A group of POWs huddles for warmth in a dense, wet jungle. They haven’t eaten in days,
are dying from disease, and are still forced to work 12-hour shifts by their Japanese captors. As
they try to get some rest before another grueling day begins, they hear the screams of one of their
comrades. They close their eyes and pray that the soldiers don’t come for them next. Every night
someone is taken, and the smell of burnt flesh fills the air. The fire where the meat is cooked
casts long, dark shadows through the trees of the jungle as another human is eaten by cannibals.
War can turn men into monsters. Perhaps there is no better example of this than World War
II. In Europe, the Nazis were murdering Jews and people who didn’t fit into their ideology
by the millions. In the Pacific theater, countless war crimes were committed by both sides.
And it was here that a gruesome secret would be uncovered after the war ended. Not only were
POWs being mistreated and tortured, but in some cases, they were being eaten by other humans.
We are about to investigate several cases of cannibalism during World War
II. You might want to prepare yourself to be shocked and appalled
because there are no happy endings to these stories.
On September 2, 1944, an American bomber flew towards Chichijima Island, located south of
the main island of Japan. The aircraft carried a crew of nine. As they approached the island,
anti-aircraft guns let loose. Explosions filled the sky as shrapnel flew in every direction.
A heroic pilot tried to evade the Japanese countermeasures, but the wing of his plane
was struck by an enemy shell. There was a jolt through the aircraft as the engines began to fail.
The pilot shouted back to the rest of the crew that they were going down. Before the plane went
into a nose dive, the crew was able to drop their payload. Their mission was complete,
and now they needed to evacuate the aircraft, or they would be killed on impact.
The turquoise waters of the ocean could be seen on the horizon as the plane fell from the sky.
There was no time to think. The crew strapped on their parachutes and jumped out of the aircraft
while they were still over the island. The pilot kept the plane as level as possible
so his crew had the best chance of making it out and deploying their chutes safely. Once the last
crew member was out, the pilot could bail. He was now over the ocean, but he had no other choice.
In a split-second decision that would save his life, the pilot opened the cockpit and jumped.
He landed in the waves of the ocean and engaged his life preserve.
The plane continued gliding for a few more seconds, smoke streaming from its engines,
and then crashed into the waters of the Pacific Ocean. The pilot looked to the sky and watched as
his crew’s parachutes descended toward the island of Chichijima and disappeared into its jungle.
When the crew of the aircraft landed, they unclipped themselves from their parachutes and
slowly made their way through the thick foliage. Unfortunately, the island was controlled by the
Japanese, and enemy soldiers quickly located them. They held the American soldiers at gunpoint and
led them to their encampment. It was there that the POWs were tied up and held captive.
As the sun rose the next day, the Japanese soldiers began to torture the Americans for
information. The war in the Pacific had been raging on for almost three years,
and both sides were looking for any advantage they could get. Throughout the war, POWs had
been mistreated by Allied and Axis powers in an attempt to uncover valuable information,
but this Japanese regiment would take things to a whole new level.
The American airmen were stabbed with bamboo spikes, waterboarded, and beaten mercilessly. They
didn’t give up any information and refused to help the Japanese, which would cost them their lives.
When the Japanese soldiers realized they would never get the information they wanted out of
the Americans, they cut off their heads. The American soldiers' heroic actions would not
become known until their remains were later found and their terrible fate was discovered.
It’s unknown how much food the Japanese soldiers had on the island,
but many claim that they were by no means starving as there were plenty
of resources available. This makes what happened next difficult to comprehend.
When Allied forces took the island, the Japanese were forced to surrender. When the island was
scouted and secured, the Allies found the remains of American soldiers that had been butchered and
eaten. It was clear that the flesh had been cut from their bodies due to knife marks on the bones.
Japanese Admiral Kinizo Mori would later testify that their chef had pierced the livers of the
American soldiers with bamboo sticks and cooked them with soy sauce and vegetables.
It’s been hypothesized by some that in certain Japanese belief systems, the liver is the part
of the body where courage and power come from. By eating the liver of enemy soldiers,
some Japanese military leaders believed that they would be given the power to defeat their
adversaries. However, the liver was not the only part of the POWs that was eaten.
Other Japanese soldiers stated that their commanding officer, Lt. Gen. Yoshio Tachibana,
ordered them to consume the flesh of four American soldiers who had landed on the island.
The most disturbing part of all was that this was not an isolated incident.
