Casualties
People die in war, and a lot of people — servicemen and civilians — died during World War II. Bombs probably took the most lives, but bullets, illness, accidents, weather extremes, starvation, incarceration in prison and concentration camps, and other factors also took a huge toll.
The exact number of people killed or seriously injured over the course of the war will never be known. Relatively good records were kept for Allied and Axis servicemen, but civilian deaths and injuries were so widespread and so frequently unreported that they were nearly impossible to tabulate with any accuracy. Tens of thousands of people in all theaters remain missing and unaccounted for to this day.
Figure 13-1 Two Coast Guardsmen pay silent homage to the memory of a fellow Coast Guardsman who lost his life in action in the Ryukyu Islands.
Photo courtesy of the National Archives (26-G-4739)
According to a report compiled by several neutral international relief agencies and released in 1946 by the Vatican, military and civilian casualties in World War II are estimated at 22,060,000 dead and 34,400,000 wounded. However, exact numbers were difficult to determine because of inadequate information and differences among nations in the ways the dead and wounded were tabulated.
The Sullivan family of Waterloo, Iowa, lost five members in one tragic event, the sinking of the USS Juneau. On November 1942, the ship was hit by three torpedoes off Guadalcanal and sank in less than a minute. After that, close relatives were no longer allowed to serve on the same ship.
Many casualty figures remain in conflict. For example, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey reported in December 1945 that Allied bombs had killed approximately 500,000 German civilians. However, a German report the following year put the figure at more than 4 million. The issue is made more difficult still by the fact that the Soviet Union refused to release information regarding prisoners of war and other wartime captives.
The U.S. military kept comprehensive casualty records throughout the war and reported a total of 294,597 battle-related deaths from December 7, 1941, to December 31, 1946. (In 1946, U.S. military officials officially declared dead all servicemen previously counted as missing in action in World War II.) In addition, there were 113,842 nonbattle-related deaths, and a total of 670,846 who suffered nonmortal wounds.
Allied military casualties were:
British Commonwealth (including the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India, and South Africa): 544,596
USSR: 7,500,000
France: 210,671
China: 2,200,000 (These are deaths after 1937 and do not include losses from earlier Japanese aggression.)
Germany lost an estimated 3,250,000 soldiers, sailors, and aviators over the course of the war; Italy lost 300,000, and Japan lost more than 1,506,000 from 1937 to 1945.
