviour (which is regarded as the best book on the topic) is based on interviews with veterans and Army files - especially field censorship reports which tracked what soldiers were saying in private letters and conversations - and comes to pretty much the same conclusions about Australian troops as Bergerud came to about US troops. The sources you prefer might argue that US soldiers were racist murderers, but other sources state that there was more to it than just this and a desire for revenge and responses to most Japanese soldiers unwillingness to surrender where the most important factors which generated hatred for Japanese troops. If authors who publish detailed books on Allied soldiers combat behaviour in the Pacific mention mutilations "in passing" I'd argue that this indicates that the mutilations weren't all that common and this article is placing undue weight on the topic (Niall Ferguson devotes less than half a page to the topic in 'The War of the World' and discusses prisoner killing in much greater detail - this appears to be a common ratio). At present, almost all of the article is sourced to two journal articles by Harrison and Weingartner which focus on this narrow topic - while these are reliable sources under WP:V (I don't have access to JSTOR or blackwell-synergy.com so I'm afraid that I can't read them) books published by major and serious publishing houses (and you don't get much bigger than Penguin Books) are also considered reliable. Nick Dowling (talk) 00:36, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
My thinking is that this article should be merged into the greater Allied atrocities/war crimes article (Allied_war_crimes_during_World_War_II). Note the following section: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_war_crimes_during_World_War_II#Mutilation_of_Japanese_war_dead. My thinking is that this article has gotten a little out of hand and become a bit more "editorial" than is healthy.Rodan32 (talk) 05:41, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
The Entry in the WW II crimes section is simply because this was a recognized War crime. It is a short section, with an unusually long section on the legal aspects. The latter is due to the fact that wikipedia beginners have a tendency to try to delete such information otherwise from that article unless it is written on their noses. This topic deserves its own article where the topic is explained in detail, and to which it can be pointed to from relevant associated areas using a short summary, such as the War Crimes article, the War trophy article, or the Head Hunting article.--Stor stark7 Speak 16:43, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Vietnam

i was always under the impression that what went on of this behaviour in nam was confined to ears. when i returned i, and everyone i was with, had to go through u.s. customs (like we'd been tourists,lol) and all contraband (grenades, ammunition and others too numerous to mention) was confiscated. no way anybody got through with a @#$%$#@ing skull.Toyokuni3 (talk) 02:07, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

Yes, obviously there are fewer Vietnam War skulls in the U.S. than WWII skulls, partly because of this stricter vetting at customs during Vietnam. Probably much was caught and disposed of there, they didnt bother taking them home, or they tried to get it home through other means. See for example Eerie Souvenirs From the Vietnam War. See also this picture of a Vietnamese skull, nicelly graphitied by the GI's.
Military forensic pathologists at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology see one or two cases each year of trophy remains from the pacific theatre of world war II and Vietnam. Skulls from World War II were actually easier to bring home, since the bags of returning U.S. military personel were not searched like they were after Vietnam.[6]
I also have to agree with you on the other part, it seems more emphasis was put on softer body parts during the Vietnam war.
American and Australian soldiers in vietnam also collected body parts, and some GIs strung ears or fingers around their necks, calling them "love beads" to parody the peace movement back home. One marine recounted:
We used to cut their ears off....If a guy would have a necklace of ears, he was a good killer, a good trooper. It was encouraged to cut ears off. A female, you cut her breasts off. It was encouraged to do these things. the officers expected you to do it or there was something wrong with you.[7]
Cheers--Stor stark7 Speak 16:36, 7 June 2008 (UTC)
What's your source for the claim that Australian soldiers did this? I'm an Australian and have read fairly extensively about the Australian war in Vietnam, and have never seen any such claim. Nick Dowling (talk) 00:12, 9 June 2008 (UTC)
All I wrote in the text above is referenced next to the text --Stor stark7 Speak 01:52, 9 June 2008 (UTC)
Two additional sources on Australians.[8], [9] Per your arguments in the section below the fact that such unsavory things are apparently not mentioned in the literature prepared for your consumption means it did not happen or should not be mentioned in Wikipedia?--Stor stark7 Speak 02:34, 9 June 2008 (UTC)
Interesting. I note that the caption states that skull on display at 5 RAR's base was quickly removed and the other story is from a bar night. As for your second point: yes, I do think that topics which are judged unimportant by specialist authors should also be judged unimportant by Wikipedia. This article rests largely on two specialist papers in journals, which isn't a great basis for a lengthy article, and probably explains why this article both repeats and contradicts itself at present. Nick Dowling (talk) 05:56, 9 June 2008 (UTC)
I was under the impression that it was you that had inserted the contradictions, but that is OK with me, it's only natural that "researchers" have differing opinions. As to the sources, what do you expect me to dig up on 5 minutes notice? I'd be rather alarmed that it was possible to find something that easily, despite your profession of ignorance. It's interesting that you fail to mention that the skull atop the kill board was removed together with the scoreboard because the score suddenly no longer was quite in the Australians favor... Actually I judge on-topic scholarly papers such as those that make their way into JSTOR, scientific work which have been peer reviewed, are preferable to snippets from books for popular consumption and on other topics, where the only reviewing is done by the publishing editor.--Stor stark7 Speak 13:42, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] undue weight

