How many people died during World War II? (2024)

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How many people died during World War II? ›

World War II was the deadliest military conflict in history. An estimated total of 70–85 million people perished, or about 3% of the estimated global population of 2.3 billion in 1940.

WWII was more deadly and widespread than WWI, which had around 8.5 million military fatalities, with over 16 million military fatalities and an estimated 70-85 million overall casualties, including civilians.

World War II was the deadliest conflict in human history marked by 50 to 85 million fatalities, most of whom were civilians in the Soviet Union and China.

Some 75 million people died in World War II, including about 20 million military personnel and 40 million civilians, many of whom died because of deliberate genocide, massacres, mass-bombings, disease, and starvation.

3 The brutality of WWII saw 42 countries contribute to the killing of 60 million people, costing the world economy approximately $1.3 trillion. 4 From a pure statistical perspective, WWII demonstrated a higher level of intensity than WWI as a result of military actions and its consequences.

The Cost of War

The deadliest conflict for the U.S. over this time frame was World War II, during which more than 400,000 service members died, data from the Defense Casualty Analysis System shows.

Number of United States military fatalities in major wars 1775-2024. The American Civil War is the conflict with the largest number of American military fatalities in history.

San Marino: This is the only country that never faced war | Times of India.

A total of 4,414 Allied troops were killed on D-Day itself, including 2,501 Americans. More than 5,000 were wounded. In the ensuing Battle of Normandy, 73,000 Allied forces were killed and 153,000 wounded. The battle — and especially Allied bombings of French villages and cities — killed around 20,000 French civilians.

Who killed the most humans in history? ›

So how many people did Mao kill? Dikötter estimates that “at least 45 million people between 1958 and 1962” died due to his policies. That number, however, could be as high as 78-80 million. Either way, it means that Mao killed the most people in history.

China had been at war with Japan since 1937 and continued the fight until the Japanese surrender in 1945. The United States advised and supported China's ground war, while basing only a few of its own units in China for operations against Japanese forces in the region and Japan itself.

This includes cardiovascular diseases, cancer, and chronic respiratory diseases. They tend to develop gradually over time and aren't infectious themselves. Heart diseases were the most common cause, responsible for a third of all deaths globally. Cancers were in second, causing almost one-in-five deaths.

Table ranking "History's Most Deadly Events": Influenza pandemic (1918-19) 20-40 million deaths; black death/plague (1348-50), 20-25 million deaths, AIDS pandemic (through 2000) 21.8 million deaths, World War II (1937-45), 15.9 million deaths, and World War I (1914-18) 9.2 million deaths.

The bloodiest day of World War II is widely considered to be the first day of the Battle of Stalingrad, which was on August 23, 1942. The Battle of Stalingrad was a pivotal and brutal confrontation between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during World War II.

Besides being a larger war WWII also featured the wholesale slaughter of civilians by both Germany and Japan. This added many millions to the count. Total civilians deaths amounted to around 50 million vs. 5 to 6 million in WWI.

In World War II, 30 out of every 10,000 men in uniform perished. Civil War combat was six times as deadly, killing 182 per 10,000. Based on 1860 census figures, 8 percent of all white males aged 13 to 43 died in the war, including 6 percent in the North and an extraordinary 18 percent in the South.