Sixty to seventy-five million dead, mostly civilians
From September 1939 to September 1945 two coalitions pulled nearly every country into total war on a scale never seen before. Historians put the death toll somewhere between sixty and seventy-five million, and a majority were civilians. The peace that followed built the United Nations and locked in a new great-power order.
Most accounts date the European opening to Germany invading Poland on the first day of September 1939, after which Britain and France declared war within forty-eight hours. Pacific chronologies disagree: some historians prefer Japan’s push into Manchuria in 1931 or the broader Sino-Japanese fighting that erupted in 1937. Whatever the start line, the mix of leftover First World War grievances, fascist regimes in Europe, and Japanese militarism—including the seizures of Austria and the Sudetenland—made a general conflagration hard to avoid once coalitions locked in.
December 1941 changed the map when Japan struck American and British positions across Asia and the Pacific, Pearl Harbor among them, and Washington joined the fight against the Axis. Japanese armies overran much of coastal China and Southeast Asia until Midway in June 1942 broke their Pacific momentum. By the opening months of 1943, Axis forces had been broken in North Africa and at Stalingrad. Closing dates are equally disputed: many at the time treated the mid-August 1945 ceasefire as the effective end in Asia, while Tokyo’s formal surrender on 2 September supplied the legal full stop, with a peace treaty following in 1951.
The fuse had been laid in the interwar years. Versailles cost Germany roughly 13 per cent of its home territory and every overseas colony, capped its armed forces and imposed reparations, a settlement that fed revanchist nationalism. Hitler, made chancellor in 1933, scrapped parliamentary rule, launched a huge rearmament drive and in March 1936 sent troops into the Rhineland, meeting little resistance because London and Paris were pursuing appeasement. Before that year was out, Berlin and Rome had formed their Axis and Germany had signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan.
Victory left the winners holding the pieces. Germany, Austria, Japan and Korea came under occupation, and German and Japanese leaders stood trial for war crimes. A new United Nations gave China, France, the Soviet Union, Britain and the United States permanent Security Council seats, while Washington and Moscow squared off as rival superpowers. Europe's exhausted empires lost their grip, opening the way for decolonisation across Africa and Asia.
Source: World War II
