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Photographer: Mike Wintermantel
Taken: May 14, 2014
Caption: The Devastating Cost of War
Additional Description: An estimated 60 million lives were lost - half of them civilian - during the period between Japan's 1937 invasion of China and the Axis surrender in 1945. The scope of the carnage is perhaps more accessible when examined in its component parts. The genocidal targeting of European Jews and other "undesirables" resulted in more than six million deaths. Twenty-one million Russians died, many of them during the sieges of Leningrad and Stalingrad. Of nine million Chinese civilians killed, some 300,000 were murdered during the heinous Rape of Nanking. Captured combatants often fared as poorly. Of two million Germans captured on the Eastern Front, for example, only 300,000 returned home. And unknown numbers of Japanese soldiers left behind on the Asian mainland vanished without a trace.

The advanced weaponry that produced the war's unprecedented casualty total also left several of the world's greatest cities and cultural sites in ruin. Bombing devastated London, Tokyo, Dresden, Hamburg and other population centers while Berlin, Warsaw and the major cities of Russia were the sites of fierce ground battles as well. The destruction contributed to a wartime total of homeless that exceeded the conflict's dead, with the number in China alone estimated at 60 million. The damage to infrastructure, railways, industrial production and other economically vital resources, meanwhile, created a financial burden that would be borne by victor and vanquished alike.
Submitted: May 14, 2014, by Mike Wintermantel of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Database Locator Identification Number: p273330
File Size: 1.799 Megabytes

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