The war against Germany was decided on two fronts that depended on each other. The largest land battles were fought in the East, between the German and Soviet armies; the longest campaign was fought at sea, where convoys carried fuel, food and weapons across the Atlantic. This chapter sets out the figures for both, and explains why campaign totals, casualty counts and shipping losses cannot simply be added together.

The campaigns in one ledger

Each major campaign in Europe produced its own set of numbers, and each set measured something different. At Dunkirk, the key figure is 338,226: the British and other Allied troops evacuated by sea during Operation Dynamo between 26 May and 4 June 1940, as recorded by the Imperial War Museums. That number counts people rescued, not losses, and it does not include later evacuations from western France. In the Battle of Britain, German records show 1,733 Luftwaffe aircraft lost and 643 damaged between 10 July and 31 October 1940, against RAF wartime claims of 2,692 enemy aircraft destroyed, a reminder that claims made in combat ran well ahead of losses confirmed later.

At Stalingrad, about 91,000 German and allied troops surrendered at the end of January and beginning of February 1943; the National Army Museum estimates that about 5,000 of them returned from Soviet captivity. That figure counts only the men taken prisoner at the end. It excludes those killed during the battle, those flown out wounded, and the Romanian, Italian and Hungarian armies destroyed on the flanks. In the Mediterranean, the Allied force assembled for the invasion of Sicily in July 1943 numbered about 160,000 troops, according to the U.S. Army Center of Military History.

The last row comes from the U.S. Army’s official history, Charles B. MacDonald’s The Last Offensive, which also records that 5.41 million Allied troops, 970,044 vehicles and 18.29 million tons of supplies entered western Europe between D-Day and the German surrender. Read together, the two numbers show the scale of the western campaign: for every seven soldiers who landed, roughly one became a casualty. That is a ratio of two separately compiled totals, not a casualty rate for any individual unit.

The Eastern Front

Most of the German Army’s fighting and dying took place in the Soviet Union, and the Soviet losses were the largest of any country in the war. Russian military historian Grigori Krivosheev’s team, working from Defense Ministry archives, published a figure in 1993 of more than 8.6 million Soviet military dead. As the Russian news site Meduza summarizes, the underlying documents recorded about 11.4 million losses, from which 2.77 million were subtracted for prisoners who returned and men who were called up more than once. In 2014 the Russian Defense Ministry gave the Public Chamber a figure of 8,668,400 irrecoverable losses of Red Army personnel.

The National WWII Museum’s country table gives Soviet military deaths as 8.8 to 10.7 million, a range that brackets Krivosheev’s figure and the higher estimates of researchers who believe the archives undercount those missing in 1941–42. Total Soviet losses, including civilians, are given as 24 million by the museum and 26.6 million by the 1990 Soviet government study that Mikhail Gorbachev announced. The chapter on Operation Barbarossa describes the first months of the war, when Soviet losses were highest and records weakest.

German losses in the East were also immense. In an interview with the National WWII Museum, historian Jeff Rutherford describes Operation Bagration, the Soviet summer offensive of June 1944 in Belorussia, as costing Germany about 390,000 men in nine weeks and shattering 28 divisions. It came in the same month as the Normandy landings. The Battle of Kursk collection covers the last great German offensive in the East, a year earlier.

The Western Allies’ supplies reached the Soviet Union by three routes: the Arctic convoys to Murmansk and Archangel, the Persian Corridor through Iran, and the Pacific route to Vladivostok in Soviet-flagged ships. The National WWII Museum summarizes Soviet-bound Lend-Lease shipments as roughly 400,000 vehicles, 14,000 aircraft, 4.5 million tons of food and 2.7 million tons of petroleum products. These figures measure aid delivered, and Chapter 6 explains why they must not be added to Soviet production totals.

Normandy by sea and air

The Congressional Research Service puts the number of Allied troops landed in Normandy on 6 June 1944 at 156,115, including 23,400 airborne troops. The United States landed 73,000, the United Kingdom 61,715 and Canada 21,400. They were supported by 11,590 aircraft and 6,939 naval vessels in Operation Neptune: 1,213 combat ships, 4,126 landing ships and craft, 736 ancillary craft and 864 merchant vessels. By 11 June, 326,547 troops, 54,186 vehicles and 104,428 tons of supplies had come ashore.

Casualty figures for D-Day are less precise than landing figures. The usual estimate is about 10,000 Allied killed, wounded and missing on 6 June. The National D-Day Memorial’s Necrology Project has identified by name 4,436 Allied dead for that day alone, 2,519 of them American and 1,917 from other Allied nations. The memorial’s figure has grown over time as researchers have confirmed individual deaths, which is why older books give lower numbers. The D-Day and Normandy collection follows the campaign beyond the first day.

