As a basic measure of noncombatant involvement in a conflict, some comparative history may be useful. In the American Civil War no more than 7 percent of the fatalities were civilian. By the FIRST WORLD WAR, the rate had climbed to 20 percent. In the Second World War, nearly 60 percent of the dead were not in the military. The phrase “fighting for our lives” had taken on a literal meaning.
Conservative estimates place civilian war deaths at more than thirty million. Of these, the Soviet Union lost at least twelve million. Many historians refuse to guess on China, where the toll was somewhere between two million and fifteen million (probably closer to the latter). Poland suffered the highest percentage, losing 15 percent of its population—nearly six million people. On average, Yugoslavia lost more civilians every two weeks than Britain lost every year.
As expected, war brought far more hardships to the home front than just loss of life. People lost limbs and eyes, their homes, sometimes their countries. Ever present among physical traumas were mental demons of anxiety, fatalism, and fear. Yet people lived on, many through astounding displays of composure and diligence. Survivors from Buchenwald to Nanking recounted how, even in the most desperate times, a pervasive fight for normalcy endured.
Listed below, and placed in no particular order, are some of the more ruthless trials set upon the home front, many of which lasted well beyond the dates of any military cease-fire.
1. HUNGER
It was as if the four horsemen of the apocalypse had come, and famine was leading the way. First to go was prime farmland. While the Soviet Union transported many of its factories east, past the barrier of the Urals, its agricultural base naturally remained rooted where it stood, in the west and southwest. When Germany overran these areas in 1941, the Soviets lost more than one-third of their grain and grazing lands, more than half their potato acreage, and nearly the entire sugar beet region. So, too, China lost its two most cultivated regions to Japanese invasion by 1938.1
As with most famines, the greatest harm came not from lack of food but from lack of transportation. Never in the world’s history had population centers been so large and so dependent on food shipments to sustain them.
The war sank ships, destroyed roads, killed draft animals, and commandeered trucks that transported food. For countries such as Greece, which imported a half-billion tons of grain annually, the effects were devastating. In the winter of 1941–42, Athens alone lost three hundred residents a day to starvation. Leningraders were dying at a rate of four thousand a day, with survivors reduced to killing and eating pets. In 1943 a famine in China’s Honan province sparked a civilian uprising against the Nationalist Army. By 1944 famines erupted in Holland and east India, the latter killing an estimated 1.5 million. Nearly 2 million people in Indochina succumbed to hunger the following year. Incidents of cannibalism occurred in more than one country. Women everywhere turned to prostitution to feed their families.2
While fighting had ceased in most countries by the end of 1945, hunger had not. Russia and China were producing half the grain of prewar years. Germany experienced its worst food shortages in 1946 and 1947. Rationing continued in many countries through 1950.3
A mother masks her anguish, while her children are less guarded. As many as a fifth of all civilian casualties were less than ten years old.
In 1944, Japan’s petroleum-starved war industry took what precious food was left and literally fed it to their machines. Factory owners confiscated and processed countless tons of soybeans and coconuts for machine oil and used distilled potatoes and rice to make alcohol for engines.
2. GROUND COMBAT
“Battlefield” had become a misnomer by the 1940s. The primary targets of conquest were not the opposing armies but the factories, ports, rail lines, ships, and towns that supplied them. If residents of such areas were unable or unwilling to leave their homes, unspeakable horrors awaited. For many the sight of bombers was not nearly as damning as approaching enemy tanks and infantry.
In addition to the shelling and shooting, there were the added chances of arson, looting, murder, and molestation. The desecration of women occurred with chilling regularity, especially in ethnically charged battles. Nations such as Burma, the Low Countries, France, Manchuria, the Philippines, Poland, Romania, and the Ukraine had the added curse of being fought over several times.
On local levels, men and machines razed villages, towns, and cities across Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific. By 1944 eight out of ten buildings in Warsaw were leveled or unusable. Yugoslavia, exposed to both international and civil war, possessed a stretch of road more than one hundred miles long where not a roadside building remained standing. By 1945, the city of Manila was barely recognizable. After the war the Soviet Union designated Kiev, Leningrad, Minsk, Stalingrad, and others as “Hero Cities,” essentially for undergoing 40 percent or higher casualties. Bonn became the West German capital by default because it was one of the few major German cities with more than 40 percent of its buildings intact.
In April 1945, Kronach, Germany, begins to experience the same kind of devastation that plagued hundreds of thousands of other villages across the globe.
Upon visiting the capital of conquered Germany, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower muttered, “It is quite likely, in my opinion, that there will never be any attempt to rebuild Berlin.”
3. IMPRISONMENT
Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 forced 110,000 Japanese Americans into relocation camps, though most of Hawaii’s 30,000 Japanese residents were not interned. The idea of interning German-born residents was briefly entertained, until it was calculated there were 600,000 of them.4
The thought of handling such numbers did not detract two governments across the Atlantic. The Third Reich detained as few as 25,000 people at the start of the war but abruptly expanded its network of camps to hold several million at once. The Soviet Union, with a long tradition of incarcerating large numbers, also increased its rate of abductions once war began with Germany. Both states singled out ethnic groups. Doomed in the Third Reich were Gypsies, Russians, and Jewish and Catholic Poles. For the USSR the deported included Poles, Germans, Bulgarians, Chechens, Estonians, Greeks, Kurds, Latvians, Lithuanians, Tartars, and more. Rail was the transport of choice for both regimes, inexpensively carting thousands after thousands in suffocating, lice-ridden cattle cars, permitting only a fraction of the survivors to reach their assigned destinations, mostly labor installations.5
Political prisoners were a different issue. Accused of anything from collaboration to stealing potatoes, “enemies of the state” as a whole were subject to interrogation. Methods of extraction varied with the arresting parties, but the German Gestapo depended heavily on torture and threats. Soviet interrogators steered toward depriving their subjects of food and sleep.
All told, the number incarcerated by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany may have exceeded thirty million, with as many as twenty million prisoners not surviving.6
Of Poland’s 5.5 million war dead, most died in German and Soviet camps.
4. AERIAL BOMBING
In his 1921 treatise Command of the Air, Italian Giulio Douhet predicted bombers alone would decide the outcome of future wars. By 1939 his theory had many believers, including HERMANN GÖRING and British air chief Marshal Arthur “Bomber” Harris. Prevalent was the conviction that precise strikes could knock out munitions factories, rail hubs, and key administration buildings, consequently shutting off life support for a mechanized army. As it turned out, bombing was hardly an exact science. A 1941 report in Britain revealed that, on average, fewer than a third of Allied bombs were landing within five miles of their desired targets. Given a factory or railhead as an objective, crews would have to drop around five thousand bombs to destroy it.7
Mortified by this revelation, British planners decided to use the same method the Germans employed in the BATTLE OF BRITAIN: to carpet bomb in hopes of breaking the morale of the populace and perhaps hitting a few key targets as well. The United States practiced a similar method of “area bombing” upon Japan.
Postwar studies indicated that this method also failed. Most communities hit by bombing runs became more unified, not less. But destruction came nonetheless. Though Paris and Rome were generally spared, Belgrade, Berlin, Chungking, Manila, Vienna, and many others were not. Bombed cities and towns numbered in the thousands, homes destroyed in the millions.
Most of the civilian deaths in Germany and nearly all in Japan died from bombs, or more correctly, from fires created by bombs. The highest rate of damage occurred in the last two years. France lost sixty thousand citizens in raids for the Normandy campaign. Incendiary bombing killed more than forty thousand in Hamburg and seventy thousand in Dresden.
More than half of Japan’s bombing deaths occurred in cities other than Hiroshima and Nagasaki.8
The most destructive form of civilian bombing involved incendiary devices, which torched high-density housing at thousands of degrees.
To maintain pressure on the government of Japan to capitulate, the United States resumed conventional bombing of the country the day after Nagasaki.
5. REFUGEE LIFE
Some 300,000 Germans were killed by their own government; another half-million died from bombing, but more than two million died while they were refugees.9
Officially termed in the West as “displaced persons” or DPs, war refugees flooded roads and overwhelmed towns to such a degree than many military planners began to view them as weapons. Both the threat and the deliverance of violence sent families far from home, mostly with no more than the possessions they could carry. Flight was hardest on the very young and the old, many of whom could not withstand the rigors of constant exposure to the elements and greatly reduced food and rest.
Some three million residents in southern England left their homes in 1939 and 1940. Bombing raids in 1945 left twenty million Japanese without homes. An estimated seventeen million Germans were expelled from Eastern Europe after V-E day.
Refugees were anguished coming and going. Flooding cities and towns with their numbers, they were rarely greeted with open arms, especially in communities already suffering privation. Many who returned to their homes recalled being treated as de facto deserters by their neighbors who had stayed and braved the storm.10
With some traversing hundreds of miles, the vast majority of refugees traveled mostly or entirely on foot.
Arguably none suffered more from the trials of exodus than the Chinese. Shackled by the corrupt Nationalist government and pocked with warlord strongholds, the country proved to be the least able of the belligerent nations to handle its refugee crisis. Estimates of displaced Chinese ranged from twenty million to sixty million people, with an unknown number dying from marches far in excess of a thousand miles.
The total number of civilians temporarily or permanently driven from their homes during the war nearly equaled the entire U.S. population at the time.
6. FORCED LABOR
Either in their own country or elsewhere, at least fifteen million civilians (in addition to several million POWs) were reduced to involuntary labor during the war. Perpetrators in the main were the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and Japan.
Much of Soviet industry had been taken piece by piece to the safety of central Russia. Although factories were rebuilt, supporting infrastructure was not. Food, water, and shelter were at deprivation levels in many areas. Laborers simply ate and lived in rustic munitions factories. Workdays were extended to fourteen hours and beyond, workweeks varied between six and seven days, and absence was deemed equivalent to desertion. If collective farms did not produce the state-mandated quota (set at arbitrary levels), laborers were subject to imprisonment. Soviet citizens were sometimes paid with nothing more than vouchers for state-issued clothing. Civilians taken from conquered territories such as Poland and the Baltic states were given next to nothing while suffering in Ural iron mines, arctic ports, and on Siberian roadways.11
In the Third Reich, involuntary labor was the foundation of better living standards because the hardest labor was reserved for non-Germans. Coerced into low-wage servitude or taken by force, foreign labor was at three million in May 1941, four million a year later, and six million the next. In some factories, eight out of ten workers were essentially slaves. Reaching 20 percent of the Reich’s work force, these “drafted” Belgians, French, Italians, Poles, Russians, and others were treated much like machine parts, driven until they broke, then discarded and replaced. Heinrich Himmler summarized the state’s position by saying, “Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death interests me insofar as we need them as slaves for our culture.”12
In the Empire of Japan servitude fell hardest on the people of Korea. By 1945 there were three hundred thousand Japanese troops on the peninsula, four times the force stationed on OKINAWA, imposing order on a country from which Tokyo had already taken considerable amounts of grain, livestock, and precious metals. Nearly three million inhabitants were subjected to forced labor. Many more were deported. By the end of the war, Koreans constituted a quarter of the workers in Japan. At least twenty thousand Korean women underwent years of devastating violation as “comfort women” for the Imperial forces.
One aim of German concentration camps was to provide slave laborers. These men were photographed at Buchenwald near Jena.
Of the dead at Hiroshima, approximately one-fifth were Korean laborers.
7. HAVING FAMILY MEMBERS IN THE SERVICE
Of the major belligerents, all but the United States and China placed a majority of their male citizens aged eighteen to thirty-five into the military. The vast majority of soldiers and sailors throughout the world were draftees, taken from homes and communities to work and perhaps die elsewhere. In democratic countries, conscription was relatively civil and orderly. Nationalist China employed decidedly more aggressive methods. An American witness equated the process to widespread kidnapping, a kind of inverted epidemic that struck down the strongest young men and shuttled them into poorly equipped, barely fed, ineptly trained divisions. In the last six months of the war, Hitler’s last-ditch Volkssturm (“Storm of the People”) sent young boys and old men against Allied tanks and guns.13
Along with the emotional price, departure of a male, and sometimes the only male in the family, was a considerable financial loss. In 2005 dollars, the United States paid its enlisted about $1,000 a month. Other nations paid their enlisted half as much or less. For the women left behind, their earning potential, not to mention professional and political leverage, was extremely limited (women in France, Hungary, Italy, Japan, and Yugoslavia did not yet have the right to vote). Government subsidies for dependents were meager or nonexistent. The exception was Germany, which paid wives a pension equal to a full-time clerical position.14
War also broke communication lines between servicemen and their loved ones. Aside from photographs, couples often went years without seeing each other, let alone hearing from one another. Mail was heavily censored, easily lost, and a very low priority for military transport. Letters traveled least when they were needed most, during battles, sieges, and capture. If an American serviceman was wounded in action, he was allowed to receive one message of cheer from a single emergency contact of five words or less.
Lt. Gen. John Wainwright, commanding officer among the captives of Bataan, spent nearly three years in a POW camp. His wife wrote him three hundred times. He received six of the letters.
8. INFLATION
Over the span of the war, inflation in Germany reached 700 percent. In Italy it climbed 1,000 percent. In China it hit 11,000 percent.15
Currency is fundamentally a reflection of confidence. Governments that collapsed were often preceded by an implosion of their reserve notes. States under German occupation had the added burden of having to reimburse the Third Reich for the financial costs of their occupation. This “security fee,” saddled upon the peoples of the Low Countries, France, Greece, Norway, and Yugoslavia, was invariably many times the actual expense of harboring troops. Requiring the handing over of nearly all their revenues, several of the states simply printed more money to cover the margin, which sent the face value of notes in a tailspin.
Pushing prices even higher was the natural phenomenon of supply shortages in wartime. Due to the Japanese invasion and CHAING KAI-SHEK’S confiscation of crops, the cost of rice in China was fourteen times higher in 1941 than in 1939. In 1940 a few pounds of cheese cost about sixty Greek drachmas, but by 1944 the price had jumped to over a billion. Allied officers often forbade their men from buying or taking local food and livestock to prevent a worsening of shortages. The urge was often too much for many soldiers, who discovered their rations of American cigarettes had become the currency of choice in civilian barter and black markets.16
Ruthless speculators on the Russian black market made fortunes trading food for people’s rubles, jewelry, and government bonds. To keep Moscow from shutting down their operations, these profiteers made small “contributions” to the national defense fund and were consequently hailed as heroes by the state.
9. ENEMY OCCUPATION
Invaders generally knew it was in their best interest to stabilize a nation once its armed forces had been defeated. The question was how to achieve stability. In China, the Empire of Japan tried to subdue the population by using terror (Nanking and Shanghai: 1937), puppet governments (east coast: 1937–45), saturation bombing (Chungking: 1939–40), search and destroy (Communist-held northern China: 1939–40), control of infrastructure (eastern provinces: 1940–42), and overwhelming force (everywhere: 1940–44).
Parisians were shocked when German soldiers marched into the city in 1940. Faced with a foreign military presence, many had to decide between capitulation, collaboration, and annihilation.
More than thirty countries experienced partial or complete occupation, undergoing various forms and durations of suppression such as those listed above. To say the least, experiences were mixed, but the general theme was utter disruption. Legally, whatever citizens had in the way of civil liberties were quickly removed, especially concerning speech, press, and assembly. Economically, conditions on the personal scale varied from controlled markets (with ration books and government assistance) to complete chaos. National economics generally devolved into a type of feudalism, in which occupying forces enforced quotas and restricted essentially all physical and professional mobility. Socially, communities and families were torn apart, as some chose the servitude of collaboration while others invited the dangers of resistance.
Regardless of how well people governed themselves, they were still largely at the mercy of their overseers. Even the most settled environments could erupt into bloodshed. Nazi atrocities in Western Europe provided some of the smaller but better documented examples. In 1942 the Gestapo descended upon occupied Televåg, Norway, accused the townspeople of harboring secret agents, and summarily executed eighteen men and carted the rest of the village off to concentration camps. In 1944, days after the Allied landings in NORMANDY, German soldiers entered Oradour-Sur-Glane, France, forced the men into five barns, all the women and children into the town church, and set all six buildings on fire.17
Nazi occupation of Paris = 3 years, 67 days. Japanese occupation of Nanking = 7 years, 255 days.
10. DEATH OF A FAMILY MEMBER
For those who lost relatives in the armed forces, many found consolation if victory was achieved. Even in victory, an absence of closure haunted many who never knew exactly what happened to their loved ones. The number of American deceased whose remains were returned to the states (by request of the families) roughly equaled the number listed as missing in action or presumed dead. Germans officially listed as missing outnumbered all American fatalities put together. Russians listed as missing outnumbered all Americans who served in Europe.18
Yet a person was more likely to lose a family member who was not in the armed forces. Such was the case for the Belgians, losing three civilians for every serviceman. In Poland the ratio was nine for every one. In Holland it was eighteen noncombatant deaths for each soldier killed. Civilian deaths were also likely to be witnessed by a family member, especially in refugee migrations, bombing raids, and concentration camps.
To combat a sinking national morale from the mounting losses in China and the Pacific, the government of Japan implemented a “National Smile Week” in March 1943.