‘Those who have consumed human flesh—excluding that of the enemy—will be sentenced to death for committing the worst possible crime against humanity’
—Order issued by the Eighteenth Army to Japanese troops, 10 December 1944, to clarify official position on cannibalism
On 13 October a corporal leading an Australian patrol near Templeton’s Crossing discovered two leaf-parcels of meat that aroused ‘distasteful suspicions’. He took them back to the battalion’s medical officer for examination. Captain Donnan concluded: ‘One was the muscle tissue of a large animal, the other similar muscle tissue with a large piece of skin and underlying tissues attached. I consider the last as human.’1
Earlier, there had been speculation about wild animals feasting on the troops, or fears that tribes might revert to their old head-hunting ways. George Johnston had written solemnly in his diary, ‘In the Trobriand Islands many of the natives had embarked on rape, pillaging and even cannibalism within 12 hours of the first Japanese landing. The same thing might easily happen in New Guinea.’2 Major-General Morris had earlier warned, that if ‘we lose control of the natives they will revert immediately to the primeval and it will take us at least 20 years to regain that control.’
Yet, while there were signs of recidivism in the western Highlands, the local Papuans had neither head-hunted nor cannibalised one another for about twenty years.*
The cannibals at Templeton’s Crossing were not natives. They were starving Japanese soldiers. The most disciplined army in the world had been reduced to the barbarity of the Stone Age. When the last horses died and the village gardens failed to yield any crops, they had resorted to eating the flesh of Australian corpses.
The shocking thing was not the act itself—which was comprehensible, given the extremity of their condition—but rather the manner in which the Japanese fastidiously prepared Australians for consumption. They cut the flesh in strips from the body, wrapped it in leaves and then fried the neat little parcels—reminiscent perhaps of a plate of sushi—on an open fire. ‘The taste is said to be good,’ noted Sakomoto, tactfully.3
An Australian patrol found the victims’ mutilated bodies on 15 October near Templeton’s Crossing. They were tied to trees, one with his arms cut off at the shoulders. Their thighs and calves were partially excoriated, and the flesh wrapped in leaves. Uneaten body parts were stored, half-cooked, in the haversacks of dead Japanese troops lying nearby. The findings were confirmed by an Australian medical officer and in a series of situation reports:4
SITREP to 1300. 15 Oct 42
WITHY reports finding in recently captured area a piece of raw flesh parcelled in green leaves also 2 bodies…1 minus arms and large piece of flesh cut from thigh other cuts on lower limbs. Signed report following.
SITREP 15 Oct 42. 2/25 bn reports finding in recently captured area piece of raw flesh wrapped in green.
The victims had been 3rd Battalion privates. The leader of their burial party, Lieutenant William Crombie, said at their graves: ‘These mutilations were obviously made by a sharp knife, and were not caused by bullets or bayonets. The men’s deaths were caused by a burst of [machine gun] fire in the chest and the other in the head.’5
Japanese diaries confirmed the practice, and suggest it was quite common. Yasuoka Fumitoshi, of the Tsukamoto Battalion, wrote on 18 October 1942: ‘No provisions. Some men are said to be eating the flesh of Tori [an abbreviation of Toriko, a captive]. It is said to have a good flavour.’6
Sakomoto, on 19th October 1942, noted: ‘Because of the food shortage, some companies have been eating the flesh of Australian soldiers…We are looking for anything edible and are now eating grass, leaves and the pith of the Tako tree…’*
It inspired him to write a short poem:
When we ran short of rations,
We devoured our own kind to stave off starvation.7
The sight of the mutilated corpses deepened the Australians’ loathing of the enemy, which reached a visceral intensity, and partly explained the ‘unusually murderous’ quality of Australian fighting in coming battles.8
‘This incensed all our party,’ wrote Lieutenant Don Murray, on finding a second member of his battalion partially eaten. The young Australian’s upper leg had been almost stripped of flesh, and ‘the feeling against the enemy was explosive’.9 Sixty-two years later, some veterans’ feelings remain numb. Recalling the incident, one said: ‘I have no feelings for the Jap—none whatsoever.’
It mattered little that the motive for cannibalism was survival and not premeditated cruelty. As a ‘crime against humanity’ it occupies a unique category, the predicate of the most extreme form of physical torment. Whether it represented the Japanese soldier’s ‘moral collapse between the equally potent tortures of hunger and despair’ is a question for the armchair analysts.10 Conventional morality, banished from the Japanese soldier’s mind during his military training, had no purchase in the jungles of Papua. In the grim logic of Horii’s army, the practice of eating the dead was an extreme form of military pragmatism, a rational response to his near total logistical failure.
In fact, a few Australian troops also succumbed to the temptation. An Australian patrol, lost and starving for weeks behind enemy lines, cannibalised one of their dead mates, according to research by George Friend and others. Other Australians, if not inured to the latest horror, came to comprehend it. Lieutenant Ken Clift wrote that he and his mates, on seeing partly eaten Australian bodies, ‘certainly did not condemn them on this’. Others could only respond with a macabre sense of humour: ‘Don’t go to sleep!’ warned members of the 2/2nd Battalion at night, for fear of losing an arm or leg.11
Acts of wanton cruelty, such as the bayoneting of live prisoners for no apparent reason other than training purposes, elicited the deepest loathing. But scenes of cannibalism exacerbated these feelings, and the Australians would retaliate with systematic thoroughness.
Many Japanese who surrendered were subsequently shot (often out of fear of booby traps as much as revenge). There were stories of sudden massacres of Japanese prisoners—dozens were later reported shot by enraged Australian troops. Charles Lindbergh wrote of Japanese being thrown out of planes (though it is unclear whether they were pushed or allowed to jump).
Killing the Japanese seemed to satisfy everyone: many of them preferred to die; the Australians wanted them dead; and the carriers were spared having to carry the wounded or sick prisoners to prison. ‘To men with no respect for the humanity of their enemy,’ wrote Mark Johnston, ‘the practical difficulties of the situation probably made killing them on the spot seem reasonable.’12
There was another dimension to the discovery. These were not isolated, frenzied acts of men tearing in desperation at human corpses. The consumption of human flesh was planned and organised, it appears, under a deliberate policy authorised by Japanese command.
For one thing cannibalism was widespread, and the flesh was carefully carved and divided up as though being prepared to feed many troops. The practice became more common as the Pacific War progressed.
Cannibalism was later officially sanctioned as a means of keeping the army not simply alive, but able to fight. This was formalised in an order issued on 10 December 1944 by the Eighteenth Army:13 ‘…those who have consumed human flesh—excluding that of the enemy—…will be sentenced to death for committing the worst possible crime against humanity’.*
To eat Japanese corpses was punishable by death, noted one official document (entitled ‘Discipline’). In the battles of the beaches, however, and in later campaigns, the Japanese did eat their own troops—though instances were rare. A Formosan prisoner of war, captured at Guadalcanal, told his interrogators that the Japanese had killed and eaten the heart and liver of one of his sixteen-year-old subordinates. He had also seen Japanese troops devour a fellow soldier who had been dead for two days.14
Some enemy prisoners apparently feared their Allied captors would eat them, too. A Japanese POW, who seemed to think he’d be cooked alive—perhaps in an open cauldron—‘shot through’ when ordered to report to the cookhouse ‘without his dixie’.15