The Fallen of World War 2 - A Historian Reacts

welcome back everybody to another reaction video and i've had a number of requests for me to react to the fallen of world war ii i've seen this suggested to me uh in my recommended videos on youtube but i have not watched it before so i'm interested to see what it is that you guys uh see in this that you want me to react to so much so we're just gonna dive right into it and i'll kind of react as i go along please don't forget to hit that like button subscribe if you haven't already make sure you check out all my other videos thanks for watching here we go the average life span of an american is 80 years and an 80 year old today was 10 when world war ii ended 4 when it began a soldier who saw battle would have to be in his late 80s at least today generals political leaders the decision makers of the war few are still with us and over the past few decades we've seen authors and filmmakers rush to capture stories from survivors so you know it's interesting and one of the things that that is fascinating about the war is that at the start of 1945 three of the leaders of various nations were no longer in control of those nations by the end of 1945 franklin roosevelt died in april uh of course adolf hitler died a few weeks later when he took his own life and then winston churchill was actually voted out of office in july of 1945. so the uk the us and germany all led by different people by the end of the war um well of course so is japan but that was because they lost joseph stalin dies what eight years later in 1953 um but it's kind of interesting to think about how many of those leaders particularly two of the three main allied leaders didn't stay in power to the end of the war before this connection of memory is lost this project is not about individual war stories and it's not about survivors we're going to tally up the tens of millions of people whose lives are cut short by the war and see how these numbers stack up to other wars in history including trends in recent conflicts we'll be counting soldiers and civilians separately each of these figures represents 1 000 people who died civilians were of all walks of life whereas military deaths were almost entirely men the average age was about 23. in most battles for every 1 000 soldiers killed there are more than a thousand who were injured the word casualty can be confusing because in military speak it often includes both deaths and injuries and anything else that takes a soldier out of service here we're just counting the deaths and we'll begin with american soldiers now uh you know for the united states outside of our american civil war which took upwards of 750 000 lives uh but the vast majority of those were actually from illness uh and so for the united states world war ii was uh the war in which we saw the most combat deaths of any war that we've been involved in and yet i know our numbers pale in comparison to the vast majority i think something like 400 000 americans died during world war ii stacked that up against the millions suffered by the soviet union japan china germany a number of countries who just were devastated by the numbers [Music] over 400 000 died most of the deaths occurred in the european theater fighting the nazis in about a quarter we're in the pacific fighting the japanese so the the us actually had decided early on that the focus was going to be to defeat germany first because it was going to take time to take out the japanese in the pacific and it kind of worked out that way and of course you can see that with the the number of casualties being much higher now had the u.s had to actually invade mainland japan that obviously would have been very different when you put them on the timeline you see that casualties were the heaviest at the end of the war the war began on september 1st 1939 but the us wasn't willing to join the fight until pearl harbor two years in the deaths increased drastically on d-day when the allies invaded normandy one of the most tragic moments of the war was on d-day at omaha beach where 2 500 americans fell yeah surprisingly the other beach there were two american beaches omaha if you if you're thinking of it in terms of a left and right flank omaha was on the left and utah was the very right beach there were five beaches total the us had the two furthest to the right which would would have been to the west uh and utah was the furthest to the west um and they actually suffered significantly fewer casualties a much much easier landing there so about the same number of us soldiers died on this single beach landing as the entire 13 years of the recent war in afghanistan the bloodiest battle in the pacific was okinawa which lasted 82 days during which 12 500 americans died and in okinawa was also where the highest ranking american was killed that was lieutenant general simon b buckner jr uh his father simon buckner senior was a confederate general a prominent confederate general during the civil war about 5000 of these deaths were at sea from kamikaze attacks [Music] now let's look at some other countries starting with europe now we're going to see just how small the us numbers were germany started world war ii when it invaded poland poland ultimately lost 200 000 soldiers in the war most died after the invasion while the country was occupied by germany and the soviet union germany meanwhile lost just 16 000 in the invasion of poland wow the nazis went on to invade and conquer other countries including denmark belgium the netherlands france greece and yugoslavia now here's something you don't hear a lot about i mean at least here in the west uh in america we don't talk a lot about uh what happened in yugoslavia and you look at their casualty numbers their deaths compared to france now