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Writer's pictureMichael Baker

Death by Numbers

It's impossible to consider the Second World War without reaching for statistics. There are a multitude to choose from and the scale of the figures is often awesome and appalling in equal measure. Such as the overall death toll of the Soviet Union (at least 27 million and counting) or the 3 million who died in the Bengal famine of 1943 or the 2 million plus German and other women raped by Red Army soldiers as they advanced into central Europe in 1944-45. The point about these stats is that they are essentially guesstimates, usually rounded up or down to a manageable figure, because in any protracted war it's impossible, on a methodical basis, to keep an accurate tally of casualties and victims. Armies might reasonably be expected to tot up their losses, but in the confusion of battle even their calculations could and often did seriously err on the rough side. Of course, for civilian victims, many were never, and could not have been, officially acknowledged, their loss known only to their nearest and dearest - which brings to mind the dictum ascribed to Stalin that one death was a tragedy, a million deaths merely a statistic. Moreover, the fog of war produces so many victims in such diverse circumstances that the truth of numbers is very hard to pin down: how many women who were raped and survived, for example, hid the fact out of shame or even later committed suicide without telling? In China, where the scale of loss and destruction in WW2 is always monumental, historians are necessarily reduced to talking of tens of millions of refugees - not least because the definition of displacement is rarely a scientific one. And, to add to the confusion, sometimes figures are plucked from the air to make a self-serving point. The post-war Polish authorities informed the Nuremberg tribunal that 4 million Jews had died in the death camp at Auschwitz, whereas modern estimates put the number at less than a quarter of that number. We now know that the projected estimate of a million American deaths if US forces had to invade the Japanese home islands in 1945 - the official excuse at the time for dropping the two atomic bombs on Japan instead - was merely a figment of the fevered imaginations of American pressmen: what MacArthur actually told Truman was that the invasion would likely incur 105,000 GIs killed and missing, a figure that plausibly squared with the over 82,000 US casualties suffered in the recent bloody battle for Okinawa. Given all this, it's hardly surprising that many stats for WW2 continue to be largely a work in progress: honest historians attempt ever greater accuracy (and that doesn't always mean that the tally gets smaller), but in some areas the real truth is unlikely ever to be known. On the other hand, what the figures, however rough, do tell us is that this was a war on an unprecedented scale that brought unimaginable suffering and destruction to our planet. In this sense alone, the numbers remain critical to the narrative.

If you think you know about WW2, it's time to think again.



An Understanding History Podcast


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