THE NOUN AND adjectives World War II are synonymous with mass death as never before envisioned. The six years and one day of World War II (September 1, 1939–September 2, 1945) witnessed somewhere between fifty and eighty-five million deaths. Perhaps a figure of sixty to sixty-five million killed is the most likely guess. Or to put it another way, about 3 percent of the estimated two billion people alive in 1939 would die by force by 1945.
During the combined three centuries of conflict between 1700 and 1988, roughly one hundred million are estimated to have died in some 471 wars. Well over half that number perished in just the six years of World War II. The toll may have been even greater, given that the exact number of fatalities cannot be known due to poor wartime recordkeeping, especially in the former Soviet Union and China, the locales of over half the war’s fatalities.1
Plenty of disagreement arises over the methodology of counting the war’s losses, given the exact relationships between the war and famines, massive displacements, deportations, and disease. If a man died in 1946 from a war wound incurred in 1944, or if one first contracted tuberculosis at Dachau and succumbed in 1947, he was usually not counted as a direct fatality of World War II. The only constant in counting the human cost of the war is that over the last seventy years of scholarship, the number of fatalities attributed to World War II seems always to have been revised upward. The war dwarfed even the unprecedented horrors of World War I. Until 1939, the Great War had accounted for the greatest number of dead (15–20 million) of any conflict in history. Yet World War II resulted in at least three times that toll.
World War II was also the worst human-caused disaster in civilization’s history—more deadly than the Mongol invasions, the forced collectivization of farmland and reordering of rural life ordered by Joseph Stalin between 1930 and 1932, and perhaps even more catastrophic than the later mass starvations caused by the various internal revolutions spawned by Mao Zedong. On the other hand, at war’s end the armies of the victorious Allies had never been larger, better equipped, and more lavishly supplied, almost as if the more death and destruction that ensued, the more the military grew and the life of the soldier improved. The three major winners alone fielded forces in aggregate of nearly thirty million combatants. Despite the far greater carnage between 1939 and 1945, seventy years later historians rarely write of the political or strategic futility of the Second World War as they so often do of the First. Apparently, losing sixty million for a subsequent general seventy-year peace and the end of nightmarish ideologies was defensible, while losing fifteen to twenty million for a twenty-one-year hiatus was sometimes not.
The staggering twenty million who perished from the flu pandemic of 1918 were probably less than wartime losses inside the Soviet Union alone between June 1941 and spring 1945. The great Chinese drought of 1876–1879 (approximately 10 million dead) proved less deadly than the violence unleashed by the Japanese in China between 1931 and 1945. Even the horrific bubonic plague—the worst natural catastrophe in human history, which may have killed two-thirds (40 to 50 million) of Europe’s population between 1346 and 1353—probably did not match the death toll of World War II.2
IN ADDITION TO the reasons noted in the prior chapters for the singular deadliness of the war, other considerations help to explain how a perfect six-year storm of death was unleashed by an otherwise brief German invasion of its neighbor Poland in 1939.
First, by the mid-twentieth century, the world had an estimated population of two billion. More people died in World War II than ever before because there simply were more people to fight and die. Armies were larger. Major belligerent countries such as Britain, China, France, Germany, Japan, the Soviet Union, and the United States had never been so populous or so urbanized. In no past era in history was an infantry force such as the Soviet Red Army of more than five hundred active ground divisions even conceivable. There had never been a navy such as the American fleet of nearly seven thousand warships. Some estimates put combined Axis and Allied mobilized military manpower at its peak at an aggregate seventy million people during six years of war.3
Second, like many of history’s greatest conflicts, the war started in and spread from Europe. It was largely fought by Western or Westernized powers that were the most industrially advanced and technologically sophisticated nations in the world, and at the apogee of their scientific development. A South American border war, a continent-wide conflict in Africa, or even a battle engulfing all of Southeast Asia would not have involved the use of Zyklon B, napalm, B-29 bombers, atomic weapons, proximity fuze shells, land mines, millions of sophisticated tanks and artillery pieces, and ubiquitous semi-automatic weapons.
The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) was fought in the heart of Europe and lasted five times longer than World War II. It was bloodier than any war of the seventeenth century outside of Europe, given the population size and degree of scientific advancement of the continent. Yet that savagery was a pre–Industrial Revolution conflict in which matchlock muskets fired at best at rates of one shot every two minutes, and were hardly accurate beyond a hundred yards. Such small-arms fire was light years away from the five hundred to six hundred rounds per minute capability of a World War II light machine gun or semi-automatic pre-assault weapon such as the Sturmgewehr 44, much less the much more terrifying Maschinengewehr 42 that spewed out bullets at a rate of 1,200 rounds per minute. One Wehrmacht soldier represented the firepower of a few hundred harquebusiers and could kill easily at three or four times the distance. In short, two developments—the emergence of rapid-firing rifles with cheap cartridges, and mass-produced artillery and shrapnel shells—changed the complexion of land warfare in the twentieth century. For the first time in military history, the percentage of losses between the victor and defeated evened out. In fact, in many battles the victorious side suffered far more than the losers. The number of weapons produced by all the nations of World War II was staggering: 440,000 military aircraft, five million military vehicles, over eighty billion bullets and mortar and artillery shells, and fifty million small firearms and artillery pieces. The previous notion of husbanding bullets because of their rarity and expense simply did not apply to most battles of World War II, at least in comparison to past conflicts.4
Third, global transportation and communications—the telephone, the radio, sophisticated internal combustion engines, and rapid and cheap air and oceanic travel—allowed the war to expand well beyond the confines of Europe. The world had shrunk. The fighting reached Asian, African, and Oceanic locales that otherwise had been largely immune from past internecine European conflicts. Napoleon had spread his war to Egypt. There were Middle Eastern and African theaters during World War I. Yet never before had so many combatants fought so violently so far apart over such vast expanses of territory—whether near the Arctic Circle or the Sahara Desert, from the Volga River to the waters off Miami, and in the Aleutian Islands and across the Indian Ocean. Exotic places like Tarawa or far off cities such as Kursk became everyday referents to millions of European and Asian citizens in a way they never were before or since.
The use of radio guidance and radar allowed ships to travel in zero visibility and planes to bomb amid heavy cloud cover. The idea that a bomber such as a B-29 could fly 1,600 miles over the ocean to drop ten tons of incendiaries would have been considered absurd in 1939. But the notion was passé by September 1945 after months of lethal fire raids on Japan as the radius of war grew as never before.
Large oil-fired ocean-going transports and warships, processed foods and improved storage and packaging methods, along with air transports, allowed soldiers to reach the enemy in great numbers and be supplied almost anywhere on the globe. It would again have been beyond the power of the World War I American military to have conducted large-scale amphibious operations in the Pacific or to have landed consecutively in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, Normandy, and southern France. Italy in 1914 would not have been able to send a half-million men to eastern and northern Africa and support them. The German army of 1918 could not have parachuted troops into Crete and captured the island.
Fourth, World War II was an ideological war waged in the new age of secular modernism. There had been centuries of conflicts fueled by religious ideas, revolutionary fervor, and ethnic chauvinism in the West—from the Crusades to the Thirty Years’ War to the Napoleonic Wars—that transcended traditional disputes over personalities, succession, territory, resources, or politics. But totalitarian ideologies of World War II, often claiming pedigrees from Darwin and Nietzsche to Marx and Engels, reenergized theories of racial superiority, state power, mass participation of civilians, technological determinism, and national destinies as never quite seen in the 2,500 years of Western history. Modernism had helped to reinvent morality in relativist terms. The 1930s championed the statist idea that the interests of the strong collective trumped the supposed selfishness of the weaker individual, as dying and killing were easily justified as necessary means to achieve utopian ends. One of the many reasons why the Eastern Front turned so horrific was the similarly totalitarian nature and morality of the Soviet and Nazi military leadership. Both the Red Army and the Wehrmacht censored all news from the battlefield. Both tolerated no dissenting voices and executed their own in vast numbers—in the case of the Germans, over twenty-five thousand through military courts-martial; for the Red Army, well over a hundred thousand. They conceded that surrender was usually tantamount to death and recklessly suffered enormous losses to protect the hierarchy of the state.
By the start of World War II, scientific development, especially in Nazi Germany, was also considered synonymous with ethical advancement, despite the fact that technologies were often used to enhance the mechanics of mass death. Science almost seemed to excuse or at least offer a veneer to barbarity. The quite contrary idea of material progress ensuring moral regress—a warning in classical literature from the early Greek poet Hesiod and classical tragedian Sophocles to the Roman imperial novelist Petronius and historian Tacitus—was never more evident. The great myth of the war was that ethics had evolved at the same pace as engineering, or that the diminution of edged hand-held weapons meant less barbarism and cruelty. No warlike premodern empire—not those of the Vandals, Mongols, Aztecs, Zulus, or Ottomans—systematically and deliberately killed as many civilians during a conflict as did the Third Reich.
The Nazis capitalized on breakthroughs in German engineering and chemical production at places like Auschwitz and Treblinka to ratchet up the death tolls to surreal levels. Topf & Sons was proud of its cutting-edge incinerators that facilitated the cremation of hundreds of thousands of gassed inmates at Auschwitz, understanding quite correctly that the bottleneck in the Final Solution was not just rail transportation to the East or insufficient gas chambers, but rather the inability to dispose of tens of thousands of corpses each day. The firm wanted its brand name prominently stamped on the doors to the Apocalypse.
