Unbelievable Soviet WWII Casualty Figures

Poland lost a lot of men in a fairly short time. For the forces involved so did France, Britain, and Belgium. For those whom the cause was obviously lost they didn't prolong the losses but that's a different matter.

Most of the European democracies were out of the war as in no longer participating in it if they got into it. France surrendered. There was a Dutch government in exile and they continued fighting. Denmark surrendered as did Norway. Sweden never got in. Finland was in and out several times. The Swiss never got in, likewise Ireland although a lot of Irish served in the allied forces. Belgium surrendered not sure about whether there was a government in exile war effort. Poland (although not really a democracy) had two governments in exile that contributed signficant forces vs the Axis. The British obviously were in the war from the beginning and continued through to the end. They did tend to take some effort to limit their casualties after D-day and perhaps before. I'm not aware of any of the others doing so.

 

Conventionally OP means the original poster or the original post. If you want to be understood bucking convention is not the way to do it.

Do you have anything to back that up?

You are defintily wrong here. A single example would be the French insistence on liberating Paris. As for Denmark or Norway did they care if British or US soldiers were the agents in any particular battle vs the Germans?

 

You are contradicting yourself, and saying 'that's a different matter' does not change that.

Several European nations suffered casualties in the early part of the war, but none of them were 'willing to sacrificy their males at fairly prodigious rates'.

If you believe this then find some evidence please. Perhaps your understanding of the word 'prodigious' is not the same as mine.

All nations in Europe other than Sweden and Switzerland (and to a similar extent Portugal) were involved in the war in some way or another, most of them from 1939.

Those nations which had surrendered continued to have personnel contributing, either as 'free' forces, vichy style forces, resistance forces, Axis auxiliary recruits, local militias, POWs, and labour forces. There was no country in Europe that escaped the war completely, and only the 3 Neutrals (Switzerland, Sweden, Portugal) did not have personnel fighting.

The fact that most of these countries carried on resistance indicates that they didn't think the cause was obviously lost.

All the western European allied nations wanted to keep their casualties as low as possible, because they did not have the manpower to replace them. The axis had similar problems, but less choice in the matter.


P.S. Lwd I believe you are incorrectly attributing quotes to Nicnac rather than to Victor Gomez.

 

No. I'm not. While the decision was in doubt they showed little reluctance to sacrafice soldiers to affect that decision. Once the decision was no longer in doubt and/or their civilian population was at substantial risk they capitulated. I see no contradicition there.

While the casualty rates and more importantly the numbers weren't up to WWI levels they were still taking significant casualties. It may turn on exactly what one means by "prodigious" but certainly the forces involved in fighting the Germans on the whole lost men at more than an acceptable rate.

I could ask you the same. Indeed as noted we may be using the word "prodigious" in different ways or applying it differently. Perhaps the originator of the comment should state his definition.

But the governments of many of them were out of the war or reduced to governments in exile by the end of 1940. Others joined them in 1941. Also neutral by the way were Ireland and Turkey.

That may be but as functioning nation states quite a few were as I pointed out above "out of the war". By your defintion the US was in the war in 1940 and Mexico in 1941.

Either that or the consequences so dire that resistance was mandatory and/or better than the alternative.

One always wishes to keep ones casualties as low as possible. Lack of manpower to replace them is usually not the driving reason either.

Where?

 

you were the originator of the 'prodigious' comment in post #30

you are contradicting yourself by saying that European nations wanted to sacrifice their manpower while also saying they surrendered to avoid that.

'Significant' as far as casualties are concerned is an opinion and not a quantity

As already stated (by you) Ireland had considerable numbers of troops fighting with the commonwealth, Turkey in this instance can be grouped with Sweden, Switzerland and Portugal if you wish to consider it European (as in fact Turks did want, but Europeans generally didn't at the time)

The US and Mexico are not geographically in Europe, so I don't believe you understood my definition. The fact is that any european war affects even the non-combatants due to the close proximity and interdependence of all the nations in europe.

