What were the casualties during World War II (details...)?

Question

I need to know the separate casualties for the Pacific Theater and European Theater of World War II. Does anybody know the numbers? If you do can you tell me with your source. Thanks a lot.

Answer 1

Exact numbers are hard to come by - historians still debate what the exact numbers of dead were in some countries.

Rather than give details for every single country, here is a chart:

http://www.secondworldwar.co.uk/casualty.html

I simply did a google search for "Chart of WW2 fatalities" and got many hits, this was the best one and looks to me like the most accurate (within a few percent of the correct answer)

Let me explain some of the numbers.

You'll see that about 25 million soviets were killed. (Somewhere between 20 and 25 million is what is commonly accepted) The Germans literally carried out a "war without mercy" against the Soviet Union. There was little to no distinction between Soviet soldier and civilian. All over eastern Europe, including Poland, the Nazis deployed their infamous Einsatzgruppen - mobile killing squads that executed civilians - Jewish and otherwise. Slavs (Eastern Europeans) were not much better than Jewish people in Hitler's eyes. This is of course outside the fact that the Germans and the Soviets fought a war without limits using modern technology - tanks, planes, machine guns, ect. The war was very bloody.

China you'll see is the second highest. The Japanese committed many attrocities in China. I recommend doing some further research on "The Rap of Nanking," but to get you started here is a good explanation of it:
http://www.tribo.org/nanking/
The Japanese invaded China far before the officially recognized start of WW2, when Hitler invaded Poland Sept 1, 1939.

Germany is number three. They were outnumberd and fought both the Soviets and the other Western allies. We bombed their cities accounting for the high numbers in civilian deaths.

Poland is number 4 for the same reason the Soviets are number 1, although the Polish civilians were not treated quite as poorly as the Soviet civilians (but not too much of a difference)... at least there was a distinction between Soldier and Civilian.

Japan is number 5.... a little over two hundred thousand of the three hundred thousand civilian deaths came from the use of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the firebombing of Tokyo. The remaining civilian deaths are due to other bombings... we used Firebombs (basically like napalm, very flamable meant to destroy Japanese wooden/paper houses). Remember that the allies never fought the Japanese on the actual Japanese mainland, so very few of these casualties, if any, would have come from fighting. Most to all were from this bombing.

The rest of the casualties are countries that were invaded, such as France, or countries that did the invading such as the U.S. and Canada... yes, the Canadians had their own beach on D-Day and fought along side the U.S. and British. Other countries such as South Africa and India were parts of the British Empire, and sent troops to help support the allies in Europe.

That's pretty much the story. Again, for a breakdown of Civilian/Military by country go to this website:

http://www.secondworldwar.co.uk/casualty.html

For a list of who fought on what side (who was an ally, who was allied with Germany/Japan/Italy), look at this chart:

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_countries_were_involved_in_World_War_2
Yes, it's from wikipedia but I've verified it's accuracy with a history book I have.

good luck.

Answer 2

see link

Answer 3

http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm scroll down to WW II.

Answer 4

Well, lookee here...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties