GERMAN LOSSES SINCE D-DAY PUT AT ONE MILLION
SHAEF HQ, Versailles, France · September 30, 1944
On this date in 1944 staff at Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) estimated that since the start of the Normandy landings on D-Day, June 6, 1944, one million German soldiers had been killed, captured, or taken prisoner by Allied armed forces. By the end of the war, the figure of German military dead stood at 5,533,000, with another 1,760,000 civilians dead. Some of the German civilian dead died in massive Anglo-American air raids. Two bookend events, one in Hamburg in late July/early August 1943 and the other in Dresden in mid-February 1945, killed some 65,000 people as firestorms swept through civilian neighborhoods and military facilities. By contrast, U.S. war dead in all theaters totaled 416,800 out of 15 million men and 350,000 women who served in the armed forces. Britain and her Commonwealth members suffered 575,000 dead. Italy suffered 301,400 military and 153,100 civilian deaths. Poland lost 160,000 service members and 5,440,000 civilians, a figure that includes victims of the Holocaust. The war between China and Japan was the longest in the series of conflicts that made up World War II (1937–1945), and China suffered more military deaths than any other nation apart from the Soviet Union: 3,000,000 to 4,000,000 Chinese versus 8,800,000 to 10,700,000 Soviet nationals. Civilian deaths were many times higher for both countries: 16,200,000 Chinese civilians died during the conflict, while 12,400,000 Soviet civilians died. Japan suffered 2,120,000 military deaths and a million civilian deaths, mostly in U.S. attacks on Japanese population centers. In a March 9–10, 1945, air raid on Tokyo, 100,000 died mostly by a fire typhoon that engulfed 16 sq. miles of downtown Tokyo. Fewer civilians died in each of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima (70,000–80,000) and Nagasaki (40,000–75,000) in August 1945. Estimated World War II military deaths by all participants range from 22,597,200 to 25,497,500 out of the 110 million who served their country, while civilian deaths range from 34,664,600 to 46,909,600. On top of that huge figure are probably three times as many wounded and an untold number who were emotionally scarred by their experiences or the loss of loved ones. The scope of human suffering was immense.
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Firebombing Enemy Cities: Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo. Some Photos are Disturbing
Above: Hamburg’s Old Town and asphyxiated victims of Operation Gomorrah. The “second city of the Reich” was the target of a human version of the wrath of God (as implied by the name of the operation) on July 24–26, July 28, July 30, and August 3, 1943, when the Royal Air Force bombed by night and the U.S. Eighth Air Force bombed by day. A July 28 firestorm that lasted three hours and created a 1,500-foot-high vortex of super-heated air killed more than 40,000 persons in and around Hamburg. Most people died of asphyxiation while huddling in bomb shelters and basements or in the above-ground flames and melting asphalt of the streets. Gomorrah killed 42,600 people and left 37,000 wounded. Fearing further horrendous air raids, approximately 1.2 million people, or two-thirds of Hamburg’s population, fled the city in the aftermath. The industrial losses were severe, and Hamburg never recovered to full production.
Above: Collecting victims and making a pyre in Dresden in the wake of four mid-February 1945 Allied air raids. A city of 642,000 (1939) swelled by 300,000 refugees fleeing from fighting on the Eastern Front, Dresden was the Third Reich’s seventh largest city. It was also home to 127 medium-to-large factories and workshops that supplied the German army with matériel (per the German Weapons Office) and employed 50,000 workers. Some 1,249 RAF and USAAF bombers unloaded more than 3,900 tons of incendiary and high-explosive bombs on the city’s center, causing a firestorm that incinerated 15 sq. miles and between 22,700 and 25,000 people. Temperatures inside the city’s famous cathedral, the Frauenkirche, reached an estimated 1,832F (1,000C).
Above: Tokyo after the March 9–10, 1945 bombing. The Dante-esque raid by B-29 Superfortresses on a densely populated area of 16 sq. miles proved the single-most destructive bombing raid in history: 267,000 mostly wooden buildings were destroyed and an estimated 100,000 killed—the highest loss of life of any aerial bombardment of the war, including victims of Hamburg (42,600), Berlin (20,000–50,000), Dresden (25,000), Hiroshima (70,000–80,000), and Nagasaki (40,000–75,000). Tokyo was subjected to over 18 bombings by four-engine B-29s and many twin-engine bombers and carrier-based aircraft. By the end of the war most of Tokyo’s urban-industrial areas had been reduced to ashes and its industrial output reduced by half.