Victory.......But at What Cost

World War Two was the deadliest war in history with approximately 61 million casualties in only about six years.The Germans suffered 3,250,000 military and 3,810,000 civilian casualties, which equals 7,060,000 total casualties. This seems like an incredibly substantial sum, but it pales in comparison to the total for the Allies. Great Britain had  388,000 casualties, 62,000 of which were civilian and America had 295,000 total casualties all of which were military. These numbers for the Allies may not seem that large and the German casualties may appear substantial, but once the numbers for the Soviets are factored in for the Allies, all of these statistics appear miniscule.

The Soviets had a total of  25,568,000 casualties with 16,900,000 being civilian and 8,668,000 being military. This number for the Soviets is so immense that is unimaginable to even begin to comprehend its true magnitude. We are detached from the true scale of Soviet loss and cannot even fathom over 25 million people being dead or wounded. This is also how I believe Stalin viewed this number with one of his most famous quotes being  "The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic." This is an accurate view, but was this detachment from the scale of events appropriate for the leader of the Soviet people? Probably not, but how else can someone even begin to rationalize the number of casualties and make sense of why so many people died. Their deaths were on Stalin's hands and I don't believe he was ever able to truly face how many people were killed or injured under his leadership.

WWII Casualties

Bibliography

World War II Casualties. n.d. http://bss.sfsu.edu/tygiel/hist427/texts/wwiicasualty.htm (accessed April 29, 2012).