Without German custom-built crematoria, the death camps would never have reached daily kill rates approaching eight to ten thousand in May and June 1944. Crematoria II and III at Auschwitz operated with clockwork efficiency:
The basements of the crematoriums built on two levels included a hall for the handling of the corpses [for the pulling out of gold teeth, cutting women’s hair, detaching prosthetic limbs, collecting any valuables such as wedding rings, glasses, and the like] by the Jewish Sonderkommando members [death camp workers] after they had dragged the bodies out of the gas chamber. Then elevators carried the corpses to the ground floor, where several ovens reduced them to ashes. After the grinding of bones in special mills, the ashes were used as fertilizer in the nearby fields, dumped in local forests, or tossed into the river nearby. As for the members of the Sonderkommandos, they were periodically killed and replaced by a new batch.5
The preindustrial Greeks and Romans executed prisoners and destroyed towns and cities, but not on such a huge scale or as a matter of national ideology as was true of the Wehrmacht. Hundreds of thousands of civilians can be killed with edged weapons rather quickly: over a million in Rwanda may have perished in just one hundred days in mid-1994, many of them by tens of thousands of killers armed with hand-held machetes. But such a nightmare could not reach the ghastly numbers targeted by Nazi Germany without the industry and technology of the modern dictatorial state.6
The Wehrmacht conceded that most Soviet prisoners taken between June 1941 and April 1945 would not survive German captivity. Only 40 percent did. The Soviet Union likewise did not worry about the approximately one million German prisoners who perished in Russian hands. Fascism, Nazism, and communism—and the determined responses of the democracies to them—created zones of war without quarter at a barbarous level never seen before. The Allies took for granted that in cities like Dresden and Tokyo tens of thousands of civilians who were not directly engaged in war production would nevertheless be incinerated along with those who were. They tolerated their deaths as an aberration from their own professed code of ethics in such an existential war against the modern barbarism of the Axis.
World War II was an anomaly in two respects: the number of dead was astronomical at over sixty million, and the victors suffered anywhere from five to seven times more dead than did the defeated. Both those paradoxes were entirely attributable to the horror of some forty million Russian and Chinese fatalities—well over thirty times the combined British and American losses. The respective populations of the Soviet Union and China were slaughtered as never before in the long history of warfare by ideological zealots who nonetheless lost the war. Taken separately, the Russian-German war in the East (27 million dead) marks the second most deadly conflict in the history of warfare after the combined other theaters of World War II.7
There was yet a fifth and unprecedented multiplier of death in World War II. In the age-old tension between technological challenge and response, the 1930s and 1940s had shifted the cycle to the clear advantage of the offense over the defense. World War II was a military world away from the defensive era of ancient Greek hoplite battle, when bronze body armor could turn away most arrows and spears and thus keep fatalities to an aggregate of about 10 percent of opposing hoplite armies, despite the horror of the head-on collisions of phalanxes. Nor was the war similar to combat during the twelfth century, when plate armor could protect heavy cavalrymen from most hand-held weapons and many projectiles. The era of World War II was not even the Medieval Age of castellation that shielded towns from pre–gunpowder catapult assault.8
World War II also lacked the protective options of later twenty-first-century warfare. There was as yet no effective body armor to deflect bullets from automatic weapons or shrapnel from mortars and artillery—as ceramic and Kevlar body armor in Afghanistan and Iraq would prevent body wounds entirely or diminish the rates of mortality from serious injuries.9
World War II anti-aircraft guns, without sophisticated computer systems, as a rule were not able to stop fleets of strafing fighter-bombers. There were no shoulder-fired guided missiles to stop tactical air attacks. German defensive planners accepted that it took an average of well over three thousand rounds from even their heralded medium-range 88 mm flak guns to down a single Allied bomber, and perhaps more when all calibers of flak guns were averaged together. Offensive considerations more often trumped defensive responses. To solve the cost-benefit dilemmas of B-29s, General Curtis LeMay did not put more guns and armor on the behemoth planes and keep them at higher altitudes, but rather reduced their weight and altitude to ensure heavier bomb loads in the anticipated effort to risk more lives to destroy more of Japan and win the war—and thus to curtail total bombing missions.10
Sixth, World War II went on longer than any other major war since the Industrial Revolution. From the invasion of Poland to the formal Japanese surrender marked a longer span than the American Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War, or the four-year horror of World War I. Six years of escalating violence led to unprecedented casualties. Key here is to remember that World War II started out as a series of declared wars from September 1939 through 1945, unlike the prior Axis interventions in China, Ethiopia, and Spain during the 1930s that, at least initially, began without declarations. Formally declared wars more quickly lead to demands for immediate and absolute victory in a way that police actions and interventions sometimes do not, which in turn become arguments for earlier mass mobilizations and retooling of industry.
Seventh, World War II, as mentioned earlier, was the first major war in which civilian fatalities far outnumbered military deaths, despite improved medical facilities and advances in food storage and preservation. The old nineteenth-century divide between soldier and civilian—obscured, but not ended in World War I—was completely obliterated in World War II. Or rather, the targeting of civilians was considered a legitimate strategy of both diminishing enemy military capability and exterminating ideological and racial enemies under the cloak of war. When Hitler bragged of the collective Volk or Stalin of the masses, enemies apparently took their boasts at face value and agreed that their militaries were indistinguishable from their populations.11
Finally, the rapid German and Japanese absorption of territory, followed by their equally abrupt forced withdrawals from their conquests in 1944–1945, led to vast transfers of civilian populations. These were not uncontested exoduses. Most of the long marches occurred in harsh climates. They were concurrent to fighting, often arising from the fury of ideological extremism and righteous revenge, amid severe shortages of food and lack of shelter. East Prussia, for example, was erased from the map entirely, never to reappear. Fascist ideologies early in the war had been used to justify brutality in the evacuation and movement of conquered peoples. That barbarity empowered a proper notion of vengeance in 1944–1945 against German and, to a lesser extent, Japanese civilians who were forced to withdraw from what they had conquered or areas where, in some cases, they had lived for centuries.12
MOST OF WORLD War II’s sixty million victims died off the battlefield, well apart from both bombs and camps. Perhaps all told, over twenty million starved to death or were weakened by hunger and perished from treatable illnesses and diseases. Yet improved food and water storage and health care—vaccination, medicines, sanitation, hospitalization—should have saved more combatants and civilians from hunger, disease, and exposure in the field. Nonetheless, there were still massive numbers of civilian deaths due to starvation and infection, largely due to the German and Japanese occupations in the Soviet Union and China, respectively. In addition, the capitulations of trapped armies in the Soviet Union and China sent perhaps ten million into prisoner-of-war camps where over half the detainees perished.13
Thousands of Western and central Europeans died from hunger, especially during the first six months of 1945 when Germans retreating from Belgium, France, Italy, and the Netherlands stripped food stocks or destroyed what they could not carry, as farms became battlefields and some civilians like the Dutch ate tulip bulbs. There were also far greater, though lesser-known, abattoirs of mass starvation: Eastern Europe, India, the large archipelagoes of the Pacific, and Southeast Asia.14
The causes of hunger varied from the general to the specific. The vast diversion of manpower from farms to factories and to the army in war zones often left fields unattended. Food was often not stockpiled in occupied countries but plundered and shipped to the Japanese and German fronts. Thousands of civilians starved to death in occupied Greece to supply Army Group South with foodstuffs on its advances to the Caucasus. Indochinese rice fueled the Japanese army. The wartime destruction of transportation and infrastructure meant that produce rotted and never reached population centers. Disruptions in irrigation systems and shortages and diversions of petrochemicals ensured that what farmland was brought into production saw vastly reduced harvests. World War II occurred when nearly half the populations of the belligerents had moved to cities and required daily importation of food by rail or truck.
Even in peacetime, China was always on the cusp of starvation. Under Japanese occupation, perhaps five to six million Chinese starved to death or died from disease, a toll comparable to the European Holocaust. The Japanese were fighting somewhere in China for some fourteen years (1931–1945), the longest of any occupation associated at least in part with World War II. At the peak of the occupation, the Japanese military controlled, indirectly, some two hundred million Chinese, over a third of the country’s population. Japanese-occupied China comprised a country larger in population than any nation in the world at the time except India. In the case of almost every famine of World War II, the death toll was predicated on the length of the Axis occupation, the geographical extent of the occupation, and the size of the occupation force. Life under a Japanese or German proconsul was synonymous with hunger.15
It is impossible to sort out the rough ratios of Russian civilian deaths from starvation, disease, and exposure, or a combination of all three. The best collective estimates range from five to ten million dead from such causes, largely during the flight before the Nazi offensives of 1941–1942, the siege of Leningrad, the great encirclements around Kiev, Minsk, Smolensk, and Uman, and the deliberate Nazi policies during the occupation of some one million square miles until 1944. Although the Soviet Union was self-sufficient in grain by 1941, its huge collective farms were not only inefficient but also far more vulnerable to disruptions in fuel, supplies, and transportation than had been true of the prior decentralized regimen of farm-owning kulaks, peasants, and small agrarians.
When the German army entered Ukraine, the collective Soviet system of food production simply collapsed. It was a deliberate policy of the invading Germans (the so-called Hungerplan of Nazi technocrat Herbert Backe) to strip the Soviet Union of all its available food. By starving to death millions of Russians, the Third Reich thought that it could feed the Wehrmacht from local stocks, send food surpluses back to the German homeland, and diminish Slavic populations to pave the way for eventual German resettlement. And while the Hungerplan was never fully implemented in its ghastly entirety, Stalin’s scorched-earth policy in the retreats of summer 1941, the Russian counteroffensives after Stalingrad, and the German withholding of food from occupied populations all help to explain why millions of Russians starved to death. Hitler entertained lunatic visions of a new Germanized Russia, in which at best the population would be reduced to helotage:
The German colonist ought to live on handsome, spacious farms. The German services will be lodged in marvelous buildings, the governors in palaces. Beneath the shelter of the administrative services, we shall gradually organise all that is indispensable to the maintenance of a certain standard of living. Around the city, to a depth of thirty to forty kilometres, we shall have a belt of handsome villages connected by the best roads. What exists beyond that will be another world, in which we mean to let the Russians live as they like. It is merely necessary that we should rule them. In the event of a revolution, we shall only have to drop a few bombs on their cities, and the affair will be liquidated. Once a year we shall lead a troop of Kirghizes through the capital of the Reich, in order to strike their imaginations with the size of our monuments.