be careful of giving undue weight to this phenomenon. From reading this article, I still don't know if it's common or not. One sentence says it's not widespread, another says it's serious enough to cause concern in the allied high command. The article also disregards the common practice of Japanese soldiers to fight to the end and not surrender. As it is the article is very biased and spotty, and when a few selected authors make such claims, their names need to be present in the article, so that their claims would not be taken as commonly entrenched beliefs when they are not. Blueshirts (talk) 20:38, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I agree - see the discussion above. Reliable histories of the experiances of US soldiers in the Pacific Theatre generally devote 2-3 pages on this topic. Nick Dowling (talk) 00:10, 9 June 2008 (UTC)
And the number of pages devoted to it in lightweight popular consumption literature means exactly what? How many pages do they devote to rape? Does that mean it did not occur or was insignificant? How about rape during the European campaign?--Stor stark7 Speak 01:21, 9 June 2008 (UTC)
I don't think that I'd call Dower, Schrijvers or Bergerud's books 'lightweight popular consumption literature'. Nick Dowling (talk) 06:01, 9 June 2008 (UTC)
I just found a PDF version of the article by Simon Harrison which is the article's major source. The article is anoyingly vauge about the incidence of this behavior, but clearly states that only a minority of US troops took body parts and few of these took skulls or bones - this qualifier was missing from the article. Nick Dowling (talk) 01:02, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Skull collecting

The claims of skull collecting in the Harrison paper don't make sense to me. Both he and Dower note that it was rare for US soldiers to collect Japanese heads, and that this was considered abhorent by the great majority of US personnel, but he then goes on to discuss it as if it was common. I'd be interested to know what the response to the article from readers of the journal was - Stor, can you access the letters pages of subsequent editions? Nick Dowling (talk) 05:52, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

No, I'm afraid I don't have that access. Could you please quote the contradictions?--Stor stark7 Speak 13:43, 9 June 2008 (UTC)
The contradiction is that the majority of Harrison's article is devoted to collecting heads, which he claims was in-line with US attitudes of the time, but yet both he and Dower state that this was actually rare and that the great majority of US troops considered such behaviour to be disgusting. The undue space Harrison devotes to this in his article seems to have been reflected in this article. Nick Dowling (talk) 10:31, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
I think we need to get two things clear. 1. The focus of Harrisons article is on trying to explain the use of Japanese body parts, (of which skulls constituted a minor segment, the majority were teeth and other such parts). In this work Harrison relies on modern war literature, articles on the recovered remains, and the pre-eminent research on the topic. ^ James J. Weingartner (February, 1992). "Trophies of War: U.S. Troops and the Mutilation of Japanese War Dead, 1941-1945". Pacific Historical Review 61 (1): 556. It only costs $12.00 USD (plus tax, where applicable) to download from the publisher, considering your apparent strong intest on the topic I'm surprised you haven't done so already. Either that or gone to an university library and accessed it there for free.
2 Some Australians and Americans may have considered skull taking "disgusting", but this certainly did not extend to other body part souvenir taking which was far more accepted.
Again, please provide specific citations where authors contradict each others, not just you summary interpretation.--Stor stark7 Speak 10:53, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Unreliable references

I have removed two references from the article:

