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85 million casualties versus 16 million. World War 2 was the most disastrous conflict ever waged on earth, but how was it many times more deadly than the previous world war?
To understand the incredible loss of human life between the two world wars, it's important to know where fighting actually took place in both wars. World War 1 was so called because it involved all the major European powers, who dragged their colonies into the fighting along with them. It would have been more fair to simply call it 'Europe's Great War', but thanks to colonialism everyone got invited to the party. Still, the vast majority of the fighting took place in Europe, with all of the costliest battles of the war taking place on the continent. And it was a brutal affair too; if you were a British soldier you had about an 11% chance of never coming home again. But the scope of the heaviest fighting was really rather geographically limited.
When World War 2 came around, the world was more interconnected than ever up to that point. This by necessity meant that fighting had to be more global; defeating major European powers no longer meant keeping the war in Europe. While much of the fighting still took place on the continent, Africa saw a fair share of fighting with the Axis push to cut the Allies off from Middle Eastern and African oil. All along northern Africa still remain the rusted hulks of tanks and armored vehicles that clashed in massive battles, all in a bid to starve the Allies of precious oil.
But this World War didn't just include European players. Japan had invited itself into the chat, and its ambition to rule the Pacific put it on a collision course with the Allied European powers who still maintained very lucrative colonies in the region. These colonies produced everything from food, to all-important rubber, to once more: oil, and Japan didn't just want these resources for itself, it needed them. As an island nation, Japan is relatively resource poor and depends on importing vital resources from other nations. This meant that the west would always have a leash on Japan, preventing it from rising as a major power by keeping its ambitions in check via threatening trade embargoes. The launch of hostilities in Europe was the opportunity that Japan needed to take these lucrative colonies for itself, kick the west out of the Pacific, and establish the empire of the rising sun over Asia.
Japan had already launched an invasion of China, which itself had been preoccupied with bitter infighting between the nationalists and the communists. The two sides temporarily set their differences aside and tried to repel the Japanese invaders, but Japan was better equipped and trained than the disheveled Chinese forces. China had after all just endured a century of humiliation where it was purposefully weakened and exploited by European powers; despite absolutely dwarquing Japan, it was in no position to resist Imperial Japanese forces. China would provide much of the raw materials and manufacturing power that Japan needed to fuel its empire, but there was still one western power who could ruin all of Japan's ambitions: the United States of America.
The United States had maintained a strong Pacific presence for decades due to the area's importance to international trade. Despite being the world's fourth largest country, the United States has always been a maritime power. That's because of its unique position on the face of the earth; it is the most important nation between the Atlantic and the Pacific, making it the balancing point between European and Asian powers. But US national security strategy hinged on being a powerful maritime power, and the nation was committed to tolerating zero incursion into its hemisphere of the earth from any other major power, European or Asian. By the time that the second world war rolled around, the United States' Navy was rivaling the vaunted Royal Navy, with the express purpose of ensuring that conflict was always far from home. Much of this firepower was stationed in the Pacific, where the United States was keeping a very close eye on Japan. Japanese expansionism had seriously disrupted US trade in the region, and relations between the two powers were strained at best. The US held the superior strategic position with its forces capable of defending all-important Pacific rubber plantations and oil fields. Japan also was heavily reliant on American oil and industrial exports, and as long as this remained the status quo the US would always hold the leash on Japanese ascension. Thus on December of 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy struck Pearl Harbor in a bid to inflict catastrophic losses on the US Navy and keep it out of the Pacific for good. At the same time, it launched an invasion of the American-held Philippines, looking to ensure that the US had no base of operations in the region from which to counterattack from.
The addition of the Pacific theater had just made the second world war the first truly global conflict, and now fighting raged across the entire face of the planet. In the Pacific alone, it's estimated that there were about 25 million casualties, more than total casualties for World War I. Only six million of these casualties were combatants; the rest, a whopping 19 million were civilians. While both sides targeted civilians, with the Chinese and Allies inflicting an estimated 1.2 million civilian casualties on Japan, the Japanese empire killed Chinese civilians for sport, much like Russia in Ukraine today. Most of the civilian casualties were Chinese, with between 7 and 8 million killed by the Japanese in mass slaughters, indiscriminate bombardments, or just falling prey to the ravages of war itself. An estimated 200,000 Chinese civilians were killed over six weeks in Nanjing alone, as the Japanese army turned killing into a contest.
