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Casualties

National Archives #80-G-213113

Casualties are the brutal reality of warfare. The number of
deaths
resulting from the Second World War remains uncertain, but was
around
70 million persons. Of these, around 22 million were military
deaths while the remainder were civilians killed during military
operations, through famine, or in crimes against humanity.
This represents about 3% of the total world population at the
time.
Casualties in the Pacific War numbered around 36 million or 50% of
the
total casualties of the Second World War.

Total casualties in Asia and the Pacific by nation and type

Blank entries indicate that estimates are unavailable, but
the numbers likely are small.
1Includes only losses in ground combat.
2Prior to 15 August 1945.

In
the broadest sense, military casualties include all losses of
military
personnel, whether from death or wounds in combat, surrender, illness,
accidents, or
desertion. About 4% of U.S.
troops were unavailable for combat at any
given moment during the war. In the Pacific, with its poor living
conditions, the great majority of these were not combat-related.
Over
the course of the Second World War, the U.S. Army recorded about
17 million
hospital
admissions globally for illness or accident, versus about a
million combat
casualties. Indeed, in the early days of the war, the Allied armies
experienced
about 100 casualties from heat or disease for every combat
casualty.

A similar picture is given by the casualty
statistics of 20
Indian
Division. During one six-month period, there were 2345
battle casualties, 1118 malaria
and typhus cases, 697 cases of
dysentery, 205 cases of venereal disease, 210 cases of skin
disease,
170 psychiatric casualties,
100
accidents, 321 minor injuries, and 2784
other hospital admissions (Hastings 2007.) This was not unusual.
During
the first six months of 1944, 14 Army
experienced 40,000 combat
casualties and 282,000 casualties from illness.

About 24.2% of Japanese soldiers and 19.7% of Japanese sailors
died
during the Second World War, contrasted with 3.66% of U.S.
Marines,
2.5% of U.S.soldiers, and 1.5% of U.S. sailors. Casualties in
China were immense even before war broke out in the Pacific: The
Japanese had suffered over 180,000 dead (including 48,344 dead
from illness) and over 323,700 wounded (including 36,470
permanently disabled) by October 1941.

Civilian casualties are difficult to quantify. Civilian deaths
resulting directly from military action or massacre are clearly
attributable to the war, but deaths from disease, famine, or other
hardship are more ambiguous, since these also occur in
peacetime.  The best one can do is to estimate excess deaths,
which is the number of deaths during the war beyond what would
have been
expected under peacetime conditions. Such estimates are inherently
uncertain. The
civilian Indian deaths in the table above are primarily from the
Bengal
famine of 1943, for which estimates of excess deaths range from
1.5 to 3 million. The civilian Chinese deaths are the best
estimate from recent archival research (cited by Hsiung
and Levine 1992) but may be an overestimate (Mitter [2013]
estimates 14 to 20 million total Chinese dead), while the estimate
of Japanese civilian casualties, coming primarily from the strategic bombing
campaign, is likely an underestimate.
The figure for the Netherlands East Indies, arising from famine
and forced labor, is also highly uncertain.

Combat Casualties.
In the Western military tradition, armed forces attempted to
impose their will on
the enemy through the use of their firepower to inflict
casualties. A unit was usually rendered hors de combat long before its
casualty rate approached 100%. This was true even of the Japanese, whose resignation to
death in
battle astonished Westerners.

In the Allied armies, approximately three men were
wounded in action for every man who was killed on the battlefield
or
died of his wounds. This relatively high survival rate was made
possible by advances in medicine
that meant that a wounded man who
survived long enough to reach a field hospital had an excellent
chance
of recovery. The corresponding figure for the Japanese
Army is nothing short of appalling: The state of Japanese military
medicine and the nature of
Japanese tactics (such as
staging massed frontal assaults or fighting
to the death in hopeless defensive positions) translated into a
95% death rate among combat casualties.

Statistics for 6
Army on Leyte indicate
that almost half of all
fatal wounds were from small
arms
fire, and a little more than half of fatal small arms wounds were
from hits to the torso,
with head wounds accounting for about 20% of fatalities. On the
other
hand, the majority of nonfatal wounds were inflicted by shell or
grenade fragments.