  • the frist H-Net Review: Xavier Guillaume on The GI War against Japan: American Soldiers in Asia and the Pacific during World War II wrongly claims that Peter Schrivvers' wrote that the bodies of most dead Japanese were desecrated. He does not make this claim on the page of the book where it is attibuted to him (pg 209 of the 2002 edition) and I can't find it elsewhere in the book. Instead he states that "yet the enemy dead were not always simply ignored" and then has a single para on the mistreatment of corpses (his argument is that it was far more common for the Americans to ignore Japanese corpses than it was for them to desecrate them - not sure if that belongs in the article?).
  • The second, War, Journalism, and Propaganda, An Analysis of Media Coverage of the Bosnian and Kosovo Conflicts, by Carl K. Savich seems to be a self-published and entirely unreferenced essay from someone who, in other writings, states that US policy in Kosovo was the same as Hitler's (see: [10] ). This doesn't meet the requirements at WP:V. Nick Dowling (talk) 06:34, 9 June 2008 (UTC)
    • I can't speak for the first but the second one is not a big deal since that photo by ralph morse is available from the gettyimages.com library if you want to see it (as with the other life magazine skull photograph), I guess the reader reaction and commentary will have to be separately sourced, but the fact the photograph was published with the original caption is fact Thisglad (talk) 07:06, 9 June 2008 (UTC)
Yeah, I removed the text in the article which was attributed to the first citation as it is clearly wrong, but left the text attributed to the second citation in the article with a request that a citation be provided. Nick Dowling (talk) 07:10, 9 June 2008 (UTC)
Refering to the first, is it on the same page were he apparently states ""American soldiers on Okinawa were seen urinating into the gaping mouth of the slain. They were 'rebutchered.' 'As the bodies jerked and quivered,' a marine on Guadalcanal wrote of the repeated shooting of corpses, 'we would laugh gleefully and hysterically'""? Is there no other qualification of prevalence?--Stor stark7 Speak 14:03, 9 June 2008 (UTC)
Yes, those quotes are on that page of the book, but Schrivvers does not state that the majority of Japanese dead were mutilated as was being attributed to him by that reviewer. He only seems to have two paras (not the one I noted earlier) on the subject of this article in his book, which explores the worst aspects of the Pacific War in detail. These paras read "Yet the enemy dead were not always simply ignored. They were desecrated." and which is followed by story about Okinawa, the shooting of corpses on Guadacanal, US Army engineers collecting teeth on New Georgia, sailors ibce preserving the leg of a Kamikaze off Okinawa [which Harrison quotes], US troops collecting the ears of Japanese snipers on Okinawa to prove that they'd completed their missions and a slighly skeptical account of a marine having seen some scalped Japanese corpses. There's nothing about how prevalent such behaviour was and Schrivvers spends almost full page describing how US troops often left Japanese corpses alone and unburried (which is itself poor behaviour and a war crime in some circumstance, but again he simply says that this happened 'often' - I've read other accounts which state that Allied troops were generally swift to bury corpses as they were a massive health hazzard in the tropics, so am skeptical about this) Nick Dowling (talk) 10:27, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

While I don't think we can do much about direct quotes (an attributed quote is always neutral), I do think they should mostly be moved into a well-labelled "Analysis" section regarding the different opinons of motivation and condemnation instead of spread all throughout the article. Right now, it's difficult at-a-glance to distinguish between fact and opinion.

That said, some quick problems I can pick out:

  • "Since the Japanese were regarded as animals it is not surprising that the Japanese remains were treated in the same way as animal remains" - Not attributed as a quote, so reads as a fact
  • Links to racism are, at best, indirectly related so shouldn't really be here
  • The propoganda image isn't needed, most propoganda posters of that time (from all sides) showed the enemy as inhuman
  • "Marines did not consider they were killing men. They were wiping out dirty animals" - needs to be attributed