The addition of an entire new theater of war skyrocketed the total casualties for the second world war, but technology would also turn this into the bloodiest conflict in human history. At the onset of World War I, the airplane was a curiosity that most military commanders didn't quite know how to deploy. They knew it could make for a handy scout though and thus it replaced observation balloons in both armies, giving commanders a true bird's eye view of enemy positions for the first time. Information is power though, and soon both armies started trying to shoot each other's planes out of the sky. The first aerial duels took place with pistols, and achieved very little, but soon machine guns were being loaded onto airplanes as their engines became increasingly powerful. Some enterprising minds saw the potential of the airplane for directly attacking enemy positions from the air though, and while machine guns were nice, if you really wanted to have an impact on the front you needed to deliver mass death from the sky. Airplane engines were still pretty weak so the first aerial bombardment weapons were sharpened darts, carried aloft by the hundreds and dropped over the front. These sharp darts would fall from great distance, and if they scored a hit could be lethal for a soldier, creating deep, wide wounds that were impossible to stop bleeding. However, the darts were inaccurate, and very few of them actually ever found a target; if a dart missed, like most did, it presented little more than a tripping hazard for enemy soldiers. Grenades were soon being chucked out of the open cockpits of airplanes, but engineers dreamt of more. Bigger airplanes capable of carrying much more bombs, enough to have a significant impact on enemy units. The first bombers could only carry between 55 and 120 pounds of bombs, but soon aircraft like the Russian Ilya Maurometz could carry as much as 1500 pounds of bombs. The future was clear; airplanes would become the most important weapons of the next world war.
When World War 2 broke out, Hitler's armies made excellent use of fighter and bomber aircraft as part of their blitzkrieg, 'lighting warfare'. Pummeling enemy defenses from the air before ground forces arrived helped to soften them up for ground attack. In the Pacific, Imperial Japan proved that the age of the battleship was at an end, when it nearly succeeded in defeating the United States of America in a single strike with aircraft launched via carriers. The airplane allowed massive bomb loads to be carried hundreds, even thousands of miles, and in numbers planes could put entire cities under siege.
Today the accepted way of fighting modern war is to engage enemy troops and destroy military and economically important targets. Civilian populations are off-limits, and it’s no longer acceptable to target them purposefully as part of your strategy to defeat the enemy. In World War 2, the mass slaughter of civilians was the strategy for defeating the enemy. If a civilian population could be eradicated, the economic fallout would make it difficult or impossible to continue prosecuting a war. Mass killing of civilians also demoralized the enemy, prompting nations to sue for peace. Thus in World War 2, the targeting of cities was not just fair game, but key to success. In the first World War, civilian deaths numbered at around 10 million. Civilian deaths on the other hand were twice as high as military deaths at around 50-55 million. And the airplane made much of that slaughter possible.
During World War I, the artillery piece was the upper limit of how far one could threaten an enemy, typically to a range of a few miles. With most fighting in World War I happening outside of population centers, this put civilians at low risk from direct combat deaths, with many of the deaths occurring due to the follow-on effects of war, namely starvation and disease. However, in the second world war airplanes could threaten cities an entire nation over, or even further. And they could bring with them thousands of pounds of bombs. With bomber formations sometimes numbering in the hundreds, indiscriminate bombing campaigns leveled entire cities. But special types of bombs made the killing much more efficient. Often cities were targeted with incendiary munitions, or bombs designed to create little blast damage and instead fuel massive fire storms. The German city of Dresden was one of many victims of World War 2 fire bombing, and turned the city into a concrete skeleton covered in ash. Incredibly, the city was reduced nearly to rubble in just three days, with 3900 tons of high explosives and incendiary devices dropped on the city by the British Royal Air Force. Such massive devastation in such a short period of time was unheard of in World War 1, and would have surely shaken both Allied and Central power commanders to the core. But in the second World War, the deaths of 25,000 civilians in three days was just par for the course.
In the Pacific Theater though, air raids on civilian cities reached new catastrophic heights. While more civilians died in Europe, Japanese civilians were particularly vulnerable to air raids by the time that the strategic bombing campaign of Japan began in 1944. With Japan refusing to surrender, the Allies began to plan an invasion of the Japanese islands. To weaken Japan for the coming invasion, and to attempt to convince the stubborn Japanese into surrender before such an invasion, unrestricted bombing of the Japanese islands was approved. At first, air raids took place against military and industrial targets. However, major Japanese industrial centers were quickly reduced to rubble. By now, Japanese forces were so starved of fuel, trained pilots, and planes, that they couldn't mount much if any resistance against air raids. Anti-aircraft guns on the ground were nearly useless, as they had difficulty reaching the high flying American B-29s. With the loss of major industrial centers, the Japanese dispersed their industrial efforts across their cities to homes and small workshops. This made them much harder to target and neutralize, which prompted the approval of mass bombing of the civilian population.
Japanese cities were not just poorly defended from the air, but were particularly vulnerable to bombing. Very quickly on, the United States realized that using conventional high explosives was not very effective against Japanese cities due to the fact that most buildings were constructed out of wood. High explosives were designed to destroy brick and mortar European cities, but Japanese cities were much more vulnerable to incendiary devices. Thus, US bombers began to drop incendiary devices by the thousands over Japanese cities, sparking massive fire storms that razed cities nearly entirely. It wasn't just the massive volume of bombing carried out by the US, but also poor organization of civil defense that led to the massive destruction of Japanese cities and loss of life. Bomb shelters had never been created in large numbers in Japan, and it's unlikely the nation ever believed it could be subjected to the same massive bombing it was carrying out against Chinese cities. Without bomb shelters, civilians had nowhere to shelter from the flames that spanned entire cities, and they were incinerated in the streets. But Japanese fire fighters were also poorly trained and equipped for combating blazes, and this led to fire raging completely out of control with no hope of stopping them. People may remember the nuclear bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, but massive aerial campaigns had so dwarfed the killing of the atomic bombs that when news of the total casualties from the bombings reached Imperial Japanese command, they were mostly unperturbed. They had, after all, already suffered far worse. It was only the realization that a single bomb had caused so much devastation that gave them any pause.
