Was the war in Europe or the Pacific harder for Americans? The question is asked often and answered badly, because it usually sets numbers from different sources against each other. This chapter uses records kept by single U.S. agencies across both theaters: the Army Air Forces statistical digest, the Army’s final casualty report and the American Battle Monuments Commission’s register of the dead. Used that way, the figures show where the effort went, what each theater cost, and why the Pacific dead are so often remembered as missing.

Two wars, one American air ledger

The Army Air Forces kept the most consistent set of numbers for both wars. Its Statistical Digest, World War II, compiled by the Office of Statistical Control, grouped every theater and command by the enemy it fought and counted sorties, bomb tonnage and aircraft lost on combat missions in the same way. Between December 1941 and August 1945, it records 2,362,800 combat sorties worldwide, 2,057,244 tons of bombs and 22,948 aircraft lost on combat missions. Against Germany, the totals were 1,693,565 sorties, 1,554,463 tons and 18,418 aircraft lost. Against Japan, they were 669,235 sorties, 502,781 tons and 4,530 aircraft.

In shares of the worldwide totals, that means about 72 percent of sorties, 76 percent of tonnage and 80 percent of aircraft lost were in the war against Germany. The figures reflect American strategy: “Germany first” was agreed with Britain before Pearl Harbor, and the heavy bomber forces were built up in England and Italy first. They also reflect geography. Much of the Pacific air war was flown by the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps from carriers and island bases, and those sorties do not appear in the Army digest at all.

A sortie is one aircraft flying one mission, so a fighter escort and a four-engine bomber each count once. The loss rate in the last column divides aircraft lost on combat missions by combat sorties, and it includes losses to accidents and weather on those missions as well as enemy action. Rates for whole theaters mix aircraft and mission types. The Twentieth Air Force’s rate of 12.7 per 1,000 reflects long B-29 missions over Japan; Alaska’s 12.0 reflects some of the worst flying weather in the world rather than heavy enemy opposition.

When the weight shifted

The yearly figures show the American air war turning from one enemy to the other. In 1942, the AAF flew more sorties against Japan than against Germany: 16,939 to 9,749. In 1944, the war against Germany dominated, with 1,012,101 sorties against 272,094. In the eight months of 1945, the AAF flew against Germany only until May and against Japan until August, and the tonnage dropped on Japan, 306,956 tons, approached the 455,272 tons dropped on Germany. More than half of the 1945 tonnage against Japan came from the B-29s of the Twentieth Air Force. The Army Air Forces collection traces the commands behind these figures.

What the Army recorded about casualties

The Army’s own final report on battle casualties and nonbattle deaths, issued by the Adjutant General in 1953, covers Army and Army Air Forces personnel from 7 December 1941 to 31 December 1946 and groups them by administrative theater. In the European Theater it records 586,628 battle casualties, including 135,034 battle deaths; in the Mediterranean, 175,107 battle casualties and 40,411 battle deaths; in the Pacific theaters, 157,938 battle casualties and 41,789 battle deaths. Battle casualties include the killed, wounded, captured and missing.

Dividing battle casualties by battle deaths, a calculation by this collection from the report’s figures, gives about 4.3 casualties for every death in both the European and Mediterranean theaters and about 3.8 in the Pacific. The lower Pacific ratio is consistent with what the campaigns’ own histories describe: wounded men were harder to evacuate from island beachheads and jungle, and fewer Americans were captured after 1942. Time matters as well. Most of the European Theater’s battle deaths came in the eleven months between June 1944 and May 1945, while the Pacific figures are spread across nearly four years of fighting, so the European monthly toll in 1944–45 was far higher than any monthly average for the Pacific.

The difference between the theaters is sharpest in nonbattle deaths. The European Theater recorded 17,075 nonbattle deaths, about one for every eight battle deaths. The Pacific theaters recorded 20,673, about one for every two. Disease, accidents and the conditions of tropical campaigning in New Guinea, the Solomons and the Philippines account for much of the difference. The chart below sets the two kinds of death side by side.

The same report shows how differently prisoners fared. The Army counted 73,759 personnel captured or interned in the European Theater, of whom 532 died of nonbattle causes in that status, about 0.7 percent. In its Pacific grouping it counted 27,465 captured or interned and 8,452 nonbattle deaths in captivity, about 30.8 percent. The Pacific figure reflects the fate of the men captured in the Philippines in 1942, on Bataan and Corregidor, and in the prison camps, labor sites and transport ships that followed. These shares cover one category of death and do not include prisoners killed outright.

