The publication by the Los Angeles Times of photographs of American servicemen in Afghanistan posing with the body parts of dead insurgents has provoked a lively exchange of opinion in the media. Some feel the newspaper did wrong by exposing troops to possible retaliation. Some are appalled by the corrupting effect of war on young minds. Others defend the trophy-hunters: 'war is war'.
But how did this ghoulish practice start? My interest in this began afer I was asked by a Japanese veteran, while on a reporting assignment to Iwo Jima, whether it was the Western custom to mutilate the bodies of the dead.
In June 1944, the syndicated Washington columnist Drew Pearson described an informal gathering held at the White House on the eve of D-Day in Europe:
Representative Francis Walter of Pennsylvania presented the President with an odd gift during the visit — a letter opener made from the forearm of a Jap soldier killed in the Pacific.
'This is the sort of gift I like to get,' the President said as it was placed on his desk.
Representative Walter apologised for presenting such a small part of the Jap's anatomy. But the President interrupted him. 'There'll be plenty more such gifts,' he said.
A fortnight earlier, Life magazine's 'Picture of the Week' had shown a young woman admiring a souvenir from her serviceman-boyfriend in New Guinea: a skull inscribed 'This is a good Jap — a dead one'. Some American church leaders were appalled and called for an end to 'isolated acts of desecration', but their appeal had little effect.
Just as in Afghanistan, American and Australian soldiers fighting the Japanese saw themselves pitted against an opponent who acted by a different — inhuman — set of rules.
You shot rather than captured them because a surrendering soldier was likely to be foxing. You poured automatic fire into the dead and dying in case their bodies were booby-trapped. You hurled phosphorus grenades into their hiding places because they did not have the sense to come out. 'We learned to kill them before they killed us' and 'They made you do it' were common refrains.
The rubric does not stand up to closer examination. It fails to explain, for instance, the cutting of the throats of wounded enemy;