Counting All The Dead

Thanks for the read this morning MAJ Dale E. Wilson, Ph.D.

The evidence regarding the human toll has existed since the time of the war and continues to grow. In his influential War Without Mercy in 1986, John Dower advanced tentative figures on the noncombatant deaths. His numbers for Japanese civilian deaths totaled 553,000 for all air raids, plus the losses in Okinawa and Saipan.
After reviewing various sources for death totals elsewhere, including a UN report, he concluded that “certainly” it would be “reasonable to think in general terms of approximately 10 million Chinese war dead, a total only surpassed by the Soviet Union.” After deducting the number of combatant deaths, a realistic reading would be that there were about eight million Chinese civilian deaths.
The UN and other sources estimate that four million civilians were killed in Indonesia, and another million in Vietnam, in addition to the 10 million killed in China.
Added to the Chinese toll, there were four million civilian deaths in what is now Indonesia, based on a United Nations report. And at least a million Vietnamese victims of a 1945 famine caused in large part by the Japanese invaders, who burned large areas of rice fields to plant peanuts so they could extract oil from them.
That made thirteen million deaths. Simple math showed twenty-three deaths of civilians who were not Japanese to one Japanese civilian death. That is not a definitive figure, but it conveys the grotesque distortion caused by omitting the deaths of civilians who were not Japanese.