i'm curious to know how many of those were military and how many were civilian france surrendered but after losing 92 000 soldiers in the battle of france over 200 000 ultimately fell which includes deaths in pow camps french colonies and other fighting now i'm actually surprised by that i expected france would have had more losses than the united states i'm honestly surprised the u.s had doubled the cash the deaths yugoslavia suffered almost half a million military deaths the initial invasion brought relatively post invasions on both sides but the deaths mounted under nazi occupation due to guerrilla fighting civil conflict and mass executions ah this is going to be nuts for swift with relatively few german losses even the nazi commanders expressed surprise at their success and then we have the united kingdom in the united states who were not invaded but took the fight to the nazis britain lost about the same number of soldiers as the u.s which includes the british colonies now that i'm also surprised by because again i mean i didn't look at these numbers ahead of time and i've never really taken time to look at at least the other allied numbers i i have a little bit of an idea of the losses by germany and japan but i i'm actually surprised the uk lost that few and now granted it's a much larger percentage of their population than it is of the united states germany lost about half a million soldiers fighting the us and britain in what is known as the western front which took place in france and belgium [Music] but most nazi soldiers died in the eastern front germany's unsuccessful invasion of the soviet union the numbers are staggering the most famous battle of the eastern front and perhaps the turning point of the european war was stalingrad the german sixth army successfully took stalingrad but then got surrounded by the soviets and cut off from food and ammunition half a million nazis would ultimately die in stalingrad think about that for a minute as many germans i don't like that he he said half a million nazis because that implies that all german soldiers were nazis and they weren't um i understand that that gets used interchangeably a lot but i think it's an important distinction to make it's like calling all american soldiers democrats because the democrats were in control of the government but as many german soldiers died at stalingrad as died on the entire western front throughout the war that's incredible to me and just one more reason why it was so foolish for hitler to invade the soviet union when he did in operation barbarossa and i know i'll get a lot of people saying oil he needed the oil well he never got the oil and yet he still was able to operate his army until 1945. imagine how much oil he would have saved by not invading the soviet union he would have i think easily been able to hold on now you can argue eventually that stalin would have invaded germany anyway i don't know if that's true or not but um it certainly was just foolish and you can see that by the numbers another 100 000 are taking prisoner of which 6 000 would ever return pows had a low survival rate throughout world war ii and it was particularly grim in the east include these pows roughly the same number of germans died in stalingrad as all the western front fighting against france the uk and the us yep amazing the stalingrad was a victory for the soviets they suffered almost twice as many losses as germany the soviet union would eventually defeat the once unstoppable german army killing 2.3 million nazi soldiers think about that 2.3 million germans not nazis german soldiers uh fighting in the eastern front were killed uh only half a million in the western front wow but look at the soviets [Music] my god that's got to be 10 million at least jeez more than that eight point seven million good tally by the russian military a hotly disputed number now as he said official tally by the russian military and you can probably count on that number then being too low some studies have calculated as many as 14 million oh look at that to complete the count of european military deaths we need to add german deaths from other fronts including the north and africa as well as deaths from other access powers a lot of the nazis hungary romania and italy when you put these european military debts on the timeline it looks like this you can now interact with the chart to learn more pause the narration if you'd like more time wow and now we switch to civilian deaths in europe [Music] six million jewish people were killed in the holocaust but what people often forget is that it wasn't just jewish people who were killed during the holocaust a lot of soviet prisoners of war a lot of people like the romani um gypsies uh homosexuals uh the infirm the elderly a lot of different groups of people if you separate this by country you see that about half 2.7 poland for polish yeah 700 000 were soviets followed by hungary and 17 other countries broken down another way about half of the six million were killed in the concentration camps over a million died in auschwitz most were killed in the gas chambers others died from starvation exhaustion disease and other forms of execution the second most deadly camp was tablinka which was exclusively an extermination camp set up to look like a train station mobile killing groups killed 1.4 million jews and that was the mobile killing groups that's how they kind of did it early on but it was wasting a lot of ammunition it wasn't real efficient took a long time and that was one of the reasons for the honesty conference which is where they met to discuss the final solution to the jewish question as they put it and it was at auschwitz that they really perfected the use of zyklon b where they could kill as many as i think 10 000 a day at its