I Wish This Was Too Sick To Be True

May 22, 1944 Life Magazine Picture of the Week, "Arizona war worker writes her Navy boyfriend a thank-you-note for the Jap skull he sent her"

I recently read an article that described, but did not reproduce the photo shown above. It described WWII soldiers keeping body parts of the Japanese thay had killed as souvenirs. I thought this HAD to be an urban legend, but horribly, it is not. According to Wikipedia:

During World War II, some United States military personnel mutilated dead Japanese service personnel in the Pacific theater of operations. The mutilation of Japanese service personnel included the taking of body parts as “war souvenirs” and “war trophies”. Teeth and skulls were the most commonly taken "trophies", although other body parts were also collected.
The phenomenon of "trophy-taking" was widespread enough that discussion of it featured prominently in magazines and newspapers, and Franklin Roosevelt himself was reportedly given, by a US Congressman, a gift of a letter-opener made of a man's arm (Roosevelt later ordered that the gift be returned and called for its proper burial). The behavior was officially prohibited by the U.S. military, which issued additional guidance as early as 1942 condemning it specifically. Nonetheless, the behavior continued throughout the war in the Pacific Theater, and has resulted in continued discoveries of "trophy skulls" of Japanese combatants in American possession, as well as American and Japanese efforts to repatriate the remains of the Japanese dead."

The Wikipedia article pulls no punches --it gets into material far too disturbing to include here. If you want to read it, it should be easy to find on a search of Wikipedia.org.

This was apparently a racist based behavior, as there is no record of U.S soldiers keeping souvenirs of Germans' remains.