1939 T H E O U T B R E A K O F WAR THE
SECOND
WORLD
WAR
WAS
THE
BLOODIEST
CONFLICT
IN
HISTORY.
EVEN
NOW
WE CANNOT BE S U R E OF ITS REAL HUMAN C O S T . T H E L O S S E S OF THE W E S T E R N A L L I E S W E R E S U B S T A N T I A L : THE
BRITISH ARMED
AS
MILITARY
UNITED
STATES
FORCES
DEAD) THE
HAD
264,000
MERCHANT
NAVY
K I L L E D (ROUGHLY THE S A M E LOST
30,248
MEN AND 6 0 , 5 0 0
BRITISH CIVILIANS WERE KILLED BY BOMBING.
G
ERMAN LOSSES were higher: some two million service
struck their air-raid shelter; or with Pacific War veteran and writer
personnel were killed and almost as many reported
William Manchester's recollection of shooting "a robin-fat, moon-
missing, while up to a million civilians perished in air
faced roly-poly little man" whose killing left him "a thing of tears
attacks. Eurther east, numbers are not only much higher but accurate
and twitchings and dirtied pants."
figures are harder to obtain. China lost perhaps five million military
It was a total war, the tools of which included snipers' rifles
dead, with another ten to twenty million civilian dead. Japanese dead,
and super-heavy artillery, midget submarines and aircraft carriers,
civilian and military, exceeded two million, and such was the impact
single-seat fighters and strategic bombers, delivering death and
of American bombing that by the end of the war an estimated 8.5
wounds, war's old currency, though bullet, high explosive, liquid
million Japanese were homeless. Perhaps ten million Russian
fire and, latterly, the atomic bomb. It transformed national
servicemen perished, and one estimate puts Russia's real demographic
economies and the lives of countless millions. Its shadow fell across
loss - including children unborn - at a staggering 48 million.
the whole globe. The Australian city of Darwin was bombed by
These figures reflect an astonishing diversity of sacrifice. A
Japanese aircraft and the German-occupied Lofoten Islands of
single firestorm in Tokyo on March 9-10, 1945, killed almost
Norway were raided by British commandos. Moroccan cavalrymen
85,000 civilians; between 1.2 and 1.5 million victims died in
died fighting German tanks in northern France, Indians killed
Auschwitz; one estimate puts dead in the Soviet Gulag at a million a
Germans in North Africa, Australians perished in Malayan jungles,
year; 13,500 Russians were executed by other Russians at
Cossacks died
Stalingrad; almost 6,000 US Marines died taking the Pacific island
Japanese—Americans fought with distinction in Italy. It was, as the
of Iwo Jima, and when the German liner Wilhelm Gustloff was
historian M.R.D. Foot has brilliantly put it, not so much two-sided
torpedoed by a Soviet submarine in the Baltic on January 30, 1945,
as polygonal, with both the broad war-fighting coalitions, the Allies
perhaps 6,000 troops and civilians went to the bottom with her in
and the Axis, subsuming ideological and cultural differences that
the largest single loss of life in maritime history. Yet sheer numbers
sometimes emerged even when the war was in progress and
somehow veil the reality of suffering, and it is human stories on a
appeared, with depressing clarity, after its conclusion.
under Allied
bombs in Normandy,
and
smaller scale that the really make the point. We identify with the
Its causes were complex, and although its outbreak (like that
fourteen-year-old Anne Frank, trembling in her garret in
of so many wars) might have been averted by greater political
Amsterdam; with a London air-raid warden's report of an
wisdom or more moral courage, it was not, unlike the First World
untouched meal in an intact house while the family of six who were
War, brought about by last-minute miscalculation. The mainsprings
to eat it were "scattered over a large area" after a bomb, perversely,
of conflict were coiled deep into the nineteenth-century. Germany's
II