第二次世界大戦時、アメリカ軍は日本兵捕虜を虐殺し、頭蓋骨や耳をコレクションしていた。 American and Australian soldiers massacred Japanese prisoners of war, according to one of the most detailed studies of memoirs of the Second World War in the Pacific. It also discloses that the soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army were far from the cruel, mindless troops of popular legend, and that Gen Douglas MacArthur wanted to launch nuclear strikes on the Soviet Union from an underground airstrip in Britain. In The Faraway War, published to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the Hiroshima atom bomb and of VJ Day, Prof Richard Aldrich of Nottingham University has gathered the diaries of men and women from across the Pacific war front, from the common soldier to the highest general. He said: "We have this stereotypical idea that the Japanese were all cruel and robotic while the Allied forces were tough but fair in their treatment of the enemy. "But I was very surprised by much of what I found and had to rethink all those stereotypes." Prof Aldrich found several examples confirming what became an American policy in some parts of the Pacific theatre not to take prisoners of war. He quotes the diaries of Charles Lindbergh, the American aviation pioneer, who toured the Far East visiting United States units. On one occasion he commented to a group of senior officers that very few Japanese seemed to be taken prisoner. "Oh, we could take more if we wanted to," one of the officers replied. "But our boys don't like to take prisoners. "It doesn't encourage the rest to surrender when they hear of their buddies being marched out on the flying field and machine-guns turned loose on them." Although Lindbergh was sympathetic to the Nazis and was suspected of deliberately portraying his fellow countrymen in a very negative light, his allegations are supported by other American diarists, who report that the US marines, in particular, did not take many prisoners. Prof Aldrich also discovered new diaries showing that American generals worried about the abuse of human remains by their troops. They were particularly concerned that the skulls of dead Japanese soldiers were often displayed as gruesome mascots by some units, while US marines made a speciality of collecting ears and skulls. Australian troops are also shown not to like taking prisoners. Prof Aldrich quotes the 1943 diary of Eddie Stanton, an Australian posted to Goodenough Island off Papua New Guinea. "Japanese are still being shot all over the place," he wrote. "The necessity for capturing them has ceased to worry anyone. Nippo soldiers are just so much machine-gun practice. Too many of our soldiers are tied up guarding them." The book also features the memoir of a New Zealand soldier working with a Fijian regiment who came across the bodies of two native women, pegged out on an earthen mound. They had been "raped to death" by Japanese soldiers. Then they found a dead American soldier who had stakes driven through each shoulder and his hands cut off. "As we moved away again, one of my corporals said to me: "No more prisoners, turaga[sir]." I agreed with him.'' Prof Aldrich has found Japanese diaries that belie the common perceptions that soldiers or even low-ranking officers were automata devoted fanatically to their emperor and the codes of bushido, hara-kiri and kamikaze. "One young officer praises America and its ideas of democracy and modernity, while on another occasion a Japanese soldier voices out loud his envy of some Germans who had set up a sort of peacenik camp on New Guinea to get away from the war," Prof Aldrich said. One of the most bizarre episodes recorded was when Field Marshal Lord Alanbrook, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, visited Gen MacArthur, the American who commanded allied occupation troops in Japan, in November 1945. He recorded, with some approbation and agreement, MacArthur's view that "we should assemble at least 1,000 atomic bombs in England and in the States. We must then prepare a safe aerodrome by tunnelling into the side of a mountain so that we shall be able to go on operating from England even when attacked". He also recorded Macarthur's view of the Soviet Union. "He felt certain they would also attempt to convert Japan into a subject county, so as to be able to use the Japanese manpower at a later date for operations in the Pacific. "He considered them a greater menace than the Nazis had ever been, complete barbarians, as exemplified by one commander [in Manchuria] who had issued orders that every woman between the age of 16 and 60 was to be raped twice by Russian soldiery as an example of the superiority of the Russian race! "Macarthur considers that they should be met by force if necessary and not by conciliatory methods which were only interpreted as weakness by the Russians."

• published: 12 Dec 2014
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