On the eve of Operation Barbarossa, the future of occupied Russia was spelled out starkly in the Third Reich’s official “Economic Policy Guidelines for Economic Organization East.” Russian grain—Ukraine provided 40 percent of Soviet supplies—would be siphoned off to feed the Wehrmacht, easing shortages inside the Third Reich: “Many tens of millions of people in this territory will become superfluous and will have to die or migrate to Siberia. Attempts to rescue the population there from death through starvation by obtaining surpluses from the black earth zone can only be at the expense of the provisioning of Europe. They prevent the possibility of Germany holding out until the end of the war; they prevent Germany and Europe from resisting the blockade.”16
Aside from the combined ten to fifteen million who starved to death or died from disease in China and Russia, there were the mostly forgotten eight to ten million civilians who perished in Burma, the Dutch East Indies, French Indochina, India, and the Philippines. Perhaps three million starved on Java alone. Here the common denominator was not just war. Allied forces, for example, had mostly skipped over the Dutch East Indies and for most of the war fought few battles along the borders of India proper or in French Indochina. Instead, Japanese occupation was again the culprit. The occupied were forced to give up food to supply the Imperial Japanese Army and starved as a consequence. The accessory killer of Asians was endemic poverty. The entrance of Japanese forces into such fragile human landscapes as the Pacific and Southeast Asia, largely to extract natural resources and critical manpower, proved a brutal force multiplier of death.
Outside the Eastern and Asia-Pacific fronts, perhaps another two to three million civilians starved or suffered fatal illnesses inside the respective Axis empires. Both Allied bombing and food shortages due to rationing, transportation disruptions, and expropriations resulted in widescale famine within both Germany and Japan. Over one million starved to death in the German-controlled Baltic states, the Netherlands, Poland, the Balkans, and Eastern Europe—countries that were either occupied after 1940–1941 or joined the Third Reich and later became battlefields between advancing Allies and retreating Germans in 1944–1945. If a country was not self-sufficient in food production before the war, and if it was felt to harbor a serious resistance movement, then it was especially vulnerable to harsh German requisitions. Accordingly, the Netherlands (16,000–20,000 dead) and Greece (estimates of 100,000–400,000 dead) were especially singled out.17
Well over four thousand divisions, in addition to auxiliaries, were raised during World War II. Such an unprecedented mobilization took seventy million able-bodied men away from peacetime work, and often from farms and agriculture-related industries. Vast amounts of global capital were also diverted to munitions from food production, chemicals, fertilizers, farm machinery, and infrastructure. Natural disasters did not take a holiday during the war. Disease was enhanced by deprivation. Over a quarter-billion Russians and Chinese were displaced refugees or remained under enemy occupation. Perhaps three hundred million in Europe at some point suffered a similar fate of leaving their homes.
THE BEST ESTIMATES—DESPITE inexact recordkeeping and frequent Soviet distortions—suggest that about twenty to twenty-five million died in combat during the war, with the Eastern Front being the meat grinder of the conflict, costing the lives of fifteen million German and Russian soldiers, among them perhaps four to four-and-a-half million Russian and German POWs. Ostensibly, most Germans died in the long westward retreats after 1943, while most Russians perished in the first two years of Operation Barbarossa. Huge numbers of Germans and Russians were killed every month after June 1941, well apart from the notorious slaughterhouses at Kursk, Leningrad, Stalingrad, and Warsaw. In fact, losses on both sides spiked in late 1943 through summer 1944, more than two years after the commencement of Operation Barbarossa, as both sides rushed more lethal artillery and the war’s most potent armored vehicles to the front.18
Japan perhaps lost over one million soldiers in combat inside China. In turn, the Chinese suffered three to four million battle deaths in some fourteen years of on-off war. As on the Eastern Front, the majority of Chinese and Japanese battle fatalities in the Chinese War were in the army. Another one million Japanese died fighting Allied soldiers, largely in the Pacific and Burma, among them over four hundred thousand from the Imperial Navy, who suffered grievously from American submarines and carrier-based aircraft. Air and ground action between the Allies and Axis in Western Europe, Italy, and the Mediterranean added at least another one to two million dead. In addition, there were so many forgotten theaters both prior to and associated with World War II—the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935, the Soviet-Japanese War of 1939, the Finnish War of 1939, or the Japanese invasion of Indochina in 1940—that no exact number of combat dead can ever be ascertained. Two general rules governed military fatalities in World War II. First, the smaller and less effective a nation’s naval and air forces were, the greater its combined military’s fatalities became, mostly as a result of slow-moving and poorly supported ground fighting. Second, democracies suffered far fewer military deaths than did autocracies, perhaps in part because they were often more concerned about incurring rather than inflicting losses.
OTHER BARBARITIES EXPLAINED an additional fifteen million lost civilians. The greatest causes of death were the mass executions—both in camps and ad hoc—associated with the Holocaust. They focused mostly on the grotesque effort to wipe out European Jewry, although the Roma, communists, homosexuals, and the disabled were all targeted at times for mass exterminations. Again, it is hard to distinguish the exact number of victims who perished between 1939 and 1945 in extermination, labor, or detention camps, as well as those who were murdered by special extermination squads or executed gratuitously by roaming individuals and packs. But educated guesses indicate that about six million Jews were slaughtered by the operatives of the Third Reich, in death camps, through open-air shootings, and through destructions of Jewish ghettoes.
Perhaps five million of those dead were Polish- and Russian-Jewish citizens, with another one million Western, Eastern, and southern European Jews. Somewhere between one to two million Slavs were also targeted for death, including those starved or worked to death in camps and those killed through open-air shootings (“mobile killing operations”), along with hundreds of thousands of mostly Eastern Europeans, Roma, Freemasons, homosexuals, disabled, and communists. Before Hitler went into Russia, he had warned his subordinates that they should use all methods necessary to fulfill his envisioned killing agenda: “All necessary measures—shooting, resettlement and so on.”19
No other deliberate mass killings in history, before or since, whether systematic, loosely organized, or spontaneous, have approached the magnitude of the Holocaust—not the Armenian genocide, the Cambodian “killing fields,” or the Rwandan tribal bloodletting. For all the efforts to locate the Holocaust in a historical framework, it remains savagely unique, unlike any other event of the past.20
The origins and catalysts of the Holocaust are complex and can only briefly be examined here. There were centuries of European persecution of the Jews deriving from ingrained popular anti-Semitism, religiously inspired hatred, envy of material and professional success, and the greedy desire to confiscate and loot Jewish property and capital. But none of these experiences prepared the world for such incomprehensible numbers of the murdered.
Poland and Russia were perhaps more anti-Semitic than Germany as late as 1930. Yet neither they nor any other country had embarked on such a systematic state-sponsored propaganda against Jews, leading millions of Germans by 1939 to manifest anti-Semitism or at least to feel that they themselves were victims of various Jewish machinations. Anti-Semitism soon became a wise career move under the Third Reich. After the war, the British secretly taped two mid-level bureaucrats from the industry of the Holocaust—Eugen Horak, a guard at Auschwitz, and Ernst von Gottstein, a functionary in the forced-labor program. After small talk about the admitted savagery of their colleagues, von Gottstein shrugged, “the only really good thing about the whole affair is that a few million Jews no longer exist.” Horak agreed, but lamented the fate of the Holocaust planners: “But those who are responsible are now in the soup.” In that regard, there were few, if any, instances of German soldiers after 1939 who faced serious punishments for declining to participate directly in the killing of Jews, a fact that makes the apologies of “just following orders” more difficult to sustain.21
One additional element made the unique Nazi brew of Jew hatred especially toxic: after Hitler’s ascension to power, the general German abhorrence of Bolshevism was conflated with anti-Semitism. According to Nazi propagandists like the venomous Alfred Rosenberg, Jews such as Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky had invented communism and forced it upon the Soviet Union, and sought to do the same to Germany. Jews composed only a tiny fraction of the Soviet elite, but German propaganda had long insisted that Jewish Bolshevism invented and controlled the Soviet Union and wished dearly to absorb Eastern Europe and the German fatherland.22
The invasion of the Soviet Union ensured that millions of additional Jews would be now within the reach of Nazis. More important, the increasingly barbaric nature of the fighting, the Third Reich’s first experience with military setbacks on the ground, and soaring fatalities were all translated by German propagandists into a new sense of national victimhood. The communist Bolshevik Jews and their henchmen were supposedly slaughtering German prisoners. For the German public, Jews were now not just to be slandered as conspiratorial and greedy but as murderers of German youth.23
The ultimate font of the extermination camps was, of course, Hitler himself. His singular ruthlessness in pursuing the Final Solution permeated the entire Third Reich and often trumped military priorities. Most members of the Nazi elite shared his hatred of the Jews—well beyond Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Goering, Reinhard Heydrich, Martin Bormann, and Adolf Eichmann. Nazi doctrine fed off the lower middle class’s scapegoating for the humiliation of defeat in World War I and the economic downturn of the Depression. But no top Nazi other than Hitler was able to contextualize Jew hatred within a spellbinding public oratory that made Jewish perfidy an all-purpose explanation for the purported persecutions that Germany suffered after World War I. No politician of his age possessed such a savvy understanding of how to tap and so manipulate the deep-seated resentments and sense of shame within German-speaking Europe of the 1920s and 1930s.24
For Hitler, the one common denominator among capitalism, communism, and socialism was the subordination of nationalism to global Jewish manipulators who had allegiance to no country. Even more perniciously, Hitler’s concept of Das Volk defined Germanness as entailing, in addition to shared citizenship, customs, tradition, residency, and language, a national destiny as well. Yet his idea of a German Volk was not really linguistic or even territorial, but racial, a supposed Aryan German tribe that since Roman times had remained pristine, unconquered, and unassimilated, safe from contamination beyond the Rhine and Danube—a conflation of race and nationality that energized Franco’s and Mussolini’s notion of raza/razza. Hitler’s later wartime evening table talk was mostly consumed by thinly veiled promises to wipe out Jews: “The discovery of the Jewish virus is one of the greatest revolutions that have taken place in the world. The battle in which we are engaged today is of the same sort as the battle waged, during the last century, by Pasteur and Koch. How many diseases have their origin in the Jewish virus!… We shall regain our health only by eliminating the Jew.”25
Hitler initially approached the planned exterminations with a degree of caution because of his fear that the German people, while supportive of his racialist ideology, might draw the line at the industrial killing of millions even under cover of existential war. Thus, his agents by 1943 played down news of the acceleration of the Final Solution. Perhaps they feared that the atrocities, when combined with catastrophic losses at the front and in bombing damage, might weaken public support for the National Socialist cause, especially by scaring Germans with the specter of their enemies having righteous causes for an impending terrible payback. Killing Jews may or may not have been wise, the Nazis seemed to shrug, but not finishing them off would earn vengeance from survivors, even as they feared that Allied bombers were incinerating Germans for their supposed crimes against the Jews. At the same time, the Nazi hierarchy sought to welcome hundreds of thousands, if not millions, in the actual mechanics of mass death, from doctors like Josef Mengele to industrialists who designed the crematoria. Such mass participation might ensure that Germans in general would be so invested in culpability for such unspeakable crimes that they would have no choice but to continue their killing to the bitter end.26
Most Germans and many Europeans under occupation seemed indifferent to the fact that Jews by 1943 were out of sight and of mind, without being bothered by the gory details of exactly how their disappearance had been carried out. Almost by magic, Jews had simply gone away to somewhere else, leaving their often valuable property behind. How and where they had gone were not the concern of their neighbors. Admiral Doenitz, who ended the war as Hitler’s named successor, represented the official attitude of willful blindness when he claimed, “How, we asked ourselves, could such horrors have occurred in the middle of Germany without our having known?” What the Nazi architects required from the German and European publics was not just scapegoating of Jews, but something more appalling: general indifference to their ultimate fate.27
It was certainly true that German efficiency, from train door to crematorium ash, ensured a conveyor belt of death nearly impossible to impede by spontaneous riot or organized resistance, although on occasion both occurred. Subterfuge and illusion were integral parts of the death camps’ operation, as inmates were told to pack for relocation, ready themselves for work on arrival, follow regulations to ensure their safety, shower and clean themselves—good German rituals developed to ensure that they would walk to, rather than run from, their deaths.
Genocide was choreographed, antiseptic, and scientific. As Hans Frank, the governor-general of Nazi-controlled Poland, in a December 1939 entry in his diary concluded, “we cannot shoot 2,500,000 Jews. Neither can we poison them. We shall have to take steps, however, designed to extirpate them in some way—and this will be done.” The call for the IG Farben chemical conglomerate to supply its insecticide and fumigant Zyklon B for the death camps, or for Topf & Sons to offer new models of mass crematoria, was seen by industry as no different from a requisition for Mark V tank armor or shells for an 88 mm flak gun. Just as important, the Third Reich found it rather easy to recruit thousands of lawyers, professors, churchmen, bureaucrats, and doctors to use their expertise in pursuit of the goals of the Holocaust. The limitations of muscular labor and the problem of the disposal of the dead had always provided a check on history’s mass murderers; Hitlerian science and state organization solved both age-old roadblocks to a holocaust.28
The daily death toll of the Final Solution spiked in the last two years of the war as it became clear that Germany would likely suffer a defeat, well after the infamous Wannsee Conference of January 20, 1942, that had outlined the organization and capital needed to exterminate the Jews. By March 1942, perhaps 75 percent of the eventual victims of the Holocaust may have been still alive. Initial ideas had considered deporting millions of Jews to foreign countries like Madagascar, or to the East in occupied Russia, or herding them into ghettoes to be starved, or allowing special mobile details to conduct mass executions, or even to hold them as hostages to be bartered for cash and supplies. However, all had been rejected by late 1941 as insufficient to liquidate the millions necessary to eradicate European Jewry.29
Besides the roles of Hitler, industry, technology, and the Nazi state, the fog of war obscured Nazi atrocity. Without the din of battle, the sounds of the industry of mass death would have been difficult to muzzle. In wartime it was not so difficult to censor detailed information surrounding the slaughter. The Jewish extermination still went on all through 1944–1945, when even the Nazi hierarchy, at least privately, assumed the war could not be won. In that existential context, eliminating the Jews became one of the few Nazi goals of the war that was still felt to have been obtainable, and that might justify renewed sacrifices amid general failure at the front.30
Of course, there is no guarantee that the Allies would have intervened to stop the bloodletting in the mid-1930s had Hitler begun to slaughter millions rather than thousands of Jews before the war. Hitler was not completely ostracized by the West even after the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935 that excluded German Jews from German citizenship and forbid them from marrying non-Jewish Germans, as well as defining Jewishness by race, not by religion. The Allies did not boycott the Berlin Olympic Games of 1936; in fact, US Olympic Committee president Avery Brundage, for example, had dubbed the efforts to stop participation a “Jewish-Communist conspiracy.”31
Before the advent of hostilities in 1938, Germany’s neighbors were objecting loudly to the forced transfer of German Jews into their own territories. French foreign minister Georges-Étienne Bonnet reportedly asked German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop to stop the shipments of Jews into France because the French “did not want to receive any more Jews from Germany.” That plea prompted Ribbentrop to record that he had replied, “we all wanted to get rid of our Jews but that the difficulties lay in the fact that no country wished to receive them.” During the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Stalin turned down the Nazi request to accept Jews who were forcibly removed from the Third Reich.32
Even after the war began, ultimately it remained impossible to convince Britain and the United States to divert their own war resources to thwart the Holocaust, or even to systematically publicize the details of the Nazi death industry. It took months to smuggle out detailed descriptions of the everyday savagery at Auschwitz, such as the barbaric experiments of Joseph Mengele:
Two, perhaps three days later the SS man brought them (two children, aged about four) back in a frightening condition. They had been sewn together like Siamese twins. The hunchbacked child was tied to the second one on the back and wrists. Mengele had sewn their veins together. The wounds were filthy and they festered. There was a powerful stench of gangrene. The children screamed all night long. Somehow their mother managed to get hold of morphine and put an end to their suffering.
By 1943 there were enough firsthand accounts of the death camps circulating in the US State Department, and by 1944 the possibility of at least bombing some of the camps (Auschwitz-Birkenau especially), that the failure of America, on the one hand, to take in hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees and, on the other hand, to destroy many of the extermination camps was increasingly becoming indefensible. Americans at the highest levels of the Roosevelt administration were anxious about admitting what might become millions of Eastern European Jews into the United States, or diverting large military resources on what they feared would be a permanent project to save the Jews. Luminaries like wartime Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long and Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy were especially culpable, both in either downplaying the evidence of the death camps or incorrectly asserting that heavy bombers either could not reach camps like Auschwitz or could not be diverted from more important missions.33
There were endlessly tragic paradoxes about the destruction of European Jewry. The Jews in and out of Europe at the war’s outbreak looked to Britain to defeat Hitler. Yet they accepted that British efforts to curtail immigration to Palestine reduced chances of escape for tens of thousands of those marked for death in Europe. Jews saw Western democracy as the enlightened antidote to the engines of the Holocaust, and the Red Army as the nearest means to end the death camps in the East, even as Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union did not let in sufficient numbers of Jewish refugees, whom Hitler had cynically but presciently assumed would not find sanctuary among his enemies. American Jews lobbied for increased Jewish immigration and yet sometimes did not press their case out of fears that large influxes might spike wartime anti-Semitism.34
There was a final factor integral in the German algebra of death: wartime geography. As many as eight million Jews were in relatively easy reach of the Third Reich in both Eastern Europe—the Baltic states, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania—and western Russia. The ability of the Nazi government to forge alliances with Eastern European nations with large Jewish populations and to devote the vast majority of its military resources to the East—before June 1941 in Poland and the Balkans, afterwards in the Soviet Union—spelled the near doom of European Jewry. Certainly, the Nazis went after Western European Jews and built various detention, labor, and transit camps in the West by which hundreds of thousands of Jews perished or were shipped to the East, but such roundups were always more difficult. Western European Jews were less numerous. They were more dispersed through the population, more assimilated within Western European society, closer to neutral sanctuaries, and often more affluent and with greater financial means to flee. Governments in the West before the war were more democratic, and there was a clearer account of the persecutions of the prewar Third Reich, which gave Jews earlier warnings of the need, first, to flee Germany and, second, to leave the entire Western European continent.
