WW2 POSTERS

World War 2:
Costs, Casualties, and Other Data

World War II spread death and devastation throughout most of the world to an extent never before experienced. The loss of life can be only generally summarized; an attempt to express the value of property and livelihoods destroyed in terms of money is futile: the resulting sums reach astronomical figures that have little if any practical meaning.

Military Casualties

Probably the best documented and most meaningful figures are the battle casualties. Those for the United States, Great Britain, and the Commonwealth nations are accurate; those for other nations, Allied or Axis, vary in reliability. Chinese figures are largely estimates because of the lack of documentation, information on Soviet losses has been given only grudgingly and in very general terms, and many records. of the Axis nations were lost when those countries were overrun. The most accurate available figures are shown in Tables. 1, 2, and 3.

Table 1-UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES TOTAL STRENGTH AND CASUALTIES IN WORLD WAR II, DEC. 7, 1941-DEC. 31, 1946

In utilizing strength figures, it should be noted that total strength means the total number of personnel belonging to the armed forces during the entire war, whereas peak strength is the greatest strength reached at any one time during the war. Several methods of classifying and computing casualties are in use, and other variations result from the differing periods covered by the various computations. Consequently, different reputable reference works sometimes show slightly different figures even for United States casualties. Nonbattle deaths include deaths from accidents and disease.


Table 2-ARMED FORCES PEAK STRENGTHS AND BATTLE DEATHS OF THE PRINCIPAL ALLIED POWERS

Table 3-ARMED FORCES PEAK STRENGTHS AND BATTLE DEATHS OF THE AXIS POWERS

Civilian Casualties

Casualties among civilians were much less accurately recorded than military losses. In part, this was unavoidable because of the population shifts that took place as civilians fled before invading armies or the continual air attacks on major industrial centers, or were sent to Germany or the Soviet Union for forced labor.

Civilian casualties in the United Kingdom, slightly over half of which were inflicted in the London area, were as follows. Killed: 60,595 and Seriously injured: 86,182 for a total of 146,777.

Civilian casualties in the USSR have been placed roughly at 2,500,000 killed. The loss of population (including both military and civilian casualties) caused directly or indirectly by the war has been stated at 20,000,000. Air raids against Germany killed approximately 300,000 Germans and seriously injured about 780,000 more. Numerous additional casualties occurred during the Soviet invasion of 1944-1945, but no specific estimates are available. Japanese civilian casualties probably approached 500,000 killed and 625,000 seriously injured, plus a considerable number reported as missing after the fire raids and atomic bombings. In addition, about 360,000 Japanese captured by the Russians in Manchuria, Korea, and the Kuril Islands were still missing in 1950; a large number of them have never been accounted for. Chinese civilian losses are unknown but probably numbered several million.

Industrial Conversion and War Production

In the final analysis, victory was won by the Allied powers' technological superiority-the ability to raise, arm, equip, move, and supply superior forces throughout the world, and through them to break up and destroy the technological resources (as well as much of the armed forces) of the Axis nations. Of all the Allies, it was the United States that possessed the raw materials, skilled manpower, and industries that made their victory possible. This potential American technological power, however, required precious time to change from peacetime to military production. The process of conversion, and of reconversion at the war's end, is' illustrated in Table 4.

Table 4-UNITED STATES BUDGET EXPENDITURES, JULY 1, 1940-AUG. '31, 1945 (in Billions of dollars)

Among the varied items purchased by United States defense expenditures were 57,027 medium tanks (9 different types), 676,433 two-arid-onehalf-ton, six-wheel-drive trucks (11 types), 1,054 eight-inch howitzers (48 of them self-propelled), 476,628 2.36-inch rocket launchers (bazookas), 4,014,731 Garand rifles, 106,658 gunner's quadrants, 4,072,000,000 rounds of .45-caliber ammunition, 57,488,000 wool undershirts, 116,000,000 pounds of peanut butter, 206,753 SCR-536 (Handie-Talkie) radio sets, 500,754 30-dose bottles of influenza virus vaccine, 7,570 locomotives (48 types), 23,510,030 military gas masks (2 types), and 3,898 B-29 (Superfortress) very heavy bombers.