The Fallen of World War II

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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