Don't know about headhunters, but the Japanese killed and ate portions of American pilots on Chichi Jima where George Bush was shot down. In Bradley's Flyboys he talks about them eating one particular pilot. My friend who is a big collector, owns the sidearm of a Japanese officer who was wearing that sidearm while he took part in that feast. Of his collection, I am not sure which is creepier to hold, that pistol or his empty can of Zyclon B.

BQ78 said:

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Don't know about headhunters, but the Japanese killed and ate portions of American pilots on Chichi Jima where George Bush was shot down. In Bradley's Flyboys he talks about them eating one particular pilot. My friend who is a big collector, owns the sidearm of a Japanese officer who was wearing that sidearm while he took part in that feast. Of his collection, I am not sure which is creepier to hold, that pistol or his empty can of Zyclon B.

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I knew of those stories and if his comments had been something along the lines of "we were worried about Japanese night attacks" or something of the sort that would have made more sense to me. I've just never heard anything about natives patrolling the edges of our bases in certain areas looking to grab unsuspecting air crewmen.

And to reiterate, I'm not accusing either of them of fabricating the story, I'd just simply never heard that. Heck, that could have been a story that veterans on PNG told replacements just to scare them and mess with the newbies.

Ritual cannibalism was practiced on Papua New Guinea until fairly recently (if it's ever completely gone away). My limited understanding is that it was ceremonial and typically focused on prisoners of war or people believed to be possessed by witches or demons. They would be killed and then ritually cooked and eaten. They would lash out at what they saw as foreign invaders, which both sides in WWII would have been, and were certainly capable of kidnapping and cannibalizing any men unlucky enough to be caught off-guard. But honestly, they were victimized more during the war than the other way around. The Japanese frequently starved them or flat out murdered them. I'm not aware of any Allied victims of the locals, but it's possible.

Maternal Grandfather fought in New Guinea and I don't recall him mentioning cannibals.

My father worked in Irian Jaya from 1992-1993 and he said that he heard stories about cannibals.

They hired lots of local labour for the construction project he was working on. He said they did have territorial problems with the local indigenous bushmen. He said that several times they would find warning markings left behind by the local tribesmen and the local labourers would refuse to build the road in that direction. They would have to reroute.

He also had some stories about Indonesian Army paratroopers jumping in and clearing out the indigenous population from time to time.

So cannibalism stories were still going in the early 1990s.