In the Ardennes in the winter of 1944–45, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum gives 75,000 to 80,000 American casualties and 80,000 to 100,000 German casualties for the Battle of the Bulge. Arlington National Cemetery separately estimates about 19,000 U.S. Army deaths. Both are reasonable figures; the first counts all casualties, including wounded, captured and missing, and the second counts deaths only. The Maps of World War II collection shows the shape of the salient that produced those numbers.

North Africa, Sicily and Italy

The Mediterranean campaigns were smaller than those in the East but lasted almost the whole war. The U.S. Army Center of Military History gives about 107,000 troops for the Allied force that landed in French North Africa in Operation Torch on 8 November 1942, at Casablanca, Oran and Algiers. Six months of fighting in Tunisia followed, including the American defeat at Kasserine Pass, before the Axis armies in Africa surrendered in May 1943. The invasion of Sicily in July 1943 and the landings at Salerno in September carried the campaign into Italy, where fighting continued until the German surrender there on 2 May 1945.

The American records for the theater give a sense of its cost. The U.S. Army’s final casualty report counts 175,107 battle casualties in its Mediterranean Theater, including 40,411 battle deaths, between Pearl Harbor and the end of 1946. The Army Air Forces flew 659,513 combat sorties in the Mediterranean and lost 6,731 aircraft on combat missions, according to its statistical digest. Those are American figures only; British, Commonwealth, French, Polish and Italian co-belligerent forces fought in the same campaigns and kept their own records. Chapter 4 sets the Mediterranean figures beside those for northwest Europe and the Pacific.

The Battle of the Atlantic

The Naval History and Heritage Command summarizes the cost of the Atlantic campaign in five numbers: about 3,500 Allied merchant ships sunk, totaling 14.5 million gross tons; 175 Allied warships sunk; 72,200 Allied naval and merchant seamen killed; 783 German U-boats lost; and about 30,000 German submariners killed out of some 40,000 who served. The submariners’ loss rate of about three in four is the starkest single ratio in the campaign. The Battle of the Atlantic collection tells the campaign in full.

The shape of the campaign is clearer year by year. The research site uboat.net, which compiles individual sinkings from German and Allied records, counts ships hit by U-boats, meaning sunk, damaged or captured, and U-boats lost in each year. The chart below sets the two series side by side for the full years of the war. In 1942 U-boats hit 1,322 ships while 87 U-boats were lost. In 1943 the lines crossed: hits fell to 582 while losses rose to 244, and in 1944 U-boats hit 243 ships and 249 boats were lost.

The turning point came in a single month. The U.S. Navy’s wartime convoy history counted 44 U-boats sunk worldwide in May 1943, 35 of them in the North Atlantic, and Admiral Karl Dönitz recalled his boats from the main convoy routes on 24 May. Long-range aircraft closing the mid-Atlantic air gap, escort carriers, better radar, and code-breaking all contributed. U-boats continued to operate until the end of the war, but they never again sank ships at the rate of 1942.

The British official naval historian, Stephen Roskill, recorded the scale of 1942 in his appendix tables: 1,664 British, Allied and neutral ships of 7,790,697 gross tons lost to enemy action in that year alone, and a further 365 ships of 2,001,918 tons in January to May 1943. These figures cover all theaters and all forms of enemy action, so they are larger than the Atlantic-only and U-boat-only counts above. A postwar Admiralty study, quoted by Rear Admiral Bern Anderson in the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, gave 4,786 merchant vessels of over 21 million tons lost during the whole war, 2,775 of them to submarines.

Reading Europe’s numbers together

It is tempting to rank campaigns by their totals, but the figures in this chapter resist ranking. A casualty total for the Bulge, a surrender count for Stalingrad, a loss estimate for Bagration and an evacuation count for Dunkirk measure four different things. Even within the Atlantic campaign, the ship counts vary by more than a thousand depending on whether a source counts all causes or only submarines, the Atlantic or the world, sunk ships or ships hit. The only safe comparisons are those made within one series from one source.

What the numbers do show clearly is proportion. The Soviet Union’s military dead outnumbered those of the United States and Britain together many times over. The western campaign from Normandy to the Elbe, for all its scale, cost the Allies 766,294 casualties in eleven months, while a single Soviet offensive cost Germany about 390,000 men in nine weeks. And none of the land campaigns in the west could have been fought without the convoys, whose cost is counted in ships and seamen. Chapter 3 turns to the war in Asia and the Pacific, where the sea war took a different form. Chapter 1 sets out the alliances and populations behind these campaigns.

Gallery · 6 photographs · select to enlarge

Supply routes and memory

Sources and further reading

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