In contrast, Jews in the East were far more numerous, mostly poorer, often concentrated in ghettoes, more apt to be orthodox and thus easily identifiable, and historically more subject to local pogroms. One of the ironies of the German requirement for Jews inside the Third Reich and its Western European occupied territories to wear yellow cloth badges at all times was the need at all to require any identification for a people who, according to Nazi ideology, were supposedly easily identifiable as Untermenschen. Even supporters of the yellow stars noted the disconnect. The fascist and anti-Semitic French novelist Lucien Rebatet approved of the odious requirement but noted about the supposed racial enemies being indistinguishable from Europeans: “The yellow star rectifies this strange situation in which one human group that is radically opposed to the people of white blood and which for eternity is unassimilable to this blood, cannot be identified at first glance.”35
The Nazi authorities were able to kill more Jews within their first two months of the Russian invasion than they had during the previous eight years of Nazi rule and yearlong wartime occupation of Western Europe. A parade of Nazis for the first time in their lives visited Eastern Europe and western Russia between 1939 and 1941. They remarked on the quite contrasting status and appearance of Eastern from Western Jews, as if the difference made their own task of extermination somehow easier. After Joseph Goebbels returned from newly occupied Poland, he wrote to Hitler confirming their shared view that the conditions of Eastern European Jewry made their extermination more likely. Then he recorded in his diary, “The Jew is a waste product. It is a clinical issue more than a social one.”36
In this regard, the June 22, 1941, invasion of the Soviet Union was the most critical turning point in the history of the Jewish people since the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple in AD 70. Had Hitler not invaded the Soviet Union and not headed further eastward—absorbing all of eastern Poland, the Baltic states, and western Russia—it would have been impossible to carry out the full agenda of the Holocaust. The transport of Jews “to the East” was cloaked in disinformation. Had the death camps inside Poland been scattered throughout occupied France, for instance, the Holocaust would have been a nightmare far more difficult to disguise.37
ALL OF THE major powers of World War II built prisoner-of-war camps. But what distinguished the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, and Japan (which ran well over 250 major internment camps in Borneo, Burma, China, the Dutch East Indies, Formosa, Korea, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, and smaller centers almost everywhere else under Japanese occupation) was that, in addition to captured soldiers, these powers interned, mistreated, and often killed an entire array of dissidents and ethnicities. Hundreds more camps were established exclusively for civilian prisoners throughout the Japanese Empire.38
Death rates varied among prisoners, depending on the type and status of the enemy. Japan imprisoned fewer civilians than Germany. The Japanese were far more brutal to captured enemy soldiers than was Germany outside of the Eastern Front. About a third of all who were interned in camps by the Japanese perished. The worst survival rates of the war were among Soviet prisoners of the Germans (almost 60 percent, or over 3 million deaths), as well as Germans held by the Soviets (up to 1 million). American and British prisoners in German hands rarely died (3–5 percent). Nor did Germans and Japanese fare poorly under the Western Allies (1–2 percent death rates). It was hard to sort out the logic of Axis captors: few warring powers were more successful in keeping prisoners alive than were the Germans with their British and American captives; yet no country was as murderous as were the Germans to captured Russians in the East or Jews in their midst. Brutal Japanese prisoner-of-war camps wiped out nearly a third of the Allied soldiers who fell into them, with even higher death rates for Asian prisoners.39
Bombing may have directly accounted for well over 5 percent of the war’s civilian dead. Most European capitals and major cities, except those of neutral nations (Dublin, Istanbul, Lisbon, Madrid, Stockholm, Zurich, etc.) at one time or another were bombed. In addition to at least some attacks on Amsterdam, Antwerp, Athens, Berlin, Brussels, London, Paris, Prague, Rome, Rotterdam, and Warsaw, Allied and Axis bombers hit as well cities far to the east, such as Chongqing, Darwin, Manila, Moscow, Leningrad, Shanghai, Singapore, Stalingrad, and Tokyo. It is almost impossible to know exactly how many of the roughly forty million civilians who perished in World War II died as a direct result of bombing. Even in the most deadly and infamous cases—Belgrade, Berlin, Cologne, Coventry, Dresden, Hamburg, Hiroshima, London, Nagasaki, and Tokyo—death tolls to this day remain disputed. Nonetheless, rough estimates suggest that in six years of combined Axis and Allied bombing, at least two million civilians perished.40
The size and efficiency of the attacking bombing force were crucial. The 828 B-29s with 186 fighter escorts that flew on the last day of major hostilities of World War II (August 14, 1945) carried an aggregate of over eight thousand tons of bombs—far larger even than the payload of 1,046 tons of the “thousand bomber” British raid over Cologne in February 1942, given that many of the earlier Cologne bombers were two-engine medium aircraft. There were great varieties in delivery capacity even among heavy four-engine bombers: the 339 B-29s that flew the devastating first fire raid against Tokyo on March 10, 1945—theretofore the greatest force of B-29s to fly on a single mission—carried bomb tonnage equivalent to the capacity of over a thousand B-17s.41
The nature of a fleet’s bomb load (explosive or incendiary) also mattered. Firebombing took far more lives than high explosives and was largely used in area rather than precision attacks. The degree to which a bomber fleet was accompanied by fighter escorts was important but not always decisive. The quality of anti-aircraft defenses (barrage balloons, flak, radar, etc.) also determined how many died on the ground. Equally important were the nature of civilian and industrial construction at the target site (e.g., wood, stone, cement), the density of population (e.g., single-family dwellings, apartment blocks, urban, suburban), the effectiveness of firefighting responses, the presence of bomb shelters, and the efficiency of forward warning stations (e.g., border spotters, radio, radar) and evacuation plans. By late 1944 and 1945 all these considerations favored the attacking bomber in a way that had been largely untrue between 1939 and 1943.42
Between 1939 and 1941, most successful bombing attacks were conducted by the Axis. Yet despite the absence of effective Allied defenses, and despite systematic indifference to civilian attacks, they were never as lethal as what followed from the Allies. The Axis air forces had neither the number nor the quality of bombers or fighter escorts, nor the duration of air superiority that the Allied air fleets enjoyed after 1942. Still, German strategic and tactical attacks in Poland, the Balkans, Britain during the Blitz, and the Soviet Union in the initial eighteen months of Operation Barbarossa may have accounted for three hundred thousand deaths. No one knows how many Chinese civilians perished in fourteen years from Japanese bombing—perhaps over a hundred thousand—but the toll was limited not by Chinese defenses or Japanese intent but only by a lack of Japanese capability and resources. Axis bombing of cities in East and North Africa and against targets such as Malta might have upped the Axis tally by several thousands.
With the exceptions of the V-1 and V-2 attacks on London and Antwerp, and the ill-fated “Baby Blitz” over London (Operation Steinbock, January–June 1944), the Axis powers after 1943 were mostly unable to bomb Allied civilian centers effectively. Fuel shortages, the lack of long-range heavy bombers, insufficient fighter escorts, poor aircrew training, confused strategies, and loss of air superiority all conspired to make major missions no longer possible. At the same time that the Axis air offensive effort waned, the ability to stop incoming raids over occupied Europe and Germany likewise diminished. Allied air supremacy was achieved by the appearance of long-range, late-model fighter aircraft with drop tanks. No country during the war inflicted so many deaths through strategic bombing and suffered so few in return as the United States, a fact not lost to strategic planners for the next seven decades. Hitler himself after declaring war on America quickly grasped that he had no idea how to conquer the United States, and admitted to the Japanese ambassador that the problem could only be addressed “in the next generation.”43
FAR MORE MILLIONS perished during and after World War II due to forced expulsions of civilians that mirrored the ebb and flow of the war. Two phases marked these massive transfers: an initial flight of Allied and neutral populations before Axis armies of occupation between 1939 and 1942, and a second displacement of civilians, this time of German, Italian, and Japanese civilians, after the collapse of their respective occupation armies. During 1944–1945, millions of Japanese civilians fled from Korea, Manchuria, and most of the Japanese-occupied Pacific. No one knows how many died in efforts to reach Japan, but it is generally considered a fraction of the many millions of Chinese who were forced out of their homes by the occupying Japanese between 1931 and 1945.44
Brutal forced transfers of ethnic German speakers from the East in 1945–1946, especially from Poland, East Prussia, and Eastern Europe, brought even more mass death home to Germany than did Allied bombers. Many of those fleeing had left eastern communities that dated from medieval times. In all, some twelve to fourteen million Germans were forced out of the eastern Third Reich, occupied Eastern Europe, and the western Soviet Union. They fled ahead of the advancing Red Army, or were exiled thereafter by Eastern European governments after liberation from German occupation or in the settling-up period of the first five years of the postwar era.
Exposure, disease, hunger, collateral damage from concurrent ground fighting, and bombing conspired to take the lives of somewhere between half a million to two million Germans fleeing the East—as great a toll as the Mongols’ late thirteenth-century slaughter and devastation in Persia. The mass death of German refugees remains little publicized even today, and is not reckoned as infamous as the Armenian or Rwandan genocides that resulted in probably fewer deaths. The lack of sympathy for this vast human tragedy was summed up best by an East Prussian refugee: “It was our holocaust, but nobody cares.” Anti-German sentiment peaked right after the war. Most in the East felt that most German civilians received what they had deserved. In any case, they suffered far fewer fatalities than what their military had inflicted on others. Most of the descriptions of German refugees after 1944 mirror-imaged those of Eastern Europeans and Russians in 1939–1942 who fled ahead of the German army or were removed by the German occupation.
Operation Hannibal, the huge German sea-lift to evacuate roughly nine hundred thousand German citizens and 350,000 Wehrmacht personnel trapped by the Red Army in East Prussia, proved more than three times larger than the Dunkirk operation. Yet such mostly unknown seaborne evacuations rescued less than 10 percent of the total of German refugees fleeing the East, even as Germany lost one-quarter of its prewar territory and 15 percent of its resident population. Americans and British, more concerned with polarizing the Soviet Union than in checking the abuses of the Red Army, looked the other way as the mass cleansing continued.45
Collateral damage during ground fighting also claimed the lives of millions of civilians caught in war zones: among the most deadly incidents were the massacres in and attacks on Nanking (200,000 dead), the siege of Budapest (40,000), the 125,000 German civilians who died in Berlin during the Soviet assault, the hundred thousand Filipinos lost in the American retaking of Manila, and the hundreds of thousands of Russians who were killed by shells and bullets when trapped in places like Kiev, Leningrad, and Stalingrad. From the first twenty-five thousand dead in the September 1939 attack on Warsaw to the nearly hundred thousand civilians caught up in Okinawa in April–July 1945, thousands of civilians died each day near or on the battlefield due to associated damage and through deliberate targeting. Those who “were in the way” accounted for a large percentage of the some eighteen to twenty-three thousand civilians who on average died each day of World War II—almost four times the number of dead at the Battle of Gettysburg.46
WORLD WAR II was a Russian catastrophe. The Soviet Union suffered the greatest number of losses of the war, somewhere between twenty and twenty-seven million military and civilian dead. Less than half that total was due to combat-related operations. A number of reasons explain the almost inexplicable number of Soviet fatalities. Except for China, nowhere was the war fought longer inside a single country, roughly from June 22, 1941, to March 1945. Britain and Japan were bombed but not invaded. Both Italy and Germany were likewise bombed, but Italy was only invaded and fought over for less than two years, Germany for less than eight months. The US mainland was untouched by enemy bombers, and never reached by Axis ground troops.
The Russians most often fought the Germany army, the most deadly of the Axis militaries, and on a front that would consume 75–80 percent of the Wehrmacht’s resources. While Operation Barbarossa had included nearly a million Eastern European allies and pan-European volunteers, the war usually pitted Germans against Russians. The Eastern Front saw collisions between the greatest combined number of artillery pieces, armored vehicles, aircraft, and infantry in history, on a scale that dwarfed all other theaters. The armed conflicts were handmaidens to deliberate famines and mass executions.47
In the fighting itself in Russia, there were several cycles of mass death. The first came during the initial Nazi offensives between June 1941 and September 1942. In just over a year, the ascendant Wehrmacht killed over four million Soviet soldiers and an untold number of civilians. In these first fourteen months of the war, two considerations had upped the Russian death toll. The Germans enjoyed both surprise and air superiority. They possessed better artillery and initially for a few months often superior armor. Soldiers of the Wehrmacht, mostly veterans of the defeat of Poland and the fall of France, were more experienced and better supplied and organized. Hitler also ordered the army to exterminate hundreds of thousands of particular classes of captured enemies, especially partisans, commissars, and Jews.
Stalin in his early incarnation as supreme wartime leader opposed strategic retreats. His initial stand-or-die plans of resistance only added to the destruction of the Red Army through enabling vast Nazi encirclements such as those at Kiev (nearly 670,000 trapped) or Vyazma-Bryansk (666,000). Being captured in 1941–1942 as a result of strategically imbecilic orders most likely meant death in a German prisoner-of-war camp; survival assured lifelong suspicion and possible death upon repatriation. Between June 1941 and July 1943, over five million Red Army soldiers were swept up in German encirclements—catastrophes nearly as much Stalin’s making as Hitler’s.48
Second, as the German army advanced, it razed considerable infrastructure that it found without immediate military advantage, all within an occupied area perhaps soon to cover a million square miles in which the prewar Soviet economy had produced half its food, nearly two-thirds of its coal and ferrous metals, and 60 percent of its aluminum. The Nazi notion of Lebensraum meant that Soviet civilian deaths were not just useful in the short term for eliminating resistance, but also in the long term for making German colonization and usurpation all that much easier, at least until labor shortages inside the Third Reich meant that by 1943 it was more economical to work occupied peoples to death rather than to kill them outright.49
Third, as the Red Army initially retreated nearly a thousand miles in 1941 and 1942, it destroyed and uprooted its own infrastructure and industry, thereby ensuring misery and death for those Russians who could not escape or relocate. No other German enemy—not the Poles in 1939 or the French in 1940—had yet embraced such a deliberate policy of destroying its own assets. Only a totalitarian government such as Stalin’s could wield enough state power to ensure that Russian subjects destroyed their own livelihood. Stalin’s desolation was as effective as Tsar Alexander I’s similar torching of the Russian motherland to rob Napoleon’s Grand Army of much of its planned sustenance. The scorched-earth policies, along with partisan attacks in occupied Russia, explain in part why Germany was never able to plunder as much food in war as it had purchased from the Soviets in friendship.50
THERE ARE NO accurate figures for the staggering number of Chinese dead. Rough estimates suggest anywhere between ten and twenty million Chinese were lost, with a consensus that most likely fifteen to sixteen million perished during the more than a decade-long Japanese war and occupation. A number of factors explain China’s gargantuan losses.
China was the most populated country in the world—about 660 million in 1931—and thus could suffer human losses that would have unwound almost all other nations, without necessarily collapsing. In such a populous landscape the sheer scale of Japanese barbarity was often underappreciated. Overpopulation, natural catastrophes, and stagnant agricultural practices had made food reserves rare even in times of peace.
Manchuria had turned into a battleground nearly a decade before the “official” outbreak of the Pacific war. The Chinese military was the least adept of the major allies. Racial animus and historical hatred between Chinese and Japanese only exacerbated the conflict. China, in fact, fought three wars simultaneously: a foreign one against Japanese occupiers, a civil war between Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists and Mao Zedong’s communists, and the latter two factions’ sometime alliance against the Japanese-sponsored collaborationists of Wang Jingwei.
If less systematic in their barbarity than the Nazis, the Japanese likewise envisioned war as inclusive of soldier and civilian. They had no reservations about murdering millions of Chinese civilians as part of their general aims to colonize parts of China and extract its national wealth. In their so-called Sanko¯ Sakusen (“Three Alls Campaign”), Japanese protocol was to “kill all, burn all, and pillage all”—and may well have been sanctioned by the emperor himself. The Chinese front proved uncannily similar to the Russian: a vast landscape that drew in an outnumbered invader who battled the elements, enemy soldiers, and civilian onlookers, with no quarter given and none received—with race and ideology as force multipliers to the savagery.51
DESPITE METHODICAL RECORDS, we still have no exact idea of how many German soldiers and civilians perished. That lacuna is largely due to the slaughterhouse of the Eastern Front in 1945 and the simultaneous expulsion of well over twelve million German speakers from Eastern Europe. It is unclear how many German civilians reported as missing actually perished—or in fact survived, but disappeared from official records. Postwar political controversies often saw German historians insisting on greater fatalities, while their American, British, and Russian counterparts argued for fewer. The Cold War division between East and West Germany further politicized analyses of the German wartime dead. The collective German guilt from the Holocaust also played a more subtle role, as some German historians sought to envision bombing losses, POW deaths in the Soviet Union, and the expulsions from the East as the Allies’ own versions of multifarious holocausts, perhaps less planned, but nonetheless accounting for millions of civilian dead.52
All that said, Greater Germany, including all German-speakers in the Third Reich, lost perhaps six to seven million soldiers and civilians, the third-greatest number of fatalities behind the Soviet Union and China. The ratio of far fewer civilian (approximately 2 million) than military dead (approximately 5 million) was unusual for the fighting of World War II that was waged in the heart of central and Eastern Europe for five and a half years. But neither Germany nor Austria was occupied in its western regions until March 1945. Unlike the Soviet Union, China, or Italy, Germany—aside from strategic bombing—was fought over for a matter of weeks, not years.53
A variety of causes accounts for over two million German civilian deaths. The Nazi regime over a decade itself probably killed two hundred thousand ethnic German dissidents, the disabled, communists, homosexuals, and others deemed undesirable, among them those convicted of military desertion and other political crimes. At least another two hundred thousand German and Austrian Jews perished in the extermination camps. Yet another fifty to a hundred thousand noncombatants died in the 1945 two-front Allied advance and occupation of the Third Reich. British and American bombing, particularly after mid-1944, accounted for another four hundred to six hundred thousand dead, the vast majority civilians. But the largest toll was from the Russian-led ethnic cleansing of German speakers during the panicked 1945 retreat before the Red Army—a visitation that exacted a terrible retribution on any German who stayed behind in addition to those who died in the flight westward.
Germany’s huge military losses and its civilian toll were mostly products of the last twelve months of the war. The Scandinavian, Belgian, French, Balkan, North African, Blitz, and U-boat campaigns before June 1941 had cost the Wehrmacht probably less than two hundred thousand military dead, which, although an enormous figure, is small in comparison to what would follow in the Soviet Union. Aside from naval and air operations, the military was relatively static from June 1940 until its April 1941 entry into Yugoslavia. Indeed, the German armed forces may well have suffered nearly as many casualties in the single month of January 1945 (451,742) as it had during the entire fighting of 1939, 1940, and 1941 combined (459,000).54
THE GERMAN INVASION of Poland on September 1, 1939, formally began World War II. Ostensibly, Poland should not have suffered any more fatalities than France or other Western European countries that were subsequently quickly overrun by the Wehrmacht. Poland capitulated (though never signed a formal surrender) to both the Third Reich and the Soviet Union in little over a month. The country was divided by its two conquerors on October 6 after enduring about sixty-six thousand fatalities. Yet by war’s end, Poland would suffer between 5.6 and 5.8 million dead, the highest percentage of fatalities (over 16 percent) of a prewar population of any participant of World War II.
The Polish people’s curse had always been their location, sandwiched between Europe’s strongest nations, Germany and western Russia, neither of which had enjoyed a long tradition of constitutional republican government. Poland’s population was less than half of Germany’s and a quarter of Russia’s, and its unfortunate location often prompted twentieth-century realist alliances with distant France and Britain, which were geographically on the other side of Germany. Nothing can prove more dangerous than a sympathetic and powerful, though distant ally. In World War II Poland would fight both Germany and the Soviet Union, and suffer casualties through occupation by both.55
Poland was the laboratory of Nazi barbarity, given that it was the site of over 450 German extermination, concentration, labor, and prisoner-of-war camps. It was both the first country attacked by Hitler and the first to have its citizens—both Jews and Slavs—targeted for mass extinction. In the words of Reinhard Heydrich—the later infamous Deputy Reich Protector of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and a chief architect of the Holocaust—the conquest of Poland was planned as “a cleanup once and for all.” The Holocaust accounted for the greatest number of Polish deaths, given that the prewar Jewish community of Poland—10 percent of the population—was the largest in the world at somewhere around 3.5 million persons. Scarcely over a hundred thousand Polish Jews survived the German extermination efforts. The six most infamous extermination camps of the Holocaust—Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibór, and Treblinka—were all in Poland.56
It is unknown how many Poles perished in Soviet camps after the 1939 Eastern occupation, or were simply executed by the Russians. But the death toll of Polish intellectuals, officers, and supposed counterrevolutionaries, including those at the infamous Katyn massacre, numbered well over fifty thousand. After the June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, hundreds of thousands of Poles were released from Soviet prisoner-of-war camps or gathered up to form anti-Nazi units and died fighting the Germans. In addition, Polish refugees who had fled westward after the 1939 Nazi occupation numbered in the hundreds of thousands and joined Allied units and died in some of the most ferocious battles of World War II, from Monte Cassino to the hinges of the Falaise Pocket to the airdrops of Operation Market-Garden.57
Polish resistance fighters usually fought the Nazi occupation in a far more muscular fashion than their Western European counterparts, provoking a commensurately fearsome German response. For the historian, it is a near impossible task to ascertain how and where the non-Jewish Polish population perished. Many of the war’s worst catastrophes were so often Polish: the Warsaw uprising and other insurgencies (250,000 Polish dead?), the Polish internment and work camps (800,000?), Polish civilians killed as collateral damage or direct targets of bombing during the war (250,000?), Poles shipped into the oblivion of captivity in the Soviet Union both in 1939 and 1945 (300,000?), Polish workers starved or worked to death inside the Third Reich (200,000–300,000?), and Polish military losses inside Poland in 1939 and during 1944–1945 in alliance with the Americans and Soviets (100,000–150,000?).
Poland alone lost more of its citizens than all the Western European nations, Britain, and the United States combined. It fought from the first day of the war through to the end of combat in the European theater of operations, and had the unfortunate fate to have been defeated and occupied by both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. It shared the Eastern European misfortune in World War II of losing its freedom in the defeat of 1939 and then again in the victory of 1945. The fate of Poland was emblematic of the entire tragedy of World War II.58
OF JAPAN’S PREWAR population of a little over seventy million, somewhere between 2.6 and 3.1 million died due to armed conflict (roughly 3–3.5 percent of the population), a ghastly figure that includes some six hundred to eight hundred thousand civilians. Although Japan formally entered World War II in December 1941 more than two years after Germany, it had warred far longer in China (off and on since 1931), and in a brief but bitter 1939 war against the Soviet Union along the Mongolian border (40,000–45,000 fatalities) that ended just three weeks after the outbreak of World War II. Japan’s population was not that much smaller than that of Greater Germany (approximately 80 million). But both on a percentage and absolute basis, Japan suffered fewer losses than did the Third Reich. That fact is often overlooked, given the horrific nature of incendiary and atomic bombing of the Japanese mainland and the customary unwillingness of Japanese soldiers in the Pacific to surrender. Due to the collapses in China, Burma, and the Pacific, and the bombing of the mainland, Japan suffered more dead during the last year of the war than in all previous years since 1941 combined. A number of paradoxes explain the peculiar nature of Japanese casualties.59
First, Japan’s war in China was protracted—the first phase in 1931–1937 and the second in 1937–1945. Eventually somewhere between half a million and one million Japanese soldiers died in battle. A comparable number were declared missing or casualties to famine and disease. And perhaps a third to a half of all Japanese army losses in China occurred outside of battle, due to starvation and illness.
Second, although bombed, Japan (unlike China, Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union) was never invaded. Had it been in late 1945 or early 1946, the Japanese might have easily suffered fatalities comparable to Germany’s. The Japanese declaration of war on Great Britain and the United States, given the asymmetry of relative industrial output and population, nevertheless did not lead to huge continental ground battles analogous to those on the Western Front. When large conventional engagements did occur—such as the American reconquest of the Philippines (well over 300,000 Japanese dead), the British slog in Burma (150,000 Japanese killed), or on Okinawa (approximately 110,000 Japanese fatalities)—Japanese losses soared. Britain finally deployed, for example, one million military personnel in Burma, and the size of the invasion force at Okinawa—ships, planes, and troops—was initially comparable to that at Normandy on D-Day.
The battles of Leyte Gulf, the Marianas, and Iwo Jima were savage, as was the near-complete destruction of the Imperial Japanese Navy and the Navy and Army Air Services in 1944–1945. Yet the geography of the Pacific resulted mostly in a succession of naval and amphibious battles where ground fighting was fierce but of short duration, not always sustained over several months, and involving far fewer troops than the collisions on the Eastern Front. Moreover these battlegrounds were sometimes sparsely settled islands and far distant from mainland Japanese cities. In contrast, the Japanese Imperial Navy in the Pacific over nearly four years of fighting lost perhaps over four hundred thousand dead, well over twice the number of naval fatalities of any other navy of the major belligerents, and almost a quarter of all Japanese military dead.
Third, the sustained American firebombing of the Japanese homeland and the two atomic attacks at Hiroshima and Nagasaki radically spiked Japanese losses (perhaps 600,000 civilians lost in all bombing attacks). It was Japan’s misfortune that three of the most effective new weapons of the American arsenal—napalm, B-29 heavy bombers, and atomic weapons—appeared late in the war and were unleashed exclusively on its cities, which were more often built of flammable materials than was true of European structures. The surrender of Japan not only curtailed an American ground assault but also meant an end to the incineration of Japanese cities and casualties that had already exceeded even those inflicted on the civilians of the Third Reich.60
Many of the some eight hundred thousand Japanese missing in action were army troops marooned in the Pacific and China when the war ended, where they either starved or were dispatched by partisan forces. Yet of all the major belligerents of the war, Japan suffered the fewest number of lost prisoners. About seventy-five thousand Japanese died in Western captivity, whereas perhaps seven times that number perished while in Soviet hands—a testament to the reality both that Japanese soldiers rarely surrendered to their victors, and that if they did, until the last weeks of the war they most often fell into the hands of the British and Americans rather than the Chinese and Soviets. Perhaps another three hundred thousand Japanese were lost or unaccounted for during the nearly decade-and-a-half-long war in China.
In terms of killing versus being killed, the Japanese probably achieved the highest ratio of inflicting death versus receiving it, largely because of the Japanese Imperial Army’s nightmarish killing of Chinese civilians. Suffering a ground invasion of the homeland was the most lethal experience of World War II, as was true of most wars of the past in general. Japan, as well as Britain and the United States, avoided such a fate, explaining why all three experienced the most lopsided ratios between fatalities inflicted and suffered.
ITALY SUFFERED NEARLY five hundred thousand fatalities, a hundred thousand of them civilians. Half a million dead is a shockingly large figure, inasmuch as Italy had not entered the war until June 10, 1940, and formally exited early on September 8, 1943, after less than three years of actual fighting. Yet these figures on the loss of life are tragically understandable, given the unusual nature of Italy’s role in the war. In reckless fashion, Benito Mussolini had entered the fighting without even minimal preparation in terms of oil supplies, food, transportation, ammunition, armor, and air power. Worse, Mussolini chose to fight ambitious regional wars simultaneously in the Balkans, East Africa, and North Africa, whose various fronts Italy had no ability to sustain and in which medical care and easy supply were wanting.61
Italy’s innate weakness drew the attention of the newly formed Anglo-American alliance and brought it, after victory in Tunisia in mid-1943, to Sicily and the Italian peninsula as the envisioned first steps of reconquering the European mainland. The early exit from the war, however, did not much lessen Italian casualties. German furor at supposed betrayal turned Italy into a battleground for two more years. What benefit Italy received from the Allies for its change in allegiance in 1943 was more than offset by the new hostility of Germany, whose troops far longer controlled a much larger percentage of Italian territory than did the Americans and British. Hundreds of thousands of indentured Italian soldiers and civilians were sent northward into the gulags of the Third Reich as forced laborers—perhaps as many as 650,000 soldiers alone. Few other people during the war became the targets of both the Allies and Axis, often simultaneously.62
Yet the human toll could have been far worse still if not for two unforeseen factors. First, Italy initially fought less-equipped and poorly prepared enemies such as the Albanians, Ethiopians, and Greeks, and British troops prior to 1942, who were often outnumbered in Africa. None of Italy’s initial adversaries, except Britain, had the industrial might to bring sustained air, artillery, or armor against the Italian army.63
Second, when the Italians were defeated by the British and Americans (as early as autumn 1941 in the case of the former), they usually surrendered en masse and into the hands of victors who, by the cruel standards of World War II, were rather humane in their treatment of prisoners. Prisoner-of-war status for an Italian soldier—unless he had surrendered to his former German allies in 1943–1945 or to the Soviets—was not synonymous with death, as it proved so often for both Germans and Soviets on the Eastern Front. Mussolini’s fascism did not galvanize Italians with the same suicidal zealotry and indoctrination that the Germans and Japanese had, and Italians were therefore likely to be among the first to surrender and thereby avoid nightmares like the defeats at Stalingrad or Okinawa. In defeat, the Italian military did not incur the justified hatred that was so prevalent on the Russian, Chinese, or Pacific fronts and that led to existential wars of annihilation. Italy suffered terribly in the war, and had usually started its regional wars by surprise attacks, but as the weakest and most vulnerable member of a defeated Axis triad, it ironically escaped with far fewer human losses than did either the Germans or Japanese.64
THE WAR COST the United States over four hundred thousand lives, or about 0.3 percent of its prewar population, the lowest percentage of any nation of the major Axis and Allied powers. About 110,000 fatalities were due to noncombat causes, whether accidents or illnesses. Some twelve thousand dead were civilians on service abroad or on the seas in war zones, the smallest number of noncombatant fatalities of all the major belligerents.
