I'm reading Max Hastings Retribution and he says that it wasnt uncommon for Allied soliders to keep the skulls of dead japanese and polish them and even send them home.
Is that true? How was this viewed during the war? Was it allowed? What is the militarys view on mutilating enemy bodies like that during the war?
Short answer:
Yes we have records of this. The military's official view was that it was impermissible, and on occasion they attempted to suppress it, with only limited success. We can find articles on the popular media of the time boasting of the practice. For example, Life magazine of 22 May 1944 has a 'Picture of the Week', captioned : 'Arizona war worker writes her Navy boyfriend a thank-you note for the Jap skull he sent her'. Note that we don't know if this photo was authentic or staged, but it was plainly an idea that the public liked, or at least didn't find overwhelmingly revolting.
Discussion:
In answer to an earlier question,Captured samurai swords obtained during WWII regularly appear in American museums. How do museums address the question of whether these should be displayed vs. returned to Japanese families (if at all)?
. . . I had a section on this, which I'll excerpt here for clarity.
Much more troubling are more intimate trophies taken by soldiers-- notably skulls. It is an upsetting and unfortunately still necessary call on experts to identify such human remains as turn up from time to time
A small subfield of forensic anthropology concerns the identification and analysis of human skulls collected by military personnel as war souvenirs and trophies. Most of these relics originate in two twentieth-century conflicts: the Pacific War and the Vietnam War.' Many have come to light quite accidentally. In June 2003, for instance, detectives in the city of Pueblo, Colorado, searching a house for drugs, discovered a small trunk inscribed with the word 'Guadalcanal' and the date 'November 11 1942'. Finding a human skull inside, they seized it. Photographs taken by the coroner's office, and published in a local newspaper, showed that the skull bore many inscriptions . . .The skull also bore autographs of two or three dozen servicemen up to the rank of lieutenant colonel, and had been lacquered. The householder told the police that it was a family heirloom, and demanded its return. It was the skull, he said, of a Japanese soldier killed in the battle of Guadalcanal by his great-grandfather, Julius Papas. Papas and other members of his unit had signed their names and ranks on it and given it the nickname 'Oscar'. Forensic analysis by anthropologists at the US Army Central Identification Laboratory confirmed the probability of wartime Japanese origins, and in May 2004 the skull was handed over to the Japanese authorities for interment.
If it's not too nauseating, letters from soldiers explained fairly frankly what trophy hunting was like
We looked all over the island and in the hospital cave where the last fighting took place. There were dead Japs all over the place and I thought of sending Pack his Jap skull, but most were still being used slightly. We got some pens and stuff out of the pockets and one of the fellows got 2 bayonets. I got a rifle and other papers. There were a lot of helmets, canteens etc. lying around. The Japs were pretty ripe and one of the boys got sick
The book I list below, "Dark Trophies", is a systematic look by a cultural anthropologist at "trophy hunting" in war. His approach isn't as an historian, but it's useful to historians. The summary is "yes, this happened". We have records that it was a subject of consternation among military leadership
General George C. Marshall, U.S. Army Chief of Staff, was sufficiently disturbed by these accounts to radio General Douglas MacArthur in October 1943 about his "concern over current reports of atrocities committed by American soldiers"' This was followed in January 1944 by a directive from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to all theater commanders calling upon them to adopt measures to prevent the preparation of skulls and "similar items" as war trophies, and to prevent members of the armed forces and others from removing from the theater skulls and other objects which might be represented as Japanese body parts. Marshall's and the Joint Chiefs' effort to terminate the practice of collecting grisly mementos from Japanese war dead proved, however, to be ineffective
See:
Trophies of War: U.S. Troops and the Mutilation of Japanese War Dead, 1941-1945
Skull Trophies of the Pacific War: Transgressive Objects of Remembrance