Oberiko (talk) 13:18, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

I'm getting fed up, Both Racism, and the imagery most definitely have their place in the article.
And how exactly do you motivate the claims that most propoganda posters of that time (from all sides) showed the enemy as inhuman, even if it were true - of which I'm not so certain and there probably are severe degree differences - how is that relevant? We are talking on the effect of American propaganda. which documentedly was severe.
Straight quotes:
Harrisson:
In the case of the Euro-American armed forces, the answer has much to do with racism. Trophy-taking in these organizations seems to have become progressively racialized during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, tending increasingly to be limited to wars which mapped strongly onto social divisions of race. The Pacific War is a paradigm case of such a conflict. Conspicuous in wartime representations of the Japanese was the pervasive use of animal terms: monkeys, rats, cockroaches, lice, vermin, reptiles, and so forth. Japanese soldiers were portrayed as brutish, simian, often rabid, with an affinity for jungles and jungle warfare unfathomable to civilized combatants. In short, for many Americans in particular, the conflict in the Pacific was a war (for some, a war to the death) between peoples or races – almost between species – in a way that the war in Europe was not.
Weingartner:
The explanation for this goes far beyond the fact that the United States had been the victim of a Japanese "surprise attack," whereas Germany and Italy initiated war by means of formal and "gentlemanly" declarations. To a much greater degree than Germans (and certainly Italians), Japanese became dehumanized in the minds of American combatants and civilians, a process facilitated by the greater cultural and physical differences between white Americans and Japanese than between the former and their European foes. It was, moreover, an outgrowth of a long history of white antipathies towards "colored races" -American Indians, blacks, and Asians-which had frequently found expression in acts of murderous violence.2
...widely held view of the Japanese as less than human. This view was reflected in and stimulated by imagery, both pictorial and verbal, propagated by the U.S. mass media. In the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the press applied to the Japanese such terminology as "mad dogs" and "yellow vermin." An article in the U.S. Army weekly Yank referred to Japanese working on the airfield on Guadalcanal as "termites." The official U.S. Navy film on the capture of Tarawa characterized the Japanese defenders as "living, snarling rats." Pictorially, Japanese were commonly represented as apes or monkeys, but also as insects, reptiles, and bats. A particularly repugnant caricature appeared on the cover of Collier's magazine commemorating the first anniversary of the air raid on Pearl Harbor. A hideous, slant-eyed creature with huge fangs and large, pointed ears, wearing a "samurai sword," is shown descending on Oahu on bat wings, preparing to loose a bomb on the ships anchored in the harbor beneath.3
The mixture of underlying racism exacerbated by wartime propaganda in combination with hatred generated by Japanese aggression and real and imagined atrocities was a potent brew. The Japanese were loathed more intensely than any enemies of the United States before or since.
One U.S. veteran of the Pacific war has written that: the Japanese made a perfect enemy. They had so many characteristics that an American Marine could hate. Physically, they were small, a strange color and, by some standards, unattractive... . Marines did not consider that they were killing men. They were wiping out dirty animals.4
The widespread conviction that the Japanese were "animals" or "subhuman" had its battlefield consequences. American troops were notoriously reluctant to take prisoners which, along with the equally notorious reluctance of Japanese troops to surrender, accounts for the fact that the maximum number of Japanese prisoners in U.S. operated POW compounds was a mere 5,424. As late as October 1944, no more than 604 Japanese had been captured by all of the Allied power^.^ In the minds of many American soldiers, combat against Japanese troops assumed the character of a hunt, the object of which was the killing of cunning, but distinctly inhuman creatures.
If, moreover, as a Marine Corps general noted, "Killing a Japanese was like killing a rattlesnake," then it might not seem inappropriate to detach something comparable to the reptile's skin or rattles for the pleasure of the victorious combatant and the entertainment of his friends and relatives back home.
The percentage of U.S. troops who engaged in the collection of Japanese body parts cannot be ascertained, but it is clear that the practice was not uncommon. U.S. Marines on their way to Guadalcanal relished the prospect of making necklaces of Japanese gold teeth and "pickling" Japanese ears as keepsakes.10 An American officer told Charles Lindbergh in 1944 that he had seen Japanese bodies with ears and noses cut off. Our boys cut them off to show their friends in fun, or to dry and take back to the States when they go. We found one Marine with a Japanese head. He was trying to get the ants to clean the flesh off the skull, but the odor got so bad we had to take it away from him. "It is the same story everywhere I go," Lindbergh concluded.ll
A Marine Corps veteran of the fierce fighting on Peleliu recorded in his memoirs the horrific scene of another Marine extracting gold teeth from the jaw of a wounded but still struggling Japanese, a task which he had attempted to facilitate by slashing his victim's cheeks from ear to ear and kneeling on his chin.12 Atrocities of this nature were widely reported. Early in 1943, Yank published a cartoon depicting the parents of an American soldier receiving a pair of "Jap" ears mailed to them by their loving "Junior," then fighting in the Pacific.13 Newspapers regaled "the folks back home" with a story of a U.S. soldier collecting Japanese teeth and of another service-man who purportedly possessed photographs illustrating the steps in "cooking and scraping" the heads of Japanese dead for souvenir skulls.14 Such photographs may have been included in a large number of sets of lurid prints which had been sold by Seabees on Guadalcanal to merchant seamen and which, to the navy's consternation, found wide circulation on the West Coast, particularly among patients in the naval hospitals at San Diego and Oakland.15 In the context of a war characterized by the slaughter of tens of millions, the mutilation of those already dead may seem a trivial matter, and was regarded as relatively unimportant by the military and naval leaders whose responsibility it was to guide U.S. forces to victory. But these acts vividly symbolized the racist attitudes which informed the U.S. war against Japan. To be sure, objections to the desecration of Japanese dead were raised by armed forces jurists, the State Department, religious leaders, and private citizens, but to many Americans the Japanese adversary was no more than an animal, and abuse of his remains carried with it no moral stigma. The widespread inability to empathize with the purportedly subhuman foe was dramatically reflected in the contrast between American treatment of Japanese dead and the extreme solicitude shown by the United States for its own war dead which were interred in elaborate cemeteries or brought back to the United States after the war at considerable expense.
Please provide backing support/citations for any opinions on the article. Thank you.--Stor stark7 Speak 17:49, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Gathering support on other talk pages