peak operation but i think it averaged around 2000 a day which i mean you know i think it was stalin who said that um you know one death is a tragedy a million deaths is a statistic and it's really just it's appalling to me that i'm even talking about it that way about 10 000 a day as though that's just a number but those are 10 000 women men children families i mean just i can't even wrap my mind around these numbers like with the gas chambers men were killed first to reduce the risk of revolt this is a picture that every person should see and i know there are many more just like it but but just just look at what's happening here look at this this is a woman holding her child that can't be more than two or three years old and the guy's got his rifle at the back of her head and he's about to execute the whole family and this multiply this times hundreds of thousands over and over again [Music] um the holocaust also includes non-jewish deaths between 130 000 to 500 000 roma then called gypsies were killed the numbers are disputed about a quarter million people with disabilities were killed homosexuals catholics and other groups were also exterminated but their numbers are relatively small some historians say that other civilian deaths should go under the label of holocaust about two million non-jewish poles were killed under german occupation some of it was sent to the gas chambers at auschwitz when you combine civilian and military deaths over 16 percent of the total polish population died in world war ii that's the highest percentage of any country was that one in six one in six polish people died during this war that my goodness but not the highest in total death count the soviet union again tops that list losing at least as many civilians as it did soldiers somewhere between 10 and 20 million a particularly dark moment of the soviet union was the siege of leningrad now saint petersburg german forces surrounded leningrad before civilians could be evacuated supplies including food were cut off for two and a half years one and a half million people died as a result mostly from starvation mostly civilians stalin's cruelty towards his own people is partly responsible for these numbers he often didn't allow civilians to evacuate from cities thinking it would cause the soldiers protecting them to fight harder about a million soviets died in stalin's own liver kings called the gulag you know it's understandable when you start to look at these numbers i'm not excusing the way that the soviet army treated german civilians when they entered germany but it makes it much more understandable when you see the devastation that was brought on both civilian and military alike on the soviet union by the germans just about every country suffered civilian losses especially countries who were invaded while many died as a result of so-called collateral damage the biggest numbers occurred when it was no accident civilians were exterminated purposely fired upon or bombed used as human shields or intentionally deprived of food the intentional killing of civilians was done by most warring parties including the united kingdom and the united states the united kingdom was spared of a land invasion but still lost 60 000 civilians largely from german air raids or blitzes often directed at civilian population centers the uk did the same to german cities at a much greater magnitude true causing about 10 times the number of deaths you know people talk like to talk a lot about the u.s bombing of hiroshima and nagasaki but we killed far more in firebombing of cities like tokyo dresden and germany just devastating numbers of civilians that were killed in these bombings but most german civilian deaths came from the ground at the late stage of the war when the nazi regime collapsed civilians living in occupied regions and desperately flee from the advancing soviet army yeah and it's not just that but places like czechoslovakia for example ethnic germans people who were german who had moved to czechoslovakia were often lined up and shot very much like uh other people groups have been lined up and shot by the by the germans uh before the war in the early parts of the war the same thing started happening to germans that they had done to other peop other groups of people rapes were widespread and death estimates range from 600 000 to 3 million [Music] let's step back and see where we are with the totals we just counted about 20 million civilian deaths in europe that's just yours to the european military deaths we already covered it brings us to over 40 million then we have the asian theater here we see the vast majority of military deaths in asia came from china and japan yep on the civilian side about 6 million deaths from china indonesia korea indochina and the philippines can be attributed to japanese war crimes which are sometimes compared to the nazi atrocities due to the sheer scale of the cruelty yeah and look at that i mean six million that's the number of jews killed during the holocaust now granted there were far more civilians killed than just in the holocaust but this should not be forgotten china had the second highest death count after the soviet union and like the soviets the chinese government demonstrated a stunning willingness to sacrifice its own people yep chinese nationalists opened the dike at the yellow river hoping the flood would halt the japanese advance half a million chinese civilians or more were killed which is two or three times the number who died in all countries in the 2004 asian tsunamis but the invasion of china only cost japan 200 000 soldiers most were killed fighting the us and allies in the pacific war a significant portion of japanese civilian deaths were caused by american firebombing and the two nuclear attacks yeah contrary