PART 2: On February 1, 1943, Life magazine published a photograph taken by Ralph Morse during the Guadalcanal campaign showing a severed Japanese head that U.S. Marines had propped up below the gun turret of a tank. Life received letters of protest from people "in disbelief that American soldiers were capable of such brutality toward the enemy." The editors responded that "war is unpleasant, cruel, and inhuman. And it is more dangerous to forget this than to be shocked by reminders." However, the image of the severed head generated less than half the amount of protest letters that an image of a mistreated cat in the very same issue received.
U.S. Marine Donald Fall recalls: "On the second day of Guadalcanal we captured a big Japanese bivouac with all kinds of beer and supplies ... But they also found a lot of pictures of Marines that had been cut up and mutilated on Wake Island. The next thing you know there are Marines walking around with ears stuck on their belts with safety pins. They issued an order reminding Marines that mutilation was a court-martial offense ... You get into a nasty frame of mind in combat. You see what's been done to you. You'd find a dead Marine that the enemy had booby-trapped. We found dead Japanese that were booby-trapped. And they mutilated the dead. We began to get down to their level" #reality #war #ww2 #trophies #hardcore #stayzero