Some idea of U.S.
casualty rates
can be gleaned from
the following table of total wartime casualties for some of the divisions that served in the
Pacific
(Frank 1999).

         Casualties in
selected U.S. divisions

Division

Total Battle
Casualties

Killed or
Died of Wounds

Wounded

Other

Campaigns

25

5,432

1,500

3,928

4
New Guinea, Luzon, southern Philippines

33

2,426

524

1.896

6

New Guinea, Luzon

40

3,025

748

2,273

4
Bismarcks,
southern
Philippines, Luzon

41

4,260

962

3,287

11

New Guinea, Luzon, southern
Philippines

43

6,026

1,414

4,609

3
Guadalcanal, northern
Solomons, New
Guinea, Luzon

77

7,461

1,857

5.534

70
Eniwetok, Guam, Leyte, Okinawa

81

2,314

517

1,793

4
Palau, Leyte

Americal

4,050

1,168

2,876

6

Guadalcanal

1 Cavalry

4,055

971

3,075

9

New Guinea, Bismarcks, Leyte,
Luzon

11 Airborne

2,431

620

1,806

5

New Guinea, Leyte, Luzon

2 Marine

12,770

2,795

9,975

0

Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Saipan, Tinian, Okinawa

3 Marine

10,416

2,371

8.045

0
Bougainville, Guam,
Iwo Jima

5 Marine

9,573

2,414

7.159

0
Iwo
Jima

Total

74,239

17,861

56,256

122

The total dead or missing were 41,592 for all U.S.
Army ground troops in the Pacific and southeast Asia, with another
145,706
wounded. The Marine Corps and attached Navy corpsmen suffered
total casualties of 23,160 killed or missing and 67,199 wounded.

Average casualty rates for U.S. units in combat
are tabulated below, in rates per thousand men committed per day (ibid.)

          Average
casualty rates for U.S. ground combat units

Pacific
Amphibious
Campaigns

Euopean
Protracted
Campaigns

Killed in action

1.78

.36

Wounded in action

5.50

1.74

Missing in action

.17

.06

Total

7.45

2.16

It is notable that the fraction of fatal casualties in the more
intense
combat (24%) is significantly greater than in the more protracted
combat (17%). This likely reflects the higher reliance on
artillery rather than small arms to wear down the enemy in
extended campaigns.

Western air and naval forces tended to suffer a much higher
percentage
of
deaths among their combat casualties than did Western ground
forces.
The U.S. Navy lost 31,157 killed in action out of a total of
62,858
combat casualties in the Pacific, a figure of nearly 50%. The U.S.
Army
Air Forces lost 15,694 dead and missing out of a total of 24,230
casualties in the Pacific, a figure of 65%.

Total U.S.
combat casualties in the war against Japan were thus 111,606 dead
or
missing and
another 253,142 wounded.

Japanese military casualties from 1937-1945 have been estimated at
1,834,000, of which 1,740,000 were killed or missing. Some 388,600
of
these were incurred in China,
another
210,830
in southeast Asia, and the rest in the Pacific. Of these, some
300,386
were naval fatalities, and some 334 Japanese warships were sunk
during
the war.

Chinese
military casualties are uncertain, but a reasonable estimate is
about four million dead and three million wounded.

In the Pacific, the British
lost 5,670 dead or
missing and 12,840 wounded, the Australians
9,470 dead or missing and 13,997 wounded, and India
6,860 dead and 24,200 wounded. The figures for Britain and India
are
from Ellis (1985) and are for ground forces only, to which should
be
added at least 1100 sailors lost with Force Z
and in other naval actions in the Far East. Ellis’ figure may be a
serious underestimate, and total combined British and Indian
combat
dead in the Far East may have been as high as 28,000  (Street
2012, private communication).

Civilian casualties were very heavy in certain theaters of the
Pacific
War. Japan suffered at least 393,400 civilian deaths and another
275,000
civilians wounded. The best recent estimate of Chinese civilian
deaths,
calculated from archival records, stands at 18 million. These
dwarf the
civilian casualties of the other Allies, though these were
sometimes
locally heavy, as at Manila.
The
war in China also produced an estimated 95 million refugees.

Combat Fatigue.
A
significant percentage of casualties in combat were psychological
casualties, as much as 30% for poorly led and poorly trained troops,
such as 43
Division at New Georgia.
A more typical figure was 5% to 10%. Japanese troops were not
immune to
combat fatigue, but because of differences in culture and military
tradition, it manifested itself differently. Japanese troops who
broke down psychologically were very likely to commit suicide, either directly (such
as
with their own grenades) or
indirectly (such as by banzai
charges into massed Allied fire.)

Surrender. Large
numbers
of Allied troops were forced to surrender during the first months
of
the war, when they were caught up in Japan’s carefully prepared opening offensive.
Almost a third of all Allied prisoners
of war died in Japanese camps by the time the war ended, a
reflection of the brutal
treatment
they received from their captors. Commonwealth forces actually
suffered
more deaths in Japanese POW camps than in combat. The British lost
50,016 prisoners of war in southeast Asia, the Australian 21,726,
and
the Indians 68,890. The American forces lost 21,580 prisoners
of war, most of them in the Philippines.

Once the Allied counteroffensive got under way,
surrender by Allied troops became a rare phenomenon.

Few Japanese
troops surrendered before August 1945. As the Allied
counteroffensive
rolled forward, and
Japanese garrisons were trapped on small islands from which there
was
no escape, Japanese garrisons literally fought to the death.
Typically
just 1 to 3 percent of a trapped garrison would surrender, while
the
remainder died in combat or committed suicide. The impression that
the
Japanese were more willing to surrender as the war became hopeless
was
largely an illusion. The Allies were taking more prisoners, but
they
were also fighting larger enemy forces, and the 1 to 3 percent
figure
held up to the end of hostilities.

Of those Japanese taken prisoner, it is estimated that only
one-third were actively looking for the opportunity to surrender.
The
remainder were capture while too sick or badly wounded to resist
or
because they stumbled into Allied positions and were taken by surprise.

Surrender may have been considerably more common among reservists in China. Historian
Kawano Hitoshi (in Peattie et al. 2011) reports that 37
Division, a Class C “security” division in China, had
approximately 7000 men taken prisoner over the course of the war.
I have found no statistics from the Chinese side on the numbers of
prisoners of war taken or their fate. 

Illness. Illness
accounted
for the overwhelming majority of Allied casualties
during the Pacific War. Malaria
was the main culprit, but dengue, scrub typhus, and other tropical
diseases, together with FUO (“Fever of Undetermined Origin”, which
sometimes was a symptom of combat fatigue), took their toll as
well.
American hospitalizations for illness worldwide numbered around 15
million.

Stavation.
Deaths from starvation were not unknown among the Americans during
the Bataan campaign, but the
great
majority of armed soldiers who died of starvation were Japanese or
Chinese. The
Allied strategy of leapfrogging
strong Japanese garrisons left these
isolated from resupply, and
since surrender was unthinkable to their commanders, these
garrisons were
forced into a Stone Age existence of trying to grow sufficient
food for survival in the jungle.
It
is likely that most of Adachi’s
18 Army, cut off in New Guinea, died of
starvation. Hyakutake’s
17 Army in Bougainville suffered a
similar
fate. Overall, an appalling 60% of Japan’s military dead were lost
to starvation.

Chinese logistics were grossly inadequate throughout the war, and
some observers reported corruption in the form of commanding
officers
stealing the money allocated to their formations for rations.
However, Chinese military deaths due to starvation are impossible
to quantify due to lack of any but anecdotal information.

The majority of those who starved during the Pacific War were
civilians. These included
somewhere between 1.5 million and 3 million Indians in the Bengal
famine of 1943, which was a consequence of the loss of rice imports from
Japanese-occupied Burma, the
worldwide shortage of shipping,
and incompetence on the part of the British-led administration.
Millions more died in China (including at least two million in Honan province alone) and in
southeast Asia from shortages brought
about by the rapacious demands of the Japanese occupation.

Accidents. In the U.S.
Army
worldwide, accidents accounted for about 2 million
hospitalizations. Air operations were especially hazardous. Some
13,000
American airmen were killed accidentally, while the Royal Air
Force
lost 787 officers and 4540 other ranks to accidents.

Absence Without
Leave and Desertion.
Absence without leave was failure to report for duty. This became
desertion if the soldier or sailor intended to
permanently separate himself from the armed forces. Though
desertion
in time of war was universally regarded as a capital offense, no
American serviceman in the
Pacific Theater (and only one in Europe) suffered the ultimate
penalty
for desertion.

In the U.S. Army, a division
shipping for an amphibious
assault
typically found about 1% of its personnel absent without leave. In
the
Marine Corps, the figure
was
sometimes as low as 0.1%, a reflection of the superior esprit
de
corps of the
all-volunteer force. Leckie (1962) claims that the number of men
absent without leave from 1
Marine Division when it shipped out for Guadalcanal was less
than a dozen.

A secret Japanese Army report in 1942 claimed
that desertions to the enemy in China peaked at just 35 men in
1939 (CINCPAC
1945). However, the same report made it clear that being captured
while unconscious from wounds was considered desertion! The
reality was
that desertion was far more common than Japanese military leaders
were
willing to admit. Kawano (in Peattie et al. 2011) reports
that 37 Division, a Type C “security division” in China,
suffered about 750 desertions over the course of the war, of whom
perhaps 100 joined the Chinese
Communist 8
Route Army. Collie and
Marutani (2009) interviewed a Japanese veteran of the Kokoda
campaign who was pressed into service as a light machine gunner to
replace a soldier who “had gone to the rear without permission.”
U.S.
forces on Okinawa discovered large numbers of young men with
concealed
weapons among the native Okinawans, but it was not clear how many
were
Okinawan conscripts who had
truly deserted or Japanese guerrillas.
Desertion became a serious concern of Japanese commanders in Burma from 1944 on.

I have found one documented case of Japanese soldiers deserting
to
the Americans. A handful of enlisted men from a communications
unit on Okinawa,
who were privy to more information on the course of the war than
the
average Japanese soldier, concluded that “they might be better off
if
Japan were defeated; Japan might then become one of the states of
the
United States or a republic like France”
(Straus 2003). The
men slipped away from their unit, took a small boat to the nearby
island of Kume Jima, were picked up by a Japanese naval unit from
which
they deserted a second time, and surrendered to the first
Americans
they could find.

Desertions from the Chinese Army are almost impossible to
quantify
but were likely a
huge drain on manpower. Initially, desertion was quite low, and
MacKinnon (2008) asserts that “High casualty figures, not high
desertion rates, characterized the Chinese side during the battle
for control fo the central Yangzi valley.” However, by the time of
Pearl Harbor, the percentage of conscripts had increased
greatly and desertions became very common. According to Larrabee
(1987), following the
collapse of the Allied defense in Burma, Chinese deserters took to
banditry and terrorized refugees attempting to escape to India.
Stilwell’s headquarters claimed that Chinese pack animals
were often in very poor shape because “The Chinese
are very reluctant to graze their animals for fear of losing both
the
animals and
the soldiers through desertion” (Romanus and Sunderland 1952), and
there was a real danger of mass desertion during the peak of the
Japanese Ichi-go
offensive.

References

Allen
(1984)

“Army
Battle Casualties and Nonbattle Deaths in World War II”
(1953-6-1; accessed 2011-10-30)

Bergerud
(1996)

CINCPAC
(1945; accessed 2011-6-17)

Collie and
Marutani (2009)

Collingham
(2011)

Dunnigan
and Nofi (1998)
Ellis (1995)

Evans and
Peattie (1997)

Frank
(1999)

Gruhl
(2010)
Hastings
(2007, 2011)

History
of U.S. Marine Corps Operations in World War II (5
volumes; accessed 2011-10-30)

Hsiung
and Levine
(1992)

Larrabee
(1987)

Leckie
(1962)

Lewin
(1976)

MacKinnon
(2008)

Mitter
(2013)

Peattie et
al. (2011)

Romanus
and Sunderland (1952; accessed 2012-2-4)

Sledge
(1981)

Straus
(2003)

Tanaka
(1998)

“U.S.
Navy Personnel in World War II: Service and Casualty Statistics”
(accessed 2011-10-30)

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