No single number captures the human cost of World War II, and every attempt to produce one depends on choices about borders, dates and causes of death. This chapter brings together the best-sourced estimates of military and civilian deaths by country, the death rates of prisoners of war, the tolls of sieges, famines and air raids, and the scale of displacement after 1945. It keeps deaths, captivity and displacement separate, because each was counted in a different way.

Military and civilian deaths by country

The most widely used country table in American education comes from the National WWII Museum’s Research Starters. It gives military deaths and combined military and civilian deaths for about forty countries and territories, and worldwide totals of 15 million battle deaths, 25 million battle wounded and 45 million civilian deaths. The museum states plainly that estimates vary widely, and in several cases it gives ranges. For China it adds that civilian deaths alone might have been higher than its table shows.

Other authorities give other numbers, and the differences are largest where the losses were largest. For the Soviet Union, a 1990 study by the Soviet State Statistics Committee, Moscow State University and Defense Ministry researchers, announced by Mikhail Gorbachev, put total losses at 26.6 million, and Western demographers broadly accept 26 to 27 million, as Meduza summarizes. For China, the University of Oxford’s research project on China’s war with Japan gives about 15 million, against the museum’s 20 million. For Germany, the museum’s wide range of 6.6 to 8.8 million is a reminder that civilian deaths in bombing, in the flight and expulsion of Germans from eastern Europe in 1944–46, and in Soviet captivity remain disputed.

The chart shows two kinds of war. In the Soviet Union, Poland, Yugoslavia and the Netherlands, civilian deaths far outnumbered military ones: civilians were killed by occupation, deliberate starvation, reprisals, deportation and the Holocaust. In the United States, Britain, Canada and Australia, nearly all deaths were military. Germany and Japan lie between, with very large military losses and, from 1943 onward, heavy civilian losses from bombing and invasion. Measured as a share of prewar population, as on the collection hub, Poland’s loss of about 16 percent was the heaviest.

Deaths in captivity

Whether a captured soldier survived depended above all on who held him. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that Germany captured about 5.7 million Soviet soldiers and that about 3.3 million of them died, roughly 57 percent, most from deliberate starvation, exposure and disease in the winter of 1941–42 and many by execution. The same museum gives about 231,000 British and American prisoners held by Germany and about 8,300 deaths, about 3.6 percent. The difference reflects Nazi racial policy: Western prisoners were generally treated according to the Geneva Convention, Soviet prisoners were not.

Prisoners of Japan died at more than ten times the rate of Western prisoners held by Germany. The National WWII Museum records about 27,500 Americans held by Japan, of whom 11,107 died; the Australian War Memorial gives about 22,000 Australians captured and 8,031 deaths. Starvation, untreated disease, brutal treatment and forced labor were the main causes, together with the sinking by Allied submarines and aircraft of unmarked Japanese ships carrying prisoners. The Bataan and Corregidor collection follows American prisoners from their surrender in 1942. The U.S. Army’s final casualty report records that 30.8 percent of Army personnel captured or interned in its Pacific grouping died of nonbattle causes in captivity, as Chapter 4 shows.

Civilians under siege, occupation and bombardment

Civilian deaths are recorded event by event as well as country by country, and the event figures carry their own definitions. In Britain, the Imperial War Museums records 43,685 civilian deaths in the Blitz of 1940–41, 20,083 of them in London. In Leningrad, the German Historical Museum estimates that 800,000 to 1 million residents died during the siege between September 1941 and January 1944, most of them from starvation. In Dresden, the city’s historians’ commission concluded that up to 25,000 people were killed in the raids of 13–15 February 1945. In Nanjing, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East judged that more than 200,000 civilians and prisoners of war were murdered in the first six weeks of the Japanese occupation, a subject covered in the Rape of Nanking collection.

The chart compares events of very different kinds, and its bars should be read with their definitions. The Leningrad figure counts residents who died over almost two and a half years, most of hunger. The Nanjing figure includes prisoners of war. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki figures count acute deaths through the end of 1945 among everyone in the cities, including soldiers, Korean forced laborers and foreigners; about 350,000 people were present in Hiroshima on 6 August. The Manila and Okinawa figures cover whole battles, including deliberate killings by Japanese forces in Manila. The Tokyo figure is the lower of the two given by the National WWII Museum. The Manhattan Project collection discusses the atomic bomb figures.

Famine killed more people than any single campaign in several countries. In colonial Bengal, one scholarly estimate published by Cambridge University Press gives 1.5 to 3 million deaths in the famine of 1942–43, caused by wartime disruption, the loss of rice imports from Japanese-occupied Burma, crop damage, hoarding and failures of government policy. Much of the museum’s range of 1.5 to 2.5 million deaths for India reflects that famine. Similar wartime famines killed large numbers in Japanese-occupied Vietnam in 1944–45, in occupied Greece in the winter of 1941–42 and in Henan province in China in 1942–43, though reliable counts for all of them are scarce.

Air raids on cities killed civilians on every side. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey estimated that nine months of air attack on Japan caused about 806,000 civilian casualties, about 330,000 of them deaths, including the atomic bombs. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s Civilian War Dead Roll of Honour, kept at Westminster Abbey, names 68,111 Commonwealth civilians whose deaths resulted from enemy action, many of them in the bombing of Britain. Chapter 5 covers the air campaigns that caused these deaths, and the Battle of Britain collection covers the opening of the Blitz.

People driven from home

Displacement was the war’s largest human consequence by number. In China, the Institute for Advanced Study presents historian Rana Mitter’s estimate that about 80 million people became refugees during the war with Japan; Mitter has given 100 million in another account. In Europe, the German Historical Institute estimates that the Allies found 6.5 to 7.5 million displaced non-German civilians in the future western zones of occupied Germany in 1945, including former forced laborers, prisoners of war and concentration camp survivors. Most were repatriated within months; Soviet citizens were returned, sometimes against their will, under agreements made at Yalta.

Those who could not or would not go home remained in camps for years. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum counts more than 250,000 Jewish displaced persons who lived in camps and cities in Germany, Austria and Italy between 1945 and 1952, and its map of major DP camps gives an end-of-1946 distribution of about 185,000 in Germany, 45,000 in Austria and 20,000 in Italy. About 136,000 Jewish DPs eventually went to Israel. The U.S. Displaced Persons Act of 1948 authorized 200,000 displaced persons to enter the United States, and more than 80,000 Jewish DPs had come under its terms by 1952, when almost all the camps had closed.

Displacement also happened inside the Allied countries. In the United States, more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent were forcibly removed from the West Coast and incarcerated during the war, according to the National Archives; roughly two-thirds of them were American citizens. Their story is part of the Home Life collection. In eastern Europe, the flight and expulsion of ethnic Germans at the end of the war, and the border changes that moved Poland westward, displaced millions more after the fighting had stopped.

The wounded and the American count

Death tolls leave out the far larger number of people wounded, maimed and disabled. The National WWII Museum estimates 25 million battle wounded worldwide. For the United States, the Department of Veterans Affairs records 671,846 nonfatal woundings among the 16.1 million Americans who served, alongside 291,557 battle deaths and 113,842 other deaths in service. Civilian injuries were rarely counted at all outside a few countries such as Britain and Japan. Psychological injury, which the armies of the time were only beginning to recognize, appears in none of these tables.

The American figures also show how one country’s count can vary. The VA’s 405,399 deaths in service, the National WWII Museum’s 407,316 killed by branch and its country table’s 416,800 military deaths are three official or institutional figures for the same war. North Carolina’s share, from NCpedia, was 6,458 battle deaths and more than 3,000 deaths from other causes among more than 362,500 who served. Readers comparing American losses with those of other countries should use one series and note which it is.

Reading the human cost

The figures in this chapter answer different questions, and the hardest part of using them is keeping those questions apart. A national death toll asks how many people from one country died; a prisoner death rate asks how one group fared under one captor; a siege or air-raid figure asks what happened in one place over a defined time; a displacement figure asks how many people lost their homes, and may count the same person more than once. None of them is complete, and the largest are estimates rounded to the nearest million.

Behind every figure, however rounded, were individual people. The Holocaust figures in Chapter 8 are being matched to names in the Yad Vashem and USHMM databases; the CWGC and ABMC registers name every Commonwealth and American serviceman they commemorate. For most of the war’s Chinese, Soviet, Indonesian and Indian dead, no such register exists, and the estimates will remain estimates. This collection gives them with their ranges and their sources so that readers can see both what is known and what is not. The first chapter returns to the populations and alliances behind these numbers.

Gallery · 8 photographs · select to enlarge

The displaced, 1945

Sources and further reading

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