It’s not totally clear what the motives behind the cannibalism on Chichijima were. Some of the
soldiers who ate the human flesh may have been starving. But several accounts do suggest that the
Japanese officers planned this human sacrifice on the island. Either way, the eight men who crashed
on Chichijima were all killed, and at least four of them were consumed by Japanese soldiers.
The day the plane went down over Chichijima, the pilot who bailed out just before the
aircraft hit the ocean watched his crew land on the hostile island. When their
parachutes disappeared into the jungle canopy, he began looking around for any form of rescue.
There appeared to be nothing else around but waves and the debris from crashed aircraft
as far as the eye could see. The current dragged him further and further out to sea.
Suddenly, something started to bubble from below; the ocean's waters began to swirl all around him.
It was as if a giant creature were ascending from the depths to eat him. The pilot tried desperately
to swim away just as the top of a submarine broke the water’s surface. It was the USS Finback. The
submarine had been dispatched to find survivors from planes that had crashed during the air raid.
Filled with joy, the pilot began swimming towards the Finback. He was worried about
his crew, but there was nothing he could do for them at the moment.
As the sailors aboard the submarine pulled the pilot onto their vessel,
they asked what his name was. “George H.W. Bush,” the man replied. Unknown to everyone on board,
they had just rescued the future 41st president of the United States of America.
George Bush continued on with the crew of the USS Finback to rescue more downed airmen,
but the fate of the men aboard his plane wouldn’t be known until years later.
It wasn’t until a researcher put all of the pieces together and presented
them to the former president in 2003 that Bush found out the gruesome fate he was
saved from the day his plane crashed just off of the island of Chichijima.
This wasn’t the only time that American soldiers would be tortured and eaten by the enemy.
In another true horror story, two members of a downed B-29 bomber were captured and
brought to a medical facility where they would undergo medical experiments. One
medical student who was stationed at the facility recounted later that the men
were brought into the lab blindfolded. They had been injured when their bomber crashed
and were led to believe that they were at the hospital to have their wounds treated.
However, nothing could have been further from the truth.
One of the U.S. soldiers was injected with salt water to see what effects
it would have on the body. The other had his chest cut open and a lung removed. The
doctors wanted to know how the respiratory system would respond with only one lung.
These were only two of many medical experiments that were done on prisoners of war at that time.
The most disgusting part is that some of the organs and body parts that were removed
may have then been eaten by hungry Japanese soldiers. The war had taken
a psychological and physical toll on many. Cannibalism was not an isolated incident,
and it did not just happen on one island. In fact, there were accounts of cannibalism across
the entire Pacific theater during this time. And each instance was more terrifying than the last.
After the war, the atrocities of the Japanese Suzuki Unit stationed in the Philippines
were uncovered. The Suzuki Unit was deployed into the Bukidnon Region
in the southern Philippines at the beginning of the war.
Their mission was to combat any American or Filipino resistance forces in the region.
Every day was hot and humid. The Japanese soldiers hiding in the
jungles of the Philippine mountains would lose large amounts of water through sweat
each day and expend vast amounts of energy just trying to hold their position.
It was a brutal environment and one that likely drove many soldiers crazy.
The bugs would constantly be biting, and diseases would make life absolutely miserable.
When the Suzuki Unit had been deployed, they had enough rations and resources to
last them several weeks. But as the fighting continued and, supply routes were cut off,
they found themselves foraging for food and stealing from local villages in the mountains.
As they continued to fight Allied forces,
more and more Japanese soldiers started dying from malaria and dehydration from diarrhea.
It was determined by doctors in the unit that the only way the men could
stay healthy enough to keep fighting was if they had a constant source of protein.
Unfortunately, this was hard to come by in the dense jungles of Bukidnon.
The Japanese had killed and eaten local farmers’ pigs, livestock, and chickens, and now the only
sources of protein left were bugs and other humans. The Japanese started to eat the bodies
of prisoners who died from illness or injuries. There were also cases of POWs being executed
for trying to escape and then immediately being flayed and cooked to feed the Japanese troops.
In testimonies by Japanese soldiers, they described in detail how they would sometimes
have to sneak into nearby Filipino villages in order to find victims to cannibalize. In the
cover of night, Japanese soldiers would enter a village. If there was someone out alone,
they would come up behind them and render them unconscious with the butt of their gun
before they could alert others in the village that something was wrong. The
soldiers would then bring their victim back to camp, where they would cut meat from their
skeleton and eat it to obtain the protein they needed. The human flesh would often
be boiled with vegetables. Other times it would be left out in the sun to be curred.
