h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: Casualties in the two World Wars for Combattant Nations - A2251108
Author: a broad called Ben - trying to keep her head above water and below the parapet - U148580

I honestly did not expect to write anything for the Edited Guide again.

It seems that I was wrong.

Ben

Hi Ben,

Interestingly, I'm in the middle of preparing an entry on part of the Second World War which came to me suddenly too: A2249804.

I'd be interested to know where you got your figures. The UK figures are a lot smaller than I had understood them to be. I'm still looking into the numbers killed in Italy in the 'forgotten war'.

I should put in links to my sources, really.

The more I look at them, the more questions I find myself asking - such as how many of the US WW2 dead were in the Pacific Theatre? And what about the dead in Burma, Singapore, Malaya and the Philippines?

I have a good friend who was a senior Statistician in various Western and Eastern European National Statistics Offices, and I think I am going to ask him for his advice on this one. Unfortunately he is lacking in time and internet access.

Ben

Ben - interesting, but I'd agree with you that it does bring up a lot of questions -

Personally I'd be curious as to the Civilian/Military breakdown of casualties...

The figures do rather back up Stalin's quote that, "Russia provided the blood, America the money and the British the time".

Cool quote GD, and aposite - can I use it?

B

I'm sure Uncle Joe wouldn't mind if he were around to give the say so. Of course if he did mind, you could find yourself purged pretty sharpish

Hi Ben,

Found it.

What blows me away about these figures is that the total dead for WWII is a mind-boggling 52 or so million people, of whom nearly half were Russian. Now, get your head around the fact that thanks to Chairman Mao's lunatic ideas in the Great Leap Forward, also a four year period, 1958 -1962, approximately 65 million Chinese, Tibetans and others under PRC rule died, mainly due to politically induced famine.

( The figure you usually see quoted is 35 million, because western statisticians cannot get get their heads around the sheer enormity of the numbers. However, Chinese scholars working on the birth/death returns since "liberalisation" reckon the higher number is more realistic.)

The famine occurred because Mao said everyone had to drop whatever they were doing and smelt steel. So backyard smelters were set up everywhere, schools, offices, villages, whatever. And mostly they produced useless low-temperature slag, having melted down their farm implements, cooking gear, everything with iron in it. Meanwhile vast swathes of forest were decimated to make charcoal for the smelters where coal wasn't available.

And no-one dared tell Mao the truth when the crops failed, when harvests were not gathered, when seeds went unsown. Bizarrely, when Mao went on one of his tours of inspection by train, wheat was densely transplanted into the fields alongside the railway lines to show how well his agricultural plans were going! This period, not the infamous Cultural Revolution, was China's biggest disaster, and the Chinese still don't like to talk about it.

In all, starting with the "anti-rightist/ anti-left-adventurist" political purges Mao instigated in the late 1920's ( five years before Stalin got going against the kulaks ) and continuing through the GLF, the Spring of a Thousand Flowers and the Cultural Revolution, Mao's hands-on approach to helmsmanship killed roughly 100 million people. Hitler and Stalin were mere amateurs by comparison.

I knew about Mao and the trains, but not about the rest of the story. Why don't you write it up as a guide entry? It is almost there as it is, in the post you posted.

One of the things which fascinates me about these stats is that everyone has different questions. I like things that make people ask questions.

Ben

I notice that generally speaking wounded are between 2.5 aqnd 3.5 times the number of killed in WWII - but in Belgium the number is 10 times 44,000 - 450,000 !

Now why would that be ?

Some early EEC fiddle ?

Its easy to forget the the number of troops who died in British uniform who were not actually British.

True, but the numbers for India are in there. I noticed that particularly because my grandfather fought in the Indian Army in the trenches and in Mesopotamia in WWI. Which is a point: the numbers for the Mosopotamia (now Iraq) aren't in there.

*scratches head*

Ben

Indeedy,Ben,

My maternal grandfather was a captain in the 14th Kings Own Ferozapore Sikhs. He and his regiment were wiped out during the first landing at Gallipoli ( one of Winston Churchill's bright ideas!) The colonial troops were sent in first, which included the Anzacs, the Indians, the Irish etc.

My mother's only brother, a pilot in bomber command, was shot down off Norway in 1942. Although Ireland was officially neutral in WWII, (having only recently "thrown off the shackles" of 800 years as a British colony) huge numbers of Irish ( including my mother's brother, and both my father's brothers - my father didn't pass the medical because of TB ) volunteered.

Just to show how complex the Irish loyalties were in WWI:- my grandfather's brother, Conor OBrien, ran guns in from Germany in 1913 to arm the Irish Volunteers ( who were getting ready to resist the Ulster Volunteers ), on his yacht "Kelpie." But he joined the British Navy as a captain once WWI broke out. His sister Mary OBrien Cane was one of the founders of the WRNS.

I might do a Guide Entry on the Mao deaths, but I'll need to go back and check my figures in detail first.

Irish loyalties...

I was once driving happily along listening to the radio when a programme came on about the Irish in the British Army.