The Army report omits the Navy and Marine Corps, whose dead were concentrated in the Pacific. The National WWII Museum’s table of U.S. casualties by branch lists 318,274 killed in the Army and Army Air Forces, 62,614 in the Navy, 24,511 in the Marine Corps and 1,917 in the Coast Guard, a total of 407,316. Almost all Marine Corps deaths, and a large share of Navy deaths, came in the war against Japan, from Guadalcanal to Iwo Jima and Okinawa. A full theater comparison including all services therefore narrows the gap that the Army figures alone suggest.

Where the dead lie: ABMC cemeteries

After the war, families of the American dead were offered a choice between burial overseas and return home, and most chose return. Those who remained overseas lie in cemeteries maintained by the American Battle Monuments Commission, which lists 92,958 World War II burials in its cemeteries and 78,985 names on its memorials to the missing, lost or buried at sea. The ratio between the two numbers differs sharply by theater. In the European cemeteries, the dead in graves far outnumber the names of the missing. At Manila, the largest of the Pacific sites, the 36,286 names of the missing are more than twice the 17,058 burials.

The pattern of the missing follows the pattern of the fighting. Ships sunk at sea, aircraft lost over open water and men killed in jungle or on islands that changed hands left no recoverable remains far more often than ground combat in France or Germany. The Honolulu Memorial names 18,095 World War II missing from the central Pacific and has no graves of its own; the East Coast Memorial in New York names 4,611 lost in the western Atlantic, many of them from ships sunk off the American coast. At Cambridge in England, the 5,127 names on the Wall of the Missing, more than the 3,811 burials, are mostly airmen of the bombing campaign and sailors of the Atlantic.

The Commonwealth record

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission keeps a comparable register for the forces of Britain and the dominions, and India, that fought in both theaters. Its 2021–22 annual report lists, for the Second World War, 348,317 identified burials and 232,531 names on memorials to the missing, a total of 580,848. The United Kingdom accounts for 245,066 burials and 138,832 memorial names; India for 18,228 burials and 68,798 names; Canada for 37,321 and 8,067; Australia for 28,604 and 12,092; New Zealand for 9,040 and 2,886; and South Africa for 10,058 and 1,856.

The proportions tell the same story as the American cemeteries. Canada’s dead, who fought mostly in northwest Europe and Italy, lie overwhelmingly in identified graves. India’s dead, who fought in Burma, North Africa, the Middle East and Italy, are named on memorials nearly four times as often as they are buried in marked graves. Australia’s ratio sits between, reflecting its divided war in North Africa, the Mediterranean, New Guinea and the prison camps of Southeast Asia. The commission notes that its totals change as historical cases of non-commemoration are investigated.

Supply and shipping across two oceans

The two wars also made very different demands on shipping. The AAF digest records materiel shipped by water to each theater between 1942 and August 1945: 6,708,156 measurement tons to the European Theater and 3,911,730 to the Mediterranean, against 2,218,618 to the Pacific Ocean Areas, 3,368,542 to the Far East Air Forces and 2,239,120 to China and India–Burma. Measurement tons record cargo volume, not weight. The Pacific totals traveled much longer distances; a ship sailing from San Francisco to the Philippines covered roughly twice the distance of a convoy crossing from New York to Britain, and so made fewer round trips each year.

Shipping losses show the two sea wars from opposite sides. In the Atlantic, the Allies lost about 3,500 merchant ships of 14.5 million gross tons to German attack, and Germany lost 783 U-boats. In the Pacific, U.S. submarines alone sank 4,779,902 tons of Japanese merchant shipping, according to the U.S. Navy’s postwar assessment, while Japan lost 128 submarines. In one ocean the Allies defended a supply line; in the other they cut one. Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 give the details for each.

The limits of a theater comparison

Each agency drew its boundaries for its own purposes. The Army’s casualty report organized the dead by administrative command; the AAF digest grouped air operations by the enemy they were flown against; the Navy measured particular sea campaigns and fleets; the ABMC groups the dead by the cemetery or memorial where they are commemorated. Geography overlaps in places such as the Mediterranean, Alaska and China–Burma–India, and a man killed over Germany might be buried in the Netherlands or named at Cambridge. That is why each table keeps its own agency’s categories.

Even within one agency, categories shift over time. The AAF digest’s loss series begins in January 1942, a month after its sortie series, and the Army casualty report runs to the end of 1946, so it includes deaths in the occupation armies after the fighting ended. Neither difference changes the broad picture, but both are reasons to quote the period with the number.

The comparison also leaves out what American records cannot show. The Pacific war was fought alongside Australian, New Zealand, Indian, British, Dutch and Chinese forces, and against an enemy whose own losses were many times larger than America’s. The European war included the Soviet front, which dwarfed both American theaters. Chapter 5 takes the air war beyond American records, and the D-Day and Normandy collection follows one campaign from the beaches to the cemetery above them.

Gallery · 7 photographs · select to enlarge

Memory and supply

Sources and further reading

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