The Suzuki Unit’s cannibalistic activity was likely done exclusively to stay alive.
Although surrendering might have been a better option in hindsight.
When American forces captured the Suzuki Unit and entered their camp,
they were horrified at what they found. There was human flesh still in the process of being cooked,
and human skeletal remains littered the ground. It became clear very quickly that the Japanese
soldiers had been surviving off of human meat for some time. When the remains were examined,
it appeared that many of the humans who had been consumed were Filipinos.
Nine members of the Japanese unit were sentenced to death for their actions.
However, many more likely ate human flesh at that time to keep from starving to death.
Surrender was not an option for the Japanese, as they would rather fight
to the death than surrender to the Americans and dishonor their country.
This was true even if it meant hiding in the jungle and living off of human flesh for years.
Before World War II officially broke out in the Pacific, Japanese forces had been securing as
many strategic points as possible. One of these places was Papua New Guinea. Japanese troops
were sent to the region relatively early on in the conflict to establish airfields and naval
ports to make attacking Australia possible. The Japanese captured soldiers from India,
Singapore, and other parts of Asia who were aiding the Allied forces, many of
which were then forced to build the wartime infrastructure Japan needed in Papua New Guinea.
As Allied forces started gaining ground in the region, Japanese forces retreated further
and further into the dense jungles. They would take their prisoners with them to aid
in building new encampments. Again, surrender was not an option for these Japanese soldiers,
so they continued to fight even though the territory was all but lost.
They eventually became cut off from supply lines, and no reinforcements would be able to reach them.
As food ran out, the Japanese soldiers looked for other sources of protein. They originally
tried hunting the aboriginal people of Papua New Guinea but quickly found out that they
were too hard to capture since they knew the land better than anyone. They also tried killing
Australian soldiers as a source of sustenance, but this proved to be too difficult as well. So,
they turned to the prisoners under their control. The Japanese needed them for manual labor,
but the intense hunger pains began to overpower any rational thoughts.
One Pakistani corporal who survived being a prisoner in Papua New Guinea recounted that
towards the end of the war, Japanese soldiers were killing and eating one prisoner a day. The
horrifying thing was that this lasted for around 100 days. It’s highly likely that
over 100 people were eaten by Japanese soldiers in Papua New Guinea alone. But it gets worse.
The other prisoners would watch each night as one of them was selected to be sacrificed so
their Japanese captors could satisfy their hunger. The survivors said that whoever was chosen would
be taken to a small hut where their screams could be heard echoing through the jungle. It
appeared that they would be fleyed alive. Those who survived having parts of their legs and arms
cut off would then be thrown into a ditch where they would bleed out as they prayed for death.
When Japanese soldiers were questioned about their decisions, some startling information came forth.
The cannibalism was most often done for survival reasons but not always.
During one soldier’s trial, he said that when he had killed and eaten an Australian soldier,
it was for two reasons. The first was because he was starving. But the second
and more sinister reason was that he had an “intense hatred” for the enemy.
As horrendous and vile as these accounts are, it’s important to remember that not every
Japanese soldier was engaged in cannibalism. These were isolated incidents. On top of that,
most would never have eaten another human if they were not dying from starvation.
Early on in the war, intense bombings and fighting occurred within Australia and the
surrounding region. The Japanese first attacked the mainland of Australia in February of 1942 when
they bombed Darwin and Broome. By the next year, the Japanese had conducted 97 different air raids
on the country. During this time, Japanese midget submarines were also entering Sydney Harbour
and shelling the suburbs surrounding the city. The Australian military would capture the midget
subs every once in a while, but whenever they opened the hatch, the two Japanese
soldiers inside would be dead from self-inflicted gunshot wounds to keep them from being captured.
It was when the Australians started pushing the Japanese back toward Asia that they uncovered
the cannibalism of their own people. Australian troops would advance from one island to the next,
making sure they were clear of any enemy presence. When they came to the larger
islands of Papua New Guinea and Indonesia, they were met by heavier resistance.
It was also here that they would come across abandoned Japanese encampments with human
remains scattered around. Oftentimes the bones showed signs of being butchered.
