On this day 75 years ago, the May 22, 1944, issue of Life Magazine carried this photo of 20-year-old Natalie Nickerson of Phoenix, Arizona. According to the magazine, two years earlier she had said goodbye to a “big handsome Navy lieutenant” who “promised her a jap.” He obliged, and she received this skull of a Japanese serviceman signed by her boyfriend and 13 of his friends. The skull carried the inscription, “this is a good Jap–a dead one picked up on the New Guinea beach.”

The magazine added that “the armed forces disaprove strongly of this sort of thing.”  Reaction to the photo by American readers was overwhelmingly condematory, and the officer was later reprimanded by the Navy. The photo was reprinted in Japan as an example of American barbarism.