War chances

[Pootle]

Who had more chances of surviving WW2, a British, Russian or German soldier?

[Octavius]

Approximately 100 million men and women had been mobilized in the armed forces of the combatants.

Excluding civilian figures, the only military official figures came from Britain and the United States. These showed that in killed and missing the British Commonwealth had lost 444,500 and the United States 308,600. But such figures were dwarfed by the slaughter in eastern europe, where by June 1944-almost a year before the collapse of Germany, Russia had lost 5,300,000 in killed and prisoners. No later figures had as yet been made public by the Soviet Union, and nothing more than tentative estimates were available for the Axis states. The German High Command reported 3,500,000 killed and missing up to December 1944, but Prime Minister Attlee in the following October estimated that with the inclusion of permanently disabled the total German losses at the time of surrender were 7,400,000. American military authorities may have been high in their initial estimate that the European war cost all belligerents 14 million dead and 5,500,000 permanently disabled; but if those figures were taken as covering the global war and as including Japanese losses in killed and disabled of around 1� million, they would probably not be very far out.

Nine out of 10 World War II German submariners were killed.

These figures, shocking in themselves, shrank almost into insignificance beside the human losses resulting from the callous and deliberate brutality of Germany and her associates in the lands they overran. It was charged that the Nazis were d�rectly responsible for the deaths of 10 million civilians and war prisoners.

A table,which details the numbers mobilised, killed, wounded and missing in action shows approximately  (excl wounded) of the troops deployed, Germany lost 40% and Britain 7%.  I am not sure though how accurate these figures are.

[Pootle]

Thank you for your answer

[Peter Pedant]

8-ius' answer is erudite. We could call it 'the wood'. Let us look at a tree or two.

Definitely British.

There was incredible slaughter on the Russian Front. I think O's figures are low. I thought by 1945 the German Army had massacred the Red Army ten times over - that is the Red Army dead was ten times what the Red Army started off with (I thought 1m men) in 1941.

My father who was a POW in Germany, said to his German guards after the surrender at stalingrad, Was ist mit Deutschland los? and just about got lynched. One German combattant s said, Russians? we only get worried when we are outnumbered 10;1.

There was incredible brutality on both sides in Russia. Everyone did everything they could not to be liberated by the Russians. The British POW camps (were)marched toward the East in 1945 and did everything they did to retard progress. In my father's case, typhus broke out. Easy, a pint of blood infected with typhus could be purchased from the Russian POWs for a few food parcels. The blood tests could easily be forged. Obviously but in todays climate I suppose I have to spell it out, the blood was not used to infect people.

The Russians - and I agree all this is subject to spin - refer to the Great Patriotic War, and figure they lost up to 26 m . yes twenty six million - and that includes civilian casualties.

The great Stalin said, one dead is a tragedy. One million dead is a statistic.

In the pacific theatre - bombs away with Curtis E Lemay! One raid over Tokyo led to 250 000 dead. 80% of Japanese had been bombed out (= refugees by definition) by 1945. By 1945 mechanised killing over Berlin and Tokyo made the deaths in Coventry 1940 (eigth thousand) look like peanuts.

[Octavius]

It is unlikely that we will ever know the full extent, most statistics are an estimate of the total numbers, though many sources now agree that the death toll (for British Commonwealth, Germany & Russia) is in the region of the following (military / civilian / total):

British: 452,000 / 60,000 = 512,000

German: 3,250,00 / 3,810,000 = 7.1m

Russia: 13.6m / 7.7m = 21.3 to 26m

 

Russian (USSR) statistics (in partcular but not uniquely)are very spurious since propaganda and leadership tried to cover up the true cost of the war.