Towards the end of the war, the Japanese soldiers that were left
to fend for themselves became desperate. It’s in the camps of these soldiers that
more signs of cannibalism were found. As Australian soldiers and other Allied
forces worked their way through the Pacific islands and came across Japanese camps,
they noted that several contained the remains of captured Australian soldiers. However,
the only thing left of them were their hands and feet; everything else had been eaten.
So, it would appear that cannibalism was happening all throughout the Pacific theater
by groups of Japanese soldiers. It wasn’t done by everyone, but some soldiers who were
desperate to survive turned to cannibalism as a means to an end. As crazy as it sounds,
eating another human was a better option than surrendering to some Japanese soldiers. That
being said, the Japanese were not the only ones who engaged in cannibalism during World War II.
When it comes to survival or death, people will do almost anything to stay alive.
At the Siege of Leningrad, starving people were seen eating the remains of the dead.
It was cold, nothing would grow, and no supplies could enter the city. The only way to survive at
that point was to eat anything that contained nutrients, including humans. There were even
accounts of people cutting off their own flesh and consuming it as hunger overcame rational thought.
Another example happened after the Battle of Stalingrad when around 100,000 German
soldiers were captured. They were sent to Siberia and Central Asia,
where they were held in POW camps. The Soviets had very little sympathy for the Germans and
didn’t provide them with enough food or water. This led to the Germans resorting to cannibalism
of their fallen comrades in order to make it through the brutal winters while locked up
in the Soviet camps. To paint a picture of how dire the situation was for the Germans,
out of the 100,000 that were captured, only around 5,000 survived until the end of the war.
In the Independent State of Croatia, which was set up and ruled as a Nazi puppet state,
a number of concentration and death camps were established to carry out Hitler’s Final Solution.
It was here that the fascist Ustasha organization committed genocide against the Serbs and countless
Jews to advance the Nazi agenda. It was recorded that when the Ustashas would slash the throats
of their victims, they would hold a cup up to their neck to collect blood as it flowed out
of the wound. The members of the Ustashas would then drink the blood in a ritualistic fashion.
This brings us back to the point that not all cannibalism during World War
II was for survival purposes. There are some that believe there may have been
a cannibalistic cult-like understanding between certain officers in the Japanese
military. There are several accounts given by different Japanese soldiers
that said they were forced to consume human flesh and liver by their superior officers.
In these situations, the men were not starving, and if they refused to eat the
flesh of their enemy, they would be chastised by their superiors. In extreme circumstances,
soldiers were even physically forced to eat the human meat. It was said that officers who made
their soldiers eat human flesh connected it back to the Sino-Japanese war that had taken place
years earlier. Many of the Imperial troops would regularly consume the flesh of their
enemies to make them invincible in battle. Some of the higher-ups who were forcing their men to
eat human meat in World War II had fought in the Second Sino-Japanese war, which had begun in 1937.
And if you don’t believe the Japanese and Allied soldier’s accounts of events,
there is a very blatant line of evidence that makes it clear cannibalism was a problem
during World War II in the Pacific. A secret Imperial Army order was given on November 18,
1944, that directly addressed the problem of Japanese troops engaging in cannibalism.
You might think it would directly condemn them, but that’s not quite the case.
In the address, the Imperial government of Japan informed the troops that cannibalization was
punishable by death. The caveat here was that cannibalizing an enemy was completely fine.
The government was not promoting cannibalization as the order mentioned eating humans as being the
″worst human crime″ and that it was due to a ″lack of thoroughness in moral training.″
However, as long as it was the enemy being eaten, it was not punished as a crime.
At the end of the war, many Japanese soldiers and officers who were found to have engaged in
cannibalism were tried for war crimes and sentenced to death.
The Japanese government does not allow this part of Japanese history to be taught
or discussed in public as it’s deemed as ″too sensitive.″ Scholars who wish to publish
information about the atrocities that happened during World War II have to leave Japan to do
so. This is why several Japanese historians have sought jobs in Australia and at other
universities around the world so that they can accurately write about this time in history.
It also can not be overstated that cannibalism by Japanese troops was not the norm. There may have
been a cult among certain military leaders that incorporated the ritualistic eating of the liver,
but that has not been proven. Most soldiers who did engage in cannibalism did so to stay alive,
just like many people have done throughout history in dire situations.
The Japanese people were never a society of cannibals,
and the atrocities that happened in World War II were never part of the Japanese culture.
Now watch “Insane Story of Cannibal Clan that Terrorized Europe.”
Or check out “Cannibal Island: The Real Battle Royale.”