to official u.s statements these airstrikes were directed at civilian populations not military targets when you add all the deaths outside of europe it brings us to a grand total of 70 million for the war give or take depending on who's counting and what civilian deaths get included so that obviously makes it the deadliest war in human history but i think and if he he mentioned at the beginning he's going to talk about some other wars i think he'd be surprised at some of the other wars primarily in china uh i think china had at least four different wars uh just like civil wars internal wars that took at least 20 million lives i think there was one back all the way in the 8th century that may have taken as many as 36 million lives but i don't know how much you'll get into that more people died in world war ii than in any other war in history for comparison here are 20 or so of the very worst wars and atrocities we have on record some of these are more of atrocities than wars but we've seen how that distinction can get blurry some of these spanned across centuries world war ii had the highest body count and it all happened in just six years the world's population has grown significantly since the earliest atrocities on this list if you want to compare them in terms of what percentage of the world there you go we can adjust the chart to look like this yep this rough approximation tells us there may have been more devastating wars before world war ii proportionally speaking yep when we turn to post-war conflicts it's hard to say anything that isn't controversial but the data shows something quite extraordinary has been happening in 1989 john gaddis coined the phrase the long piece to identify the absence of conflict between the nuclear powers during the cold war that's not entirely true though while we didn't officially go to war you know but for example between the us and the soviet union uh you very much have proxy wars happening in korea vietnam afghanistan places like this where um you know were it wore an all but name it's part of the cold war so to speak and there were millions who died in some of those conflicts 25 years later the cold war is over and the term is still being used although its meaning may have shifted european countries have not fought each other except for this 10-day war in 1956 when the soviet union invaded hungary when we look at european wars before world war ii it looks like this they tend to be more frequent as you go back those smaller in scale and the largest 44 economies of the world have not battled each other since world war ii rich countries have fought poor countries like the us versus iraq but rich countries have not fought other rich countries such a period of peace between the so-called great powers hasn't been seen since the roman empire okay that's fair peace is too strong of a word wars have occurred since world war ii and they can be grouped into these four categories we don't see colonial wars anymore we've already noted that interstate wars between rich countries have not occurred at all and here we see wars involving smaller economies have tapered off that leaves civil wars of two types with and without farm intervention and this is what these battle deaths look like alongside of world war ii more people died fighting in world war ii than in all the wars since and again we can't forget about world population which has almost tripled since world war ii if we scale these numbers to show deaths in proportion to world population showing the likelihood that a person on earth dies in battle the downward trend becomes even more pronounced now this isn't to infer anything about why this trend is occurring that's a discussion for another day you can now it does make you wonder if there was another big war if it would just be absolutely devastating compared to the others i don't know um you know we've got much more accurate weapons now uh much more deadly weapons now i don't know let me know what you think about the possibility of future war interact with this chart to explore what conflicts are behind the totals now bear in mind we're just looking at battle deaths here not civilian deaths but those two are in decline is a difficult thing to measure it's a bit like counting the people who didn't die and wars that never happened we give such importance to the word peace but we don't tend to notice it when it occurs or report on it sometimes it takes reminding ourselves of how terrible war once was to see the peace that has been growing around us yeah of course this trend may not continue and it's not clear how looking at these charts can help us make the right decisions to ensure that it does but the longer the long piece grows the more significant it becomes so if watching the news doesn't make us feel hopeful about where things are heading watching the numbers might [Music] well that was really well done um so neil halloran's the guy who did that video i'd highly recommend that you go over and support his channel uh watch it on the original hit the like button give him that support that he deserves uh let me know your thoughts about all of that use the comment section below and again please hit that like button and uh continue to subscribe for daily content we'll see you again soon thanks for watching

Channel: Vlogging Through History

Views: 664,366

Keywords: world war 2, historian reacts, historian, fallen of world war 2 reaction, fallen of ww2, historian reaction, world war 2 oversimplified, world war 2 dead, ww2 dead, ww2 killed, ww2 casualties, world war casualties, the fallen of world war ii reaction, the fallen of world war 2 reaction, the fallen of ww2, the fallen of world war 2

Id: JIcqa-DV-1Q

Length: 27min 41sec (1661 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 08 2021