I've noticed that Nick Dowling has several times on other talk pages been trying to bring in editors to comment on/edit this article, sometimes giving his POV view of it. Now, going around to talk pages where there may be editors prone to support your POV, and particularly trying to bias them beforehand is not very nice. I propose that this behaviour stop, or that we agree on a neutral text to use when inviting people on other talk pages to comment,e.g. "please have a look at article x". May I also humbly request that from now on we list here which other articles talk pages we try to bring in people from? Thank You Very Much!--Stor stark7 Speak 17:43, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

That is no more than an unofficial WP:RfC. It's a common practice when article need more 'eyes on' or may be considered by the prevailing orthodoxy - systematic bias - borderline. Given that en:Wikipedia is to a great degree edited by male Caucasians from the first world with enough money to own a computer, access the internet, and have time to spare, we are biased in a particular way. This is not a nice article and will not fit with many users' preconceptions. It needs to be balanced a little more - expansion of the 'Revenge' section with links to articles discussing Japanese war crimes, to expand on motivations more, have all the citation tags given sources, as quickly as possible, and have its supporting references thoroughly checked, but at an initial first glance, it's a detailed look at a particularly nasty bit of World War II, not much more. I haven't done the detailed line-by-line analysis that Nick has yet, though. Buckshot06(prof) 22:02, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
As noted by Buckshot, this is a standard part of the dispute resolution process - I had no problem with you raising this matter at Wikipedia talk:Neutral point of view#Undue Weight Criteria a few days ago as it's a very good place to seek other editors' views on this topic, as is the relevant Wikiproject. Given that my views on this article are very clear on this talk page, I didn't see any reason to pretend that I was neutral when I sought Buckshot's views (on the grounds that I respect his views and experiance in dealing with articles on sensititve topics and I have provided him with a second opinion in the past - which hasn't always agreed with his views) and the views of other editors on the WW2 Wikiproject. Editors who have responded to these two notifications have provided views which are somewhat more measured than my own - their views are that this is a legitimate topic for an article, but the article needs more comprehensive sourcing and tighter wording. These look like good ideas to me and a good way forward for the article. Nick Dowling (talk) 08:28, 11 June 2008 (UTC)
I have no problem with enlisting additional editors, as long as the enlisting is done using a neutral wording and does not predispose a certain POV in those who are induced to participate here, e.g. by using words such as "fringe views" and stating POV opinions as if they were facts.
To try to bring a more balanced editor population besides those interested in "war" topics, I've asked for contributions from the Japan and the Sociology projects. Although somehow, based on the assumed demographics of the wikipedia editing population, I sadly have the inkling that those reading those portals will be quite significantly fewer in number than those reading the military portal etc talk pages.--Stor stark7 Speak 15:24, 11 June 2008 (UTC)
No worries. I've also invited comments at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject United States. Nick Dowling (talk) 08:02, 12 June 2008 (UTC)