The Asia-Pacific war is usually told through its American battles, from Pearl Harbor to Okinawa. Its numbers tell a wider story. By the National WWII Museum’s estimates, China alone lost about 20 million people, the Dutch East Indies 3 to 4 million and Japan 2.6 to 3.1 million. This chapter sets out those national figures, the campaign records of the island war, and the postwar surveys that measured what the blockade and bombing did to Japan.

China’s war, 1937–1945

China fought Japan for eight years, four of them before the United States entered the war. The National WWII Museum’s country table gives China 3 to 4 million military deaths and 20 million deaths in all, and adds that civilian deaths alone might have been higher. The University of Oxford’s research project on China’s war with Japan, led by historian Rana Mitter, places the toll at about 15 million. Neither figure rests on a count of names. Both are estimates built from fragmentary wartime records, provincial reports and postwar demographic studies in a country where much of the population was not registered at all.

The scale of displacement was even larger than the death toll. The Institute for Advanced Study presents Mitter’s estimate that about 80 million Chinese became refugees during the war; in another account, Mitter has given 100 million. The war began after the clash at the Marco Polo Bridge on 7 July 1937, and within six months Japanese forces had taken Shanghai and the Nationalist capital, Nanjing. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East judged that more than 200,000 civilians and prisoners of war were murdered in and around Nanjing in the first six weeks of the occupation. The Nanking International Relief Committee reported that nearly 250,000 people found shelter in the city’s Safety Zone. The Rape of Nanking collection examines those records in detail.

The chart is dominated by civilian deaths in territories that Japan conquered or that were drawn into the war as colonies. The Dutch East Indies, French Indochina and India each lost far more people than Australia, New Zealand or the United States, and most of those deaths came from famine, forced labor and disease rather than combat. Much of India’s range of 1.5 to 2.5 million reflects the Bengal famine of 1942–43, which Chapter 9 discusses. Korea, then a Japanese colony, appears with 378,000 to 473,000 deaths; Japan conscripted Koreans as laborers and, from 1944, as soldiers.

The campaign ledger, 1941–1945

The war in the Pacific produced a sequence of battles whose numbers are well documented on the American side and less so on the Japanese. At Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, the Naval History and Heritage Command records 2,403 Americans killed, 1,178 wounded and 188 U.S. aircraft destroyed, against 29 of the 353 Japanese attacking aircraft lost. On Bataan in April 1942, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency estimates that about 65,000 Filipino and 10,000 American troops surrendered, the largest surrender in American military history. The number who died on the forced march that followed is a separate and much less certain estimate.

Two patterns stand out. The first is the asymmetry of the island battles, in which Japanese garrisons fought nearly to the last man and few prisoners were taken. At Iwo Jima, the National Museum of the Pacific War gives more than 18,000 Japanese dead, while the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force gives nearly 26,000 American casualties, about 6,800 of them killed. The second is the rising American cost as the war approached Japan. Okinawa, the last great battle, cost the United States 49,151 casualties, according to the Naval History and Heritage Command, and the kamikaze attacks off the island made it the costliest campaign of the war for the U.S. Navy.

Okinawa also shows how civilian deaths can outnumber military ones in a single battle. The Naval History and Heritage Command gives estimates of as many as 150,000 Okinawan civilian deaths; the U.S. Air Force’s Kadena Air Base history gives about 100,000, roughly one-third of the island’s prewar civilian population. Both figures come from postwar estimates rather than counts, because many families, villages and records were lost entirely. The Battle of Okinawa collection discusses the civilian experience in more detail.

The naval battles of 1942–44 changed the balance of the Pacific war in aircraft and carriers as much as in ships. At Midway, Japan lost four fleet carriers and all 248 of their aircraft; the U.S. lost 150 aircraft, the carrier Yorktown and the destroyer Hammann. In the Philippine Sea in June 1944, the National Museum of the U.S. Navy estimates that 315 of 423 Japanese carrier aircraft were destroyed, plus about 50 on Guam, against about 123 American aircraft lost from all causes. At Leyte Gulf in October 1944, the Naval History and Heritage Command counts 282 ships engaged across four actions spread over roughly 100,000 square miles of ocean. Chapter 5 follows the aircraft figures further.

Burma, the Philippines and the prisoners

The land war in Southeast Asia was fought largely by British, Indian, Chinese and Commonwealth troops, and its best-documented battle is one that Japan lost on the Indian frontier. In the Imphal and Kohima offensive of March to July 1944, the National Army Museum reports that Japan’s Fifteenth Army began with about 85,000 men and lost 53,000 dead or missing. British-led forces suffered about 12,500 casualties at Imphal and another 4,000 at Kohima. The two sets of figures measure different categories, dead and missing on one side and all casualties on the other, but the scale of the Japanese defeat is clear from either. Earlier in 1944, about 23,000 Chindits were deployed in northern Burma to support the Chinese and American advance on Myitkyina, according to the same museum.