In your post #42 you appear to think that Nicnac believed certain things, when he actually was quoting them from Victor in post #26, although he maybe wasn't completely clear.

The whole point of this section of this thread was to discuss those claims made by Victor. It is off topic from the original thread, but hopefully we wouldn't have to diverge for too much longer if you actually read the posts.

 

I brought this up because there were indications at Yalta that these post war numbers of males in Allied countries were a part of considerations some have expressed in historical reviews of Yalta and meetings of the big three. I do not discount that there were great losses of men from WWI that was having an influence. I also wish to point out that anything the UN tends to address quickly becomes mired in the politics of "No" from our own midst yet it holds the only hope of having a method of policing around the world that would be fairly and evenly loaded on all the countries even though we have often had to foot a lot of the money end of things there but not so much so in recent years. I hope we can discuss without becoming political and divisive here. I possibly am at fault if you interpreted my questions to be of a political nature. I only wanted to see how we analyze our great casualties and yet find a way to unite towards the future problems we are sure to face. I am fearful that our recent experiences may cause us to be careless about future real need for policing. We must all be of an attitude to help each other in ever way. The best way is through discourse that is friendly. I do not want to cause bickering but valid discussions so please help to maintain that demeanor. I am sorry if I did alter the discourse a little bit off subject.

 

Sorry Lou, my fault - I withdraw.

 

My have we trayed....


lol

 

Now while this doesn't address the "deaths" by military actions, nor the casualties by same it does explore the problems with figuring out exactly what happened between 1924 and 1953.


Soviet Union, Stalin's regime (1924-53)

There are basically two schools of thought when it comes to the number who died at Stalin's hands. There's the "Why doesn't anyone realize that communism is the absolutely worst thing ever to hit the human race, without exception, even worse than both world wars, the slave trade and bubonic plague all put together?" school; and there's the "Come on, stop exaggerating. The truth is horrifying enough without you pulling numbers out of thin air" school.

The two schools are generally associated with the right and left wings of the political spectrum, and they often accuse each other of being blinded by prejudice, stubbornly refusing to admit the truth, and maybe even having a hidden agenda. Also, both sides claim that recent access to former Soviet archives has proven that their side is right.

Here are a few illustrative estimates from the Big Numbers school:

Adler, N., Victims of Soviet Terror, 1993 cites these:
Chistyakovoy, V. (Neva, no.10): 20 million killed during the 1930s.
Dyadkin, I.G. (Demograficheskaya statistika neyestestvennoy smertnosti v SSSR 1918-1956 ): 56 to 62 million "unnatural deaths" for the USSR overall, with 34 to 49 million under Stalin.
Gold, John.: 50-60 million.
Davies, Norman (Europe A History, 1998): c. 50 million killed 1924-53, excluding WW2 war losses. This would divide (more or less) into 33M pre-war and 17M after 1939.
Rummel, 1990: 61,911,000 democides in the USSR 1917-87, of which 51,755,000 occurred during the Stalin years. This divides up into:
1923-29: 2,200,000 (plus 1M non-democidal famine deaths)
1929-39: 15,785,000 (plus 2M non-democidal famine)
1939-45: 18,157,000
1946-54: 15,613,000 (plus 333,000 non-democidal famine)
TOTAL: 51,755,000 democides and 3,333,000 non-demo. famine
Wallechinsky: 13M (1930-32) + 7M (1934-38)
Cited by Wallechinsky:
Medvedev, Roy (Let History Judge): 40 million.
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr: 60 million.
MEDIAN: 51 million for the entire Stalin Era; 20M during the 1930s.

And from the Lower Numbers school:

Nove, Alec ("Victims of Stalinism: How Many?" in J. Arch Getty (ed.) Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, 1993): 9,500,000 "surplus deaths" during the 1930s.
Cited in Nove:
Maksudov, S. (Poteri naseleniya SSSR, 1989): 9.8 million abnormal deaths between 1926 and 1937.
Tsaplin, V.V. ("Statistika zherty naseleniya v 30e gody" 1989): 6,600,000 deaths (hunger, camps and prisons) between the 1926 and 1937 censuses.
Dugin, A. ("Stalinizm: legendy i fakty" 1989): 642,980 counterrevolutionaries shot 1921-53.
Muskovsky Novosti (4 March 1990): 786,098 state prisoners shot, 1931-53.
Gordon, A. (What Happened in That Time?, 1989, cited in Adler, N., Victims of Soviet Terror, 1993): 8-9 million during the 1930s.
Ponton, G. (The Soviet Era, 1994): cites an 1990 article by Milne, et al., that excess deaths 1926-39 were likely 3.5 million and at most 8 million.
MEDIAN: 8.5 Million during the 1930s.

As you can see, there's no easy compromise between the two schools. The Big Numbers are so high that picking the midpoint between the two schools would still give us a Big Number. It may appear to be a rather pointless argument -- whether it's fifteen or fifty million, it's still a huge number of killings -- but keep in mind that the population of the Soviet Union was 164 million in 1937, so the upper estimates accuse Stalin of killing nearly 1 out of every 3 of his people, an extremely Polpotian level of savagery. The lower numbers, on the other hand, leave Stalin with plenty of people still alive to fight off the German invasion.

Although it's too early to be taking sides with absolute certainty, a consensus seems to be forming around a death toll of 20 million. This would adequately account for all documented nastiness without straining credulity:

In The Great Terror (1969), Robert Conquest suggested that the overall death toll was 20 million at minimum -- and very likely 50% higher, or 30 million. This would divide roughly as follows: 7M in 1930-36; 3M in 1937-38; 10M in 1939-53. By the time he wrote The Great Terror: A Re-assessment (1992), Conquest was much more confident that 20 million was the likeliest death toll.
Adam Hochschild, The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin: directly responsible for 20 million deaths.
Brzezinski: 20-25 million, dividing roughly as follows: 7M destroying the peasantry; 12M in labor camps; 1M excuted during and after WW2.
Tina Rosenberg, The Haunted Land: Facing Europes Ghosts After Communism (1995): upwards of 25M
Britannica, "Stalinism": 20M died in camps, of famine, executions, etc., citing Medvedev
Daniel Chirot:
"Lowest credible" estimate: 20M
"Highest": 40M
Citing:
Conquest: 20M
Antonov-Ovseyenko: 30M
Medvedev: 40M
Courtois, Stephane, Le Livre Noir du Communism: 20M for the whole history of Soviet Union, 1917-91.
Essay by Nicolas Werth: 15M
Time Magazine (13 April 1998): 15-20 million.

AVERAGE: Of the 15 estimates of the total number of victims of Stalin, the median is 30 million.
Famine, 1926-38
Green, Barbara ("Stalinist Terror and the Question of Genocide: the Great Famine" in Rosenbaum, Is the Holocaust Unique?) cites these sources for the number who died in the famine:
Nove: 3.1-3.2M in Ukraine, 1933
Maksudov: 4.4M in Ukraine, 1927-38
Mace: 5-7M in Ukraine
Osokin: 3.35M in USSR, 1933
Wheatcraft: 4-5M in USSR, 1932-33
Conquest:
Total, USSR, 1926-37: 11M
1932-33: 7M
Ukraine: 5M


See:

Twentieth Century Atlas - Death Tolls

 

If I may say, while we are not mentioning Soviet numbers specifically, the overall subject is still one about who suffered inordinate casualties which is definitely related.

I also feel I have to respond to the condescending tone used by lwd:

You clearly understood the topic had changed since you have been arguing about it through several posts before this one.

From here on you are replying to someone else, not me.

I too will bow out of this topic if there can't be some civility in the proceedings.

 

I also apologize in the severe thread wander. The question of whether or not to respond to an OT statment that one feels is wrong is not always an easy one. In many cases I feel a response is necessary. However it's clear when it's controversial this will cause considerable OT discussion.

I wasn't trying to be condescending I was trying to prevent confusion.

That doesn't mean the OP changes just because the topic has wandered. Indeed I went back to the OP to see if I could figure out what you were talking about. Thought maybe we were going to get back on topic.