The average life span of an American is eighty years,
and an eighty year old today was ten when World War 2 ended; four when it began.
A soldier who saw battle would have to be in his late eighties, at least, today.
Generals, political leaders - the decision makers of the war: few are still with us.
Over the past few decades, we've seen authors and filmmakers.
rush to capture stories from survivors, before this connection of memory is lost.
This project is not about individual war stories, and it's not about survivors.
We are going to tally up the tens of millions of people
whose lives were cut short by the war,
and see how these numbers stack up to other wars in history,
including trends in recent conflicts.
We'll be counting soldiers and civilians separately.
Each of these figures will represent 1000 people who died.
Civilians were of all walks of life.
Military deaths were almost entirely men - the average age was about 23.
In most battles, for every 1000 soldiers killed,
there were more than 1000 who were injured.
The word casualty can be confusing because in military speak, it often includes both
deaths and injuries, and any thing that takes a soldier out of service.
Here we are just counting the deaths, and we'll begin with American soldiers.
Over 400,000 died.
Most of the deaths occurred in the European theater - fighting the Nazis -
and about a quarter were in the Pacific, fighting the Japanese.
When you put them on the timeline, you see that the casualties were heaviest
at the end of the war.
The war began on September 1, 1939, but the U.S. wasn't willing
to join the fight until Pearl Harbor 2 years in.
The deaths increased drastically on D-Day, when the allies invaded Normandy.
One of the most tragic moments of the war was on D-Day at Omaha Beach,
where 2,500 Americans fell.
About the same number of U.S. soldiers died
on this single beach landing as the entire 13 years
of the recent US war in Afghanistan.
The bloodiest battle in the Pacific was Okinawa, which lasted 82 days,
during which 12,500 Americans died.
About 5,000 of these deaths were at sea from Kamikaze attacks.
Now let's look at some other countries, starting with Europe.
Germany started World War 2 when it invaded Poland.
Poland ultimately lost over 200,000 soldiers in the war,
most died after the invasion
while the country was occupied by Germany and the Soviet Union.
Germany meanwhile lost just 16,000 in the invasion of Poland.
The Nazis went on invade and conquer other countries including
Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Greece, and Yugoslavia.
France surrendered, but after losing 92,000 soldiers in the Battle of France.
Over 200,000 ultimately fell,
which includes deaths in POW camps, French colonies, and other fighting.
Yugoslavia suffered almost half a million military deaths.
The initial invasion brought relatively few casualties on both sides,
but the deaths mounted under Nazi occupation
due to gorilla fighting, civil conflict, and mass executions.
The Nazi invasions were swift with relatively few German losses.
Even the Nazi commanders expressed surprise at their success.
And then we have United Kingdom and the United States,
who were not invaded, but took the fight to the Germans.
Britain lost about the same number of soldiers as the US,
which includes the British colonies.
Germany lost about half a million soldiers fighting the U.S. and Britain
in what known as the Western front, which took place in France and Belgium.
But most German soldiers died in the Eastern Front
Germany's unsuccessful invasion of the Soviet Union.
The numbers are staggering.
The most famous battle of the Eastern Front, and perhaps THE turning point
of the European war was Stalingrad.
The German 6th Army successfully took Stalingrad, but then got surrounded
by the Soviets and cut off from food and ammunition.
Half a million German soldiers would ultimately die in Stalingrad.
Another 100,000 were taken prisoner, of which 6,000 would ever return.
POWs had a low survival rate throughout WW2, and it was particular grim in East.
When you include these POWs, roughly the same number of Germans died in
Stalingrad as the all the Western front fighting France, the UK, and the US.
Though Stalingrad was a victory for the Soviets,
they suffered more losses than Germany.
The Soviet Union would eventually defeat the once unstoppable German army,
killing 2.3 million German soldiers.
But winning the war came at a cost.
8.7 million is the official tally by the Russian military, a hotly disputed number.
Some studies have calculated as many as 14 million dead.
To complete the count of European military deaths,
we need to add German deaths from other fronts, including the North and Africa,
as well as deaths from the other axis powers allied with Nazis -
Hungary, Romania, and Italy.
When you put these European military deaths on the timeline,
it looks something like this.
You can now interact with the chart to learn more.
Pause the narration if you would like more time.
Now we'll switch over to civilian deaths in Europe.
6 Million Jewish people were killed in the holocaust.
If you separate this by country you see about half, 2.7 million, were polish.
700,000 were Soviets, Followed by Hungary and 17 other countries.
Broken down another way, about half of the 6 million
were killed in the concentration camps.
Over a million died in Auschwitz. Most were killed in the gas chambers.
Others died from starvation, exhaustion, disease, and other forms of execution.
The second most deadly camp was Treblinka, which was exclusively an extermination camp,
set up to look like a train station.
Mobile killing groups killed 1.4 million Jews.
Like with the gas chambers, men were killed first to reduce the risk of revolt.
The Holocaust also included non-Jewish deaths.
Between 130,000 to 500,000 Roma, then called “Gypsies,” were killed.
The numbers are disputed.
About a quarter million people with disabilities were killed.
Homosexuals, Catholics, and other groups were also exterminated,
but their numbers were relatively small.
Some historians say that other civilian deaths should go under the label Holocaust.
Another 2 million non-Jewish Poles were killed under German occupation,
some of which were sent to the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
When you combine civilian and military deaths, over 16% the of total
Polish population died in World War 2, the highest percentage of any country.
