PART 1: During WWII, US customs officials would routinely ask oncoming passengers at airport checkpoints if they were carrying any human trophies or body parts in their luggage due to the common and rampant practice of fighting men collecting and shipping human souvenirs from battlefields.
The majority of collecting occured in the Pacific theather. On Iwo Jima and the Marianas, roughly 60% of the Japanese remnants were missing their skulls.
As one young Marine recalled: "We learned about savagery from the Japanese ... But those sixteen-to-nineteen-year old kids we had on the Canal were fast learners ... At daybreak, a couple of our kids, bearded, dirty, skinny from hunger, slightly wounded by bayonets, clothes worn and torn, wack off three Japanese heads and jam them on poles facing the 'Jap-side' of the river ... The colonel sees heads on the poles and says, 'Jesus men, what are you doing? You're acting like animals.' A dirty, stinking young kid says, 'That's right Colonel, we are animals. We live like animals, we eat and are treated like animals–what the fuck do you expect?'." #reality