Casualties

National Archives #80-G-213113

Casualties are the brutal reality of warfare. In the broadest sense, casualties include all losses of military personnel, whether from death or wounds in combat, surrender, illness, accidents, or desertion. About 4% of U.S. troops were unavailable for combat at any given moment during the war. In the Pacific, with its poor living conditions, the great majority of these were not combat-related. Over the course of the war, the U.S. Army recorded about 17 million hospital admissions for illness or accident, versus about a million combat casualties. Indeed, in the early days of the war, the Allied armies experienced about 100 casualties from heat or disease for every combat casualty.

A similar picture is given by the casualty statistics of 20 Indian Division. During one six-month period, there were 2345 battle casualties, 1118 malaria and typhus cases, 697 cases of dysentery, 205 cases of venereal disease, 210 cases of skin disease, 170 psychiatric casualties, 100 accidents, 321 minor injuries, and 2784 other hospital admissions (Hastings 2007.)

Combat Casualties. In the Western military tradition, armed forces used their firepower to attempt to impose their will on the enemy by inflicting casualties. A unit was usually rendered hors de combat long before its casualty rate approached 100%. This was true even of the Japanese, whose resignation to death in battle astonished Westerners.

In the Allied armies, approximately three men were wounded in action for every man who was killed on the battlefield or died of his wounds. This relatively high survival rate was made possible by advances in medicine that meant that a wounded man who survived long enough to reach a field hospital had an excellent chance of recovery. Corresponding figures are not available for the Japanese Army, but the state of Japanese military medicine and the nature of Japanese tactics (such as staging massed frontal assaults or fighting to the death in hopeless defensive positions) translated into a much higher percentage of deaths among combat casualties.

Statistics for 6 Army on Leyte indicate that almost half of all fatal wounds were from small arms fire, and a little more than half of these were from hits to the torso, with head wounds accounting for about 20% of fatalities. On the other hand, the majority of nonfatal wounds were inflicted by shell or grenade fragments.

Some idea of U.S. casualties can be gleaned from the following table of total wartime casualties for a number of divisions that served in the Pacific (Frank 1999).

The total dead or missing were 58,710 for U.S. Army troops in the Pacific and southeast Asia, with another 164,830 wounded.

Average casualty rates for U.S. units in combat are tabulated below, in rates per thousand men committed per day (ibid.)

Combat Fatigue. A significant percentage of casualties in combat were psychological casualties, as much as 30% for poorly led and poorly trained troops, such as 43 Division at New Georgia. A more typical figure was 5% to 10%. Japanese troops were not immune to combat fatigue, but because of differences in culture and military tradition, it manifested itself differently. Japanese troops who broke down psychologically were very likely to commit suicide, either directly (such as with their own grenades) or indirectly (such as by banzai charges into massed Allied fire.)

Surrender. Large numbers of Allied troops were forced to surrender during the first months of the war, when they were caught up in Japan's carefully prepared opening offensive. Almost a third of all Allied prisoners of war died in Japanese camps by the time the war ended, a reflection of the brutal treatment they received from their captors. Commonwealth forces actually suffered more deaths in Japanese POW camps than in combat. The British lost 53,230 prisoners of war in southeast Asia, the Australian 18,130, and the Indians 68,890. The American forces lost roughly 30,000 prisoners of war in the Philippines.

Once the Allied counteroffensive got under way, surrender by Allied troops became a rare phenomenon.

Few Japanese troops surrendered before August 1945. As the Allied counteroffensive rolled forward, and Japanese garrisons were trapped on small islands from which there was no escape, Japanese garrisons literally fought to the death. Typically just 1 to 3 percent of a trapped garrison would surrender, while the remainder died in combat or committed suicide. The impression that the Japanese were more willing to surrender as the war became hopeless was largely an illusion. The Allies were taking more prisoners, but they were also fighting larger enemy forces, and the 1 to 3 percent figure held up to the end of hostilities.

Illness. Illness accounted for the overwhelming majority of Allied casualties during the Pacific War. Malaria was the main culprit, but dengue, scrub typhus, and other tropical diseases, together with FUO ("Fever of Undetermined Origin", which sometimes was a symptom of combat fatigue), took their toll as well.

Stavation. Deaths from starvation were not unknown among the Allies during the Bataan campaign, but the great majority of armed soldiers who died of starvation were Japanese. The Allied strategy of leapfrogging strong Japanese garrisons left these isolated from resupply and forced them into a Stone Age existence of trying to grow sufficient food for survival in the jungle. It is likely that most of Adachi's 18 Army, cut off in New Guinea, died of starvation. Hyakutake's 17 Army in Bougainville suffered a similar fate.

Accidents. In the U.S. Army, accidents accounted for about 2 million hospitalizations, or about 10% of the total.

Absence Without Leave and Desertion. Desertion was almost unknown in the Japanese Army outside of China. In the U.S. Army, a division shipping for an amphibious assault typically found about 1% of its personnel absent without leave. In the Marine Corps, the figure was sometimes as low as 0.1%, a reflection of the superior esprit de corps of the all-volunteer force. Desertions from the Chinese Army were likely a huge drain on manpower.

References

Bergerud (1996)

Dunnigan and Nofi (1998)
Ellis (1995)

Frank (1999)
Hastings (2007)

Hsiung and Levine (1992)

Sledge (1981)

The Pacific War Online Encyclopedia © 2008-2010 by Kent G. Budge. Index

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