All well and good, except that I was listening to it with a former Rifleman, whose grandmother was Afrikaans and had been damn nearly killed by the Brits in a concentration camp, who had himself served time in NI which was best described as 'not good', and who is a Catholic.

How is that for mixed loyalties?

How can people not love men? They are far more complex, sophisticated and interesting than they seem at first sight. Actually of course you know who that was, Chai, don't you?

Ben

Moving back to the topic of the thread..
I do like this thought prevoking piece. I was just wondering if it would workbetter with some kind of verbal consulion to tie everything together after the statistics?

Or maybe I'm wrong.

*hides*

Good entry. Statistics, even in the raw form often tell us more than we would expect.

This tells us a bit about how bloody some of the less well known theatres in both WWI and WWII were - all those dead in the Balkans etc

I don't suppose there are any stats on in which campaigns people were killed, roughly speaking? A civilian/combattant casualty breakdown comparison between WWI and WWII would also be fascinating.

I'm amazed by the quantity of Belgian, NL deaths in WWII - the actual 'war' phase they were involved in was so short, this must be nearly all resistance or civilian deaths?

And 10 million Chinese dead is this all in Manchuria?

I think this is the kind of entry that will make people think, and hopefully make them want to explore further. Can you give them some links to go down?

sprout

Yeah, I think links are a good idea, though of course - being in English - they will be by the victors again. Maybe the Imperial War Museum, and certainly the sites I got the stats from.

I have hopes that my Friend the Statistician will be able to point me in the right direction, but we will have to wait and see.

There are some incredibly good war sites out there, and some incredibly bad ones.

*scratches head*

>> "I think this is the kind of entry that will make people think, and hopefully make them want to explore further."

Not like me at all then, eh? The irony is that what is probably the entry which involved the least amount of creativity on my part is proably the one which will prompt people to think the most.

Ben

Z, you are probably right, it could do with something to round it off, but what I acutally want to do is bump people up to the stats tables again, so that they really look at them, compare the numbers and think about them.

Also I like making people feel uneasy when they read something of mine. Just a little ego-trip thing I get off on.

B

Hello Ben, Interesting indeed!

I did find several sites (I got curious, too); but they rarely agreed, even if they were siting the same general sources. It's probably not something we'll ever be able to put exact numbers to.

A lot of them, for instance, show 0 U.S. civilian casualties. We know that cannot be true because of civilian losses at Pearl Harbor. Even if the U.S. was not officially considered at war then, they would be considered losses, wouldn't they?

Then there were non-military transport personnel, killed by German subs while trying to supply lines with fuel and armaments.

I did find an additional set of stats that is also an eye-opener. Every country got involved at a different time, so losses are sometimes related to how long the country was in the fray.

These stats discuss the composition of the troops on D-Day. (FYI)

http://www.ddaymuseum.org/pdf/edu_lp_numbers.pdf
D-Day Combatants
Country . . . . . . No. on D-Day . Percentage
United States. . 95,000 . . . . . . 34.0%
Great Britain . . 60,000 . . . . . . 21.0%
Canada. . . . . . 20,000 . . . . . . . 7.0%
Germany . . . . 105,000. . . . . . 38.0%

Of course it's hardly fair to include the German numbers in the %. On their side they were 100% making the Allied numbers more like:
Country . . . . . . No. on D-Day . Percentage
United States. . 95,000 . . . . . . 54.3%
Great Britain . . 60,000 . . . . . . 34.3%
Canada. . . . . . 20,000 . . . . . . 11.4%


And these look at the numbers from the Pre-War populations standpoint.
. . . . . . . . . . . Total Deaths . .% Pre-war Pop . . Military Deaths . . Civilian Deaths
USSR . . . . . . 20,600,000 . . . . . 10.4% . . . . . 13,600,000 . . . . . . 7,000,000
Germany . . . . .6,850,000 . . . . . . 9.5% . . . . . . 3,250,000 . . . . . . 3,600,000
France . . . . . . . .810,000 . . . . . . 1.9% . . . . . . . 340,000 . . . . . . . . 470,000
United States . . .500,000 . . . . . . 0.4% . . . . . . . 500,000 . . . . . . . . . . . . 0(?) [- I don't think so.]
Great Britain . . . 388,000 . . . . . . 0.8% . . . . . . . 326,000 . . . . . . . . . 62,000

The Stats are all fascinating, scary, and sad.

You know, it also occurred to me that losses certainly cannot be the best criteria for looking at anything but losses.

Deaths per thousand combatants went way down by WWII from WWI, but injuries went up. This seeming discrepency might say to some that we got worse at killing; but others attribute it to better helmets and armored vehicles allowing hits to be more survivable.

There are differences in the protective gear between combatant armies, and differences in medical proficiencies, supplys, extraction methods (of the injured), etc.

As we well know, there are often large variations in levels of training received and dedication to 'the cause' that either give armies and advantage, or disadvantage.

Complex stuff this war business.

Great entry Ben

Fascinating... until... you realise it's people. Then it's plain depressing. How on earth could people kill so many other people? I don't understand people ...

Thank you. Thought-provoking and intelligent. Just what h2g2 is all about

F/b