But not the highest in total death count. Soviet Union again tops that list,
losing at least as many civilians as it did soldiers.
Somewhere between 10 and 20 million.
A particularly dark event for the Soviet Union was the Siege of Leningrad,
now Saint Petersburg.
German forces surrounded Leningrad before civilians could be evacuated.
Supplies, including food, were cut off for 2 and a half years.
1.5 million people died as a result, mostly from starvation, mostly civilians.
Stalin's cruelty towards his own people is partly responsible for these numbers.
He often didn't allow civilians to evacuate from cities,
thinking it would cause the soldiers protecting them to fight harder.
About a million soviets died in Stalin's own labor camps called the Gulag.
Just about every country suffered civilian losses,
especially countries who were invaded.
While many died as a result of so-called collateral damage,
the biggest numbers occurred when it was no accident.
Civilian were exterminated, purposefully fired upon or bombed,
used a human shields, or intentionally deprived of food.
The intentional killing of civilians was done by most warring parties,
including the United Kingdom and the United Stated.
The United Kingdom was spared of a land invasion, but still lost 60,000 civilians
largely from German air raids, or blitzes, often directed at civilian populations.
The UK did the same to German cities, at a much greater magnitude,
causing about 10x the number of deaths.
But most German civilian deaths came from the ground at the late stage of the war.
When the Nazi regime collapsed, Germans living in occupied regions
had to desperately flee from the advancing Soviet Army.
Rapes were widespread, and death estimates range from 600,000 to 3 million.
Let's step back and see where we are with the totals.
We just counted about 20 million civilian deaths in Europe.
If you add this to the the European military deaths that we already covered,
it brings us to over 40 million.
Then we have the Asian Theater.
Here we see that the vast majority of military deaths in Asia
came from China and Japan.
On the civilian side, about 6 million deaths from China, Indonesia, Korea,
Indochina, and the Philippines can be attributed to Japanese war crimes,
which are sometimes compared to the Nazi atrocities,
due to the sheer scale of the cruelty.
China had the second highest death count after the Soviet Union.
And like the Soviets, the Chinese government demonstrated a stunning
willingness to sacrifice its own people.
Chinese Nationalists opened the dikes of the yellow river
hoping the flood would halt the Japanese advance.
Half a million Chinese civilians, or more, were killed.
Which is 2 or 3 times the number who died in all countries in the 2004 Asian tsunamis.
But the invasion of China only cost Japan 200,000 soldiers.
Most were killed fighting the US, China and other allies in the Pacific War.
A significant portion of Japanese civilians deaths were caused by
American firebombing and the two nuclear attacks.
Contrary to official U.S. statements, these airstrikes were directed at
civilian populations,not military targets.
When you add all the deaths outside of Europe,
it brings us a grand total of 70 million for the war - give or take,
depending on who's counting, and what civilian deaths get included.
More people died in World War 2 than in any other war in history.
For comparison, here are 20 or so of the very worst wars and atrocities
we have on record. Some of these are more of atrocities than wars,
but we've seen how that distinction can get blurry.
Some of these spanned across centuries. World War 2 has the highest body count,
and it all happened in just 6 years.
The world's population has grown significantly
since the earliest atrocities on this list.
If we want to compare them in terms what percentage of the world died,
we can adjust the chart like this.
This rough approximation tells us that there may have been more devastating wars
before WW2, proportionally speaking.
When we turn to post-war conflicts, it's hard to say anything that isn't controversial.
But the data shows something quite extraordinary has been happening.
In 1989 John Gaddis coined the phrase the Long Peace,
to identify the absence of conflict between the nuclear powers during the cold war.
25 year later, the cold war is over, and the term still being used,
although its meaning may have shifted.
European counties have not fought each other except for this 10 day war in 1956
when the Soviet Union invaded Hungary.
When we look at European wars before WW2 it looks like this -
they tend to be more frequent as you go back, though smaller in scale.
And, the largest 44 economies of the world have not battled each other since WWII
Rich countries have fought poorer countries, like U.S vs Iraq,
but rich countries have not fought other rich countries.
Such a period of peace between the so-called great powers
hasn't been seen since the Roman Empire.
Too many, peace is too strong of a word.
Wars have occurred since World War 2, and they can be grouped
into these 4 categories.
We don't see colonial wars any more.
We've already noted that interstate wars between rich counties have not occurred
at all, and here we see wars involving smaller economies have tapered off.
That leaves civil wars, of 2 types, with and without foreign intervention.
This is what these battle deaths look like along side of WW2.
More people died fighting in World War II than in all the wars since.
And again we can't forget about world population
which has almost tripled since World War II.
If we scale these number to show deaths in proportion to world population -
showing the likelihood that a person on earth dies in battle,
the downward trend becomes even more pronounced.
This isn't to infer anything about why this trend is occurring -
that's a discussion for another day.
You can now interact with this chart to explore what conflicts are behind the totals.
Bear in mind that we're just looking at battle deaths here, not civilian deaths.
But those too are in decline.
Peace is a difficult thing to measure. It's a bit like counting the people
who didn't die in wars that never happened.
We give such importance to the word peace,
but we don't tend to notice it when it occurs.
Or report on it. Sometimes it takes reminding ourselves of how terrible war
once was to see the peace that has been growing around us.
Of course this trend may not continue.
And it's not clear how looking at these charts can help us
make the right decisions to ensure that it does.
But the longer the long peace grows,
the more significant it becomes.
So if watching the news doesn't make us feel hopeful
about where things are heading,
watching the numbers might.
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