On the ground, the development of mobile warfare also helped fuel the massive casualties of World War 2. Before World War 2 troops moved largely on foot, and this limited both the speed and scope of an advance. Forces couldn't spread out as widely, or move as quickly, as when warfare became mechanized. The marriage between tanks and mechanized infantry allowed warfare to become much faster and cover much more ground. This in turn meant that more territory could be covered, spreading the scope of the fighting and putting more of the civilian population at risk. And nowhere did mobile warfare have as dramatic an impact as in the eastern front.
In the first world war, Russia was defeated relatively early and the German army didn't require an invasion to force its exit from the war. The violence resulted in an estimated 8-10 million dead, with many more that number wounded. In the second world war, the eastern front saw a staggering 40 million dead, about four times World War 1's figures. The invasion of Russia opened up an entire new front of the war that had been very limited in the first world war, and Hitler's brutal push to Moscow ended up making it the deadliest theater of the war.
But Hitler was also busy pumping up his numbers by engaging in one of the greatest atrocities in human history. Hitler dreamt of a 'pure Europe', one free of any race but the Aryan race, with perhaps a token number of survivors of other races to be used as slave labor. To make his sick fantasy a reality, he initiated wholesale industrial slaughter of anyone he deemed undesirable. To make his list, one only needed to be of another race or an undesirable political ideology, or be disabled. Hitler's dreams of a pure Third Reich left no room for anyone who wasn't whole in body and mind, prompting the mass slaughter of individuals with special needs. The best known victims of the Holocaust are the Jewish people, who suffered between 5 and 6 million of their number killed in concentration camps and mass slaughters across Germany and occupied territories. As the German army conquered new lands, they began the systemic removal of all undesirables, herding them into ghettos where they were quarantined until transportation could be arranged to either work camps, where they would live as slave labor, or to extermination camps. While inside cramped ghettos, they would be walled off from the outside world by barbed wire, armed guards, and often hastily erected concrete enclosures. Food was sparse, and mass starvation, along with disease, led to the death of many long before the trucks and trains arrived. Often, populations would be sorted either before being loaded onto trains or shortly after. From there, some selects deemed healthy or skilled enough, would be sent to labor camps to work on German industrial and military goods. The rest, what the Nazis considered human 'chattel', were marked for extermination and sent directly to their deaths. This would often happen by instructing prisoners to strip nude and enter massive shower facilities. This was for their own health they were told, but once they were inside the doors were locked and all ventilation sealed. Then deadly gas was pumped into the room, often causing agonizing death via asphyxiation. Dying inside a Nazi death chamber could take up to 15 minutes, and some even survived after being buried alive by corpses, only to be shot to death by Nazi guards after.
But while the Jews suffered the most from the Nazi extermination efforts, they were far from the only populations the Nazis killed en masse. As the Nazi armies poured into the Soviet Union, Hitler wanted to wipe out the indigenous population completely, so that Russia could be turned into one giant, pure, German colony. To that end, he ordered a whopping 5.7 million Soviet civilians be put to death, with many of them simply lined up and gunned down in vast rows. Massive pits would be dug in front of which the Soviet prisoners were lined up, and as machine guns mowed them down, they would fall inside. Then a new row of prisoners would be lined up to meet the same fate. When the pit was near full, the Germans ordered dirt to be spread out over it. The next group to suffer at the hands of the Germans were Soviet POWs. While the rules of war dictated that POWs were to be treated humanely, and the Germans treated Western POWs relatively well, in the east German armies engaged in wholesale slaughter of captured Soviet forces. An estimated 2.8 to 3.3 million Soviet POWs were killed during the German invasion. Poland, which had been the first nation to suffer Germany's wrath, also saw up to 3 million of its citizens put to death. As many as 600,000 Serbs, half a million Romani, 25,000 Slovenes, and 3500 Spanish Republicans fighting against Hitler were also exterminated. Hitler's drive to purge undesirables also spread to the disabled both at home in Germany and in occupied territories. Approximately 270,000 disabled people were killed by the Nazis. Political or religious ideology was also a reason for extermination, with as many as 200,000 Freemasons exterminated alongside up to 5,000 Jehovah's Witnesses. Hitler also targeted homosexuals in Germany and the territories he conquered, killing as many as 25,000.
The wholesale slaughter of entire populations is one of the major reasons why the second world war was far deadlier than the first. For the first time in history, mankind had industrialized mass murder, and had the war lasted longer these casualty numbers would be astronomically higher. In fact, it was Germany's later troubles in the war that actually prevented even more killing. As war materials began to run short, Germany could no longer afford to transport hundreds of thousands of would-be victims to waiting extermination camps, and the drain on manpower and resources caused by the actual fighting spared many from Nazi killings.
Now go check out How Nazi Gas Chambers Actually Worked, or click this other video instead!