Basic statistics qualify it as by the greatest war in history in terms of human and material resources expended. In all, 61 countries with 1.7 billion people, three quarters of the world's population took part. A total of 110 million people were mobilised for military service, more than half of those by the USSR (22 - 30 million), Germany (17 million), and the United States (16 million). The largest numbers of active-duty personnel at any one time were; USSR 12,500,000; the United States 12,245,000; Germany 10,938,000; Japan 7,193,000; and China 5,000,00
Most statistics on the war can only be estimates. The war's vast and chaotic sweep made accurate record keeping impossible. Some governments lost control of the data, and some resorted to manipulating it for political reasons. However, there is a rough consensus on the total cost of the war. In terms of money spent, it has been put at more than US$1 trillion, which makes it more expensive than all other wars combined.
The United States spent the most money on the war, an estimated $341 billion, including $50 billion of Lend-Lease supplies which were distributed as follows; Britain $31 billion; USSR $11 billion; China $5 billion; and others $3 billion. The expenditure of other belligerents (in US dollars) was as follows; Germany $272 billion; USSR $192 billion; Britain $120 billion; Italy $94 billion; and Japan $56 billion. Except for the United States and some of the less militarily active Allies, the money spent does not come close to the war's true cost. The former Soviet government calculated that the USSR lost 30 per cent of its national wealth, while Nazi exaction's and looting in the Soviet Union and other occupied countries are incalculable. The full cost to Japan has been estimated at US $562 billion.
Clearly the major factor in the allied victory was the possession of vastly superior resources in comparision to those of the Axis powers. All economic indices attest to this superiority - in manpower, manufacturing output, raw materials, education, etc. The Untied States eventually surpassed all the belligerents economically, but the Soviet Union and Britain proved equally capable of prodigious efforts in the production of weapons of all kinds. The Axis powers could not hope to match this in the long run, despite the vast territorial gains they had made in the early stages of the war.
A. THE EFFECTS OF WAR ON CIVILIANS
Technological and scientific developments made the war one of unparalleled ferocity. It reached a level of bestiality and horror never before seen in the history of humankind. Civilians in the vast war zones became part of the fighting fronts, and suffered from disease, malnutrition, and often actual starvation, destruction of their towns and cities, and appalling injuries and death.
The air war accounted for much of this civilian suffering. The Nazi aerial blitz on Warsaw in 1939 and Rotterdam in 1940 was followed by much larger-scale night bombing of London and other British towns and cities in 1940 and 1941. Britain's Bomber Command retaliated after 1942 with a massive night bombing campaign against Germany's towns and cities, the only means until 1944 by which Britain could strike directly at the heartland of Germany. The end of the war most large German cities and towns had been reduced to rubble, with an ever-increasing civilian death toll from direct hits, blasts, and firestorms.
Contrary to the expectations of many pre-war air strategists, aerial war did not undermine enemy morale to the extent that it would force its government to sue for peace. Assisted by government exhortation and efforts to ameliorate the worst effects of the bombing by provision of shelters, first aid, and other measures (and in Germany by a ferocious and ever-present police apparatus), the civilian populations in Britain and Germany, while undeniably depressed by the destruction inflicted on them, held firm, despite occasional panic in places like Southampton where shelters were inadequate and the local administration collapsed. Indeed, in Germany in 1944, despite Allied bombing by day and night, military industrial production rose sharply, a result of the innovations of Albert Spear, Hitler's energetic and ruthless Minister of Armaments after 1942, who discovered plenty of slack and wastage in German industry.
Air historians remain divided about the effectiveness of the RAF's aerial night bombing of Germany. Many suggest that it largely failed in its objectives, and the resources devoted to bombing might have been invested elsewhere, such as in the Middle East or Far East or in the Battle of the Atlantic. Others insist that in its collateral effects on German communications and industries it made a decisive impact on Germany's war potential-- that without it Germany's military-industrial resurgence after 1943 might have been more impressive. There is little doubt that, despite its immense losses, the US Army Air Forces's "precision" bombing of Germany's industrial infrastructure, particularly oil and communications, and its progressive destruction of the German fighter defence forces did have a major impact on Germany's fighting capabilities. However when the Americans began the aerial bombing of Japanese towns and cities in 1944 and 1945 this seemed to have little effect on the Japanese people's will to continue fighting, until the dropping of the atomic bombs and the Soviet Union's declaration of war convinced the Emperor and his closest advisers hat Japan must surrender or be totally obliterated.
Civilians were also adversely affected in others ways. Many were forced into slave labour in Germany's factories and armaments industries, while French, Belgian, Dutch, and Italian citizens were shipped to Germany to work in its factories. Many of the slave labourers were starved to death. The Germans also ruthlessly pillaged the resources of occupied countries like France and the Benelux countries until they belatedly realised that it was more profitable to the German war effort to keep the workers and resources of these countries in place to produce essential armaments and others goods. Civilians, as well as former soldiers, in the occupied countries also joined guerrilla bands-such as the Marquis in France, the underground in Singapore, and the partisans in Yugoslavia-to hurry communications and sabotage Axis-controlled industries.
THE HOLOCAUST
By far the most horrifying event was the deliberate murder of 5 million Jewish men, women, and children, deported from Germany, Poland, and other occupied countries to Nazi concentration camps. This was Hitler's "final Solution" to the Jewish "problem". Before the war the persecution of the Jews in Germany, and later in Austria and Czechoslovakia, had taken the form of banning them from their employment, the seizure of their property, and arbitrary arrest and various other humiliations, such as being forced to wear the Star of David in public. Before 1942 special German units had indiscriminately murdered Jews, Poles, and Russian Bolshevik commissars captured in Poland and Russia. In 1942 a conference of German officials drew up plans for a more "scientific" approach, the Holocaust, which involved herding these people- as well as other targets groups such as Gypsies and homosexuals-into killing camps, where they were exterminated in gas chambers and then cremated. In some camps 10,000 of these unