His question was how many US troops were killed in the ETO and PTO not total military and civilian casualties. I don't know the answer offhand and it might exhaust my Google finger to find out
who said with pleasure??? well i can remember that many of us support the a bomb i tried to find out but i couldent find a good site were they make diffrence between eto and pto at least in casualties.
I would safely guess around 20 million at the least, but the war against China and Japan started 7 years before Hitler invaded Poland.
US Army and Marine battle casulities in the Pacific: killed and missing 55,060, wounded 162,230, POW ~30,000. USN about 35,000 killed/missing, about 35,000 wounded.
Total American losses (deaths only) in WW2 were 295,000, so the last number can't possibly be true and even the first is doubtful. By the way, it is perfectly normal to try to determine the amount of casualties certain campaigns or operations cost, as an estimate of the sacrifice given by the armies involved. As a cold stat it says nothing, but in such a context it is valuable knowledge.
I think 202,000 total US personnel died in North Africa , Italy , France , Belgium , Holland , and the Atlantic Ocean. Every time I hear about the battles in the west I never hear about the brits.
No American soldier has liberated any part of Holland in the strict sense of the word. American units are to be thanked for the liberation of parts of Brabant, Zeeland, Limburg and Gelderland, but not Holland. This was the work of Canadian units. Pedant... "The Netherlands" would have been correct. British losses in WW2 were somewhere near 400,000 dead, total, on all fronts.
The confusion is the result of the way the statistics are listed in various sources. 292,131 is the number of direct combat deaths. 115,185 is the number of deaths from disease, privation and accidents and includes pow deaths. total = 407, 316 wounded = 670,846 source: http://www.cwc.lsu.edu/cwc/other/stats/warcost.htm
I would say the majority of these occured in the PTO because it was mainly the US against Japan. Also disease and non-combat deaths were much more common in SE Asia and the Pacific Islands.
Well, in the ETO you get a lot of trench-foot, frostbite (in winter) and VD by the bucketload. I have seen statistics (in a Max Hastings book) showing that the US Army had a relatively high rate of non-combat casualties in Europe. Mostly trench-foot (apparently the US army did not feature regular foot inspections, as did the British) and 'combat fatigue' (or shell shock, or whatever you wish to call it).
Ricky wrote: That 400k number is deaths from disease, privation etc.. I doubt many soldiers died from trench foot, VD or shell shock.