In the Philippines, the National WWII Museum gives 57,000 military deaths and 500,000 to 1 million deaths in all. A large share came in the last months of the war. In the battle for Manila in February and March 1945, the museum’s account by Cecilia Gaerlan puts citywide deaths at about 100,000, including systematic killings of civilians by Japanese forces.

Prisoners of Japan died at rates far above those of prisoners held by Germany or Italy. The National WWII Museum records about 27,500 Americans held by Japan, of whom 11,107 died, more than 40 percent. The Australian War Memorial gives about 22,000 Australians captured by Japan and 8,031 deaths, nearly 36 percent. Starvation, disease, forced labor on projects such as the Burma–Thailand railway, and the sinking of unmarked transports carrying prisoners all contributed. Chapter 7 covers Japanese companies that used prisoner labor, including Mitsubishi’s mines.

The war on Japanese shipping

Japan was an island empire that imported most of its oil, iron ore, bauxite and much of its food. Its war economy depended on merchant ships, and the American campaign against them was one of the decisive campaigns of the war. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey’s Pacific summary report estimated that about 8.9 million tons of Japanese merchant shipping was sunk or put out of action during the war, and it broke down the losses by cause.

Submarines did more than half the work. The U.S. Navy’s postwar assessment credits American submarines alone with sinking 4,779,902 tons of Japanese merchant shipping. The cost was also high: the Navy lost 52 submarines, and the Submarine War collection follows one of them, USS Tang. Japan lost 128 submarines of its own, according to the Navy’s submarine loss history, but used them mainly against warships rather than against American supply lines.

The effect on Japan’s imports is visible in the survey’s figures. Imports of 16 major commodities fell from about 20 million metric tons in 1941 to 10 million in 1944 and 2.7 million in the first half of 1945. Oil imports from the southern territories began to decline in August 1943 and had ended by April 1945. Japan built new ships, from about 238,000 tons in 1941 to 1.6 million tons of steel ships and 254,000 tons of wooden ships in 1944, but sinkings ran far ahead of construction.

The bombing of Japan

The same survey measured the air campaign against the home islands. It recorded 656,400 tons of bombs dropped by Allied aircraft in the whole Pacific war, of which 160,800 tons, or 24 percent, fell on Japan’s home islands. B-29s delivered about 147,000 tons of the home-island total. The survey found that about 40 percent of the built-up area of the 66 cities attacked was destroyed and that about 30 percent of Japan’s urban population lost their homes. It estimated roughly 806,000 civilian casualties from nine months of air attack, including the atomic bombs, of which approximately 330,000 were fatalities.

That survey estimate is lower than some later Japanese figures, and the difference is a reminder of how casualty counts are made. The survey worked in late 1945 from Japanese police and prefectural records, many of them incomplete after the fire raids. For the single raid on Tokyo on 9–10 March 1945, the National WWII Museum publishes both about 80,000 dead and more than 100,000 in different articles. The cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki estimate about 140,000 and about 74,000 deaths respectively by the end of 1945. Those city estimates are discussed in Chapter 9 and in the Manhattan Project collection.

Japan’s own losses

The National WWII Museum gives Japan 2,120,000 military deaths and 2.6 to 3.1 million deaths in all. The civilian part of that toll includes people killed by bombing, in battles on Japanese-held islands such as Saipan and Okinawa, and in Manchuria and Korea at the end of the war. Most Japanese military deaths came late in the war and far from home. Many were caused not by combat but by starvation and disease on bypassed islands and in New Guinea, the Philippines and Burma, after American submarines and aircraft had cut the supply lines.

The Strategic Bombing Survey’s air figures show the same pattern. It estimated that Japan’s army and navy air arms lost about 50,000 aircraft during the war, less than 40 percent of them in combat. More than 60 percent were lost to training accidents, ferrying and other noncombat causes, a measure of the declining skill of Japanese pilots and the poor state of their bases. At the surrender, the survey counted about 5,000 tactical aircraft and another 5,400 assigned to kamikaze use.

The war in Asia and the Pacific ended with Japan’s formal surrender on 2 September 1945, but its human consequences ran on: millions of Japanese soldiers and civilians awaited repatriation, and many of the Allied prisoners released from Japanese camps were gravely ill. Chapter 4 compares the American war in the Pacific with the war against Germany using matched U.S. records, and Chapter 2 covers the European side.

Gallery · 8 photographs · select to enlarge

The Pacific supply line: Liberty ships in Navy service

Sources and further reading

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