Geography, for all the difficulties it posed in transportation and communications, was an American godsend. Unlike Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union, the American homeland was never invaded. In fact, unlike Britain, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the Soviet Union, the forty-eight states of America were never even systematically bombed. Three-quarters of the civilian dead were some nine thousand sailors of the merchant marine who were in frontline convoys for most of 1942–1943 during the apex of the Battle of the Atlantic between German U-boats and Allied antisubmarine forces. Unlike the experiences of its enemies and allies, one of the safest places to be in during World War II was a US munitions plant.65
It is nearly inexplicable that the United States fought for over forty-five months, mostly on two widely separated and distant fronts, with a military that grew to twelve million, seven million of whom were at any given time stationed abroad—yet lost far fewer civilians and soldiers than, for example, the total lost to France (600,000), whose main forces fought only for six weeks in May and June 1940, and then as Allied auxiliaries in 1944–1945. The causes of massive French fatalities—being fought over both in 1940 and 1944–1945, being bombed by both Germans and Allies, retaliations against resistance fighters and then collaborators, the rounding up of Jews, and food shortages—all did not apply to the United States.
The seas provided security for America in the way they also made invasion of the island empires of Britain and Japan difficult. No country was so quickly or more fully mobilized for industrial production than was the United States. The amazing transformation of the vast US economy ensured that American forces had more motorized vehicles, ships, and planes, as well as food and medicine, than did any other military. Machines in World War II took but also saved lives. While military planners complained that only a fraction of US armed forces saw combat, the huge resources devoted to logistical and mechanical support ensured that not only were a small percentage of American soldiers exposed to combat, but also that they suffered far fewer losses once in battle.
In addition, no other nation fielded larger air and naval forces. The US Army Air Force numbered some 2.4 million, with an active fleet of over eighty thousand planes. While air losses were considerable (88,119 deaths from all causes), they represented less than 5 percent of the air force’s aggregate strength, about half the relative percentage of army losses. At such a cost, the Army Air Force destroyed over forty thousand enemy planes, an untold number of enemy combat troops, and probably killed well over one million German, Japanese, and Italian civilians, many of them workers central to Axis industrial production, transportation, and logistical support. The result of such enormous investments in air power was that American infantry forces of World War II—often criticized by military historians for being too small, too reliant on artillery and air support, and too poorly led—proved continually successful without suffering high losses.66
The same was true of US naval power. By early 1944, the Navy had grown larger than the combined fleets of all the existing major powers of World War II. Except for subsequent kamikazes and occasional submarine attacks, its nearly seven thousand warships were largely immune from serious assaults by Axis capital ships. The American Navy provided infantry forces support when they disembarked at unprecedented levels and allowed the wounded, especially in the Pacific, to be evacuated in a manner unknown elsewhere during World War II. By war’s end, the Navy had grown to 3.3 million men and women, and yet suffered only sixty-six thousand fatalities or missing in action, or a little over 15 percent of the dead incurred by the much smaller Imperial Japanese Navy.
After 1943 it was rare for any American force on land, at sea, or in the air to fight in a theater while outnumbered or outsupplied. Even at its most costly infantry battles—the Battle of the Bulge, Guadalcanal, the Hürtgen Forest, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, the Philippines—the United States enjoyed eventual numerical superiority, usually with at least parity in the quality and superiority in the quantity of its weapons.
There were no American strategic and tactical follies of the sort that Mussolini committed by trying to fight simultaneously in North Africa, Russia, and the Balkans, or the stand-or-die edicts that Hitler issued to German troops in the Soviet Union from late 1942 onward. The American army was never encircled in the fashion of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad, the Soviets in summer 1941 at Kiev, or the Italians and Germans in Tunisia. Nor did the Americans after Corregidor surrender in numbers and en masse as the British had at Tobruk. If critics faulted American generals for being too conservative, they at least conceded that the United States in extremis lost divisions, not whole corps and armies, as had most other World War II militaries.
In the final two deadly years of World War II, US sailors, airmen, and GIs were better trained and more fit than their Axis counterparts (over 5 million American males were rejected for military service on account of relatively minor physical deficiencies), whose huge losses had required wholesale levies of younger, older, and inexperienced troops who were shorted training. Due to manpower and fuel shortages, German pilots had trained for scarcely over a hundred hours of flight time before entering combat, compared to American and British pilots who had amassed nearly 350 hours. Japanese pilots had even fewer hours of schooling, given even greater fuel shortages. The formula for keeping a young man alive in World War II was lengthy precombat training, access to top-rate weapons and machines, and plenty of food, fuel, and medical care. In all three areas, the US military usually far outpaced its rivals, as demonstrated by suffering far fewer combat casualties.67
ABOUT FOUR HUNDRED thousand subjects of Great Britain died in World War II, including over sixty thousand civilians lost during the various Blitzes and subsequent V-1 and V-2 attacks on British cities. Britain fought the longest of any major belligerent of World War II, for just over six years. As in the case of the United States, Britain had invested heavily in its air forces and navy. The Royal Air Force suffered around seventy thousand dead, the Royal Navy over sixty thousand, but both had somewhat fewer losses than their respective American counterparts.
Among the major powers of World War II, three conditions resulted in high battle casualties, and Britain often was able to avoid most of them: fighting alone on a European ground front against the German army prior to 1944; fighting mostly static battles of annihilation on the ground such as at Kursk or the Battle of the Bulge; and fighting under harsh winter weather conditions of the sort that characterized the Eastern Front or near the German border in late 1944 and early 1945.
Nearly eighty thousand British soldiers were lost in the Burma campaign, but the British had deployed in toto about one million there in the nearly four-year-long successful effort. The fact that Britain was not invaded, that it did not itself have to bomb or invade Japan to ensure its defeat, and that in 1944 it invaded France only in concert with the United States and its Dominion allies likewise reduced fatalities. After Dunkirk, Britain waged war on the European continent—the cauldron of World War II—for less than a year in northern Europe and about two years in Italy. In the history of Western warfare, fighting on the ground of the European continent usually proved the most lethal of all theaters.
Perhaps just as important, British military and civilian leadership in World War II was both more adroit than in World War I and certainly keener to avoid the catastrophic losses of trench warfare. British army planners like Generals Harold Alexander, Alan Brooke, and Bernard Montgomery were competent. Montgomery’s “set-piece” battles, whether at El Alamein or the crossing of the Rhine, were designed to minimize fatalities, and often did so, at least in the short term. After Dunkirk, Singapore, and Tobruk, generals were careful not to expose the British Army to encirclement or sieges, as the navy systematically cleared the seas of Axis war and support ships, and Bomber Command helped to wear down German fuel supplies and transportation capability.
British technology, such as General Percy Hobart’s modified armored vehicles (“funnies”), the continual evolution of British radar and sonar, or the use of armored flight decks on aircraft carriers, often aimed at reducing casualties as much as inflicting them. The victorious British Army suffered about the same number of fatalities over six years of fighting from Norway to Burma as it had lost during the two nightmarish battles of Passchendaele and the Somme alone in World War I. It was again a credit to the political, diplomatic, and military leadership of Great Britain that it was able to protect its homeland and wage offensive war abroad to achieve victory against far more formidable enemies than in the past, yet at the cost of fewer combat casualties than any of the other five major belligerents.68
SEVERAL COUNTRIES THAT were not original members of the Allied or Axis alliances suffered more dead than did many of the major six or seven belligerents. Yugoslavia, for example, lost well over one million dead. The initial Axis invasion of April 6, 1941, saw Germany, Italy, and Hungary converge on Yugoslavia to punish the country for a perceived about-face from the Axis. The initial German-led invasion led to a collapse of the central government, and the resulting chaos was magnified by longstanding ethnic, religious, and political conflicts as the country dissolved into a myriad of factions: Serbs, Croatians, Bosnians, Kosovars, Macedonians, Montenegrins, and Albanians, as well as Muslims, Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christians, fascists, nationalists, and royalists, Chetniks, Ustashas, and partisan communists. Germans considered Serbs as one of many categories of Slavic subhumans and were particularly indifferent to civilians and vicious in their reprisals against partisans as well as in the initial bombing of Belgrade. Disease, harsh weather, and epidemics were the usual force multipliers that explain why 7–10 percent of the prewar Yugoslav population perished.
The Dutch East Indies and modern Indonesia (3–4 million dead) as well as the Philippines (500,000 to 1 million dead) suffered more than most European belligerents. All such theaters had large populations, but they had experienced quite different wars. The Dutch East Indies, after an initial Japanese invasion, was never liberated by the Allies. While the occupation was brutal, there was not mass death until 1944–1945, when the population suffered widescale famine due largely to Japanese expropriation of foodstuffs and the disruptions of traditional agriculture.
Perhaps one million Filipinos perished to famine, battle, and mass killings, and as captives and forced laborers. There was a familiar Pacific sequence to the slaughter: the initial resistance of American and Filipino forces against the Japanese in spring 1942, followed by a savage occupation (May 1942–March 1945), culminating in a brutal American reconquest (spring 1945). Unlike the case of the Dutch East Indies, where many Indonesians had initially welcomed the Japanese as liberators, most Filipinos in some manner resisted the Japanese from the beginning of the war. Over half the territory of the islands was never subdued by the invaders. Guerrillas continued partisan attacks on retreating Japanese occupiers until the end of the war in September 1945. Few in the West appreciate that far more civilians and combatants died on the Allied side in the reclamation of the Philippines than during the Battle of the Bulge, or that starvation in Indochina alone may have caused well over fifty times more deaths than in the Netherlands.
THE THREE MAJOR Axis powers directly or indirectly caused about 80 percent of the total World War II dead, while suffering somewhere around 20 percent—the majority of their losses incurred in their last six months of respective fighting. Rarely in any war of the past had the defeated inflicted so much carnage, in such lopsided fashion, on the victorious, largely as the result of the savagery unleashed against the Russian, Chinese, Polish, and Yugoslav people.
In sum, World War II by 1942 became a predictable story of Japanese and German soldiers butchering or starving millions of Chinese and Russian civilians while being increasingly defeated on the field of battle by Allied soldiers. The question of whether the ends of ridding the world of murderous ideologies and widespread extermination camps justified the means of losing sixty million lives is discussed in the final chapter.