Почему они не хотели сдаваться
Милая обложка журнала Life от 22 мая 1944 года.
Заглянем под нее.
Arizona war worker writes her Navy boyfriend a thank-you note for the Japanese skull he sent her. This skull of a Japanese soldier bears the inscription: "Here is a good Jap -- a dead one!"
Работница военного завода в Аризоне пишет письмо своему приятелю в ВМФ США с благодарностью за то, что тот прислал ей в подарок череп японского солдата, с припиской "Хороший японец - мертвый!"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_mutilation_of_Japanese_war_dead
Эта иллюстрация из американского журнала была растиражирована и распространена японскими пропагандистами среди японского населения.
При перезахоронении в 1984 году японских солдат, погибших на Марианских островах, было установлено, что отсутствует 60% черепов погибших.
http://www.codoh.com/atro/atrusa1.html
Воспоминания американского солдата: позирование для фотокамеры с коброй в Индии и с японским черепом в Бирме: http://d21c.com/bgold5/indexA.html
Дополнение: стихи с описанием того, как обработать череп
"The US Sailor with the Japanese Skull" by Winfield Townley Scott
Bald-bare, bone-bare, and ivory yellow: skull
Carried by a thus two-headed US sailor
Who got it from a Japanese soldier killed
At Guadalcanal in the ever-present war: our
Bluejacket, I mean, aged 20, in August strolled
Among the little bodies on the sand and hunted
Souvenirs: teeth, tags, diaries, boots; but bolder still
Hacked off this head and under a leopard tree skinned it:
Peeled with a lifting knife the jaw and cheeks, bared
The nose, ripped off the black-haired scalp and gutted
The dead eyes to these thoughtful hollows: a scarred
But bloodless job, unless it be said that brains bleed.
Then, his ship underway, dragged this aft in a net
Many days and nights - the cold bone tumbling
Beneath the foaming wake, weed-worn and salt-cut
Rolling safe among fish and washed with Pacific;
Till on a warm and level-keeled day hauled in
Held to the sun and the sailor, back to a gun-rest,
Scrubbed the cured skull with lye, perfecting this:
Not foreign as he saw it first: death's familiar cast.
Bodiless, fleshless, nameless, it and the sun
Offend each other in strange fascination
As though one of the two were mocked; but nothing is in
This head, or it fills with what another imagines
As: here were love and hate and the will to deal
Death or to kneel before it, death emperor,
Recorded orders without reasons, bomb-blast, still
A child's morning, remembered moonlight on Fujiyama:
All scoured out now by the keeper of this skull
Made elemental, historic, parentless by our
Sailor boy who thinks of home, voyages laden, will
Not say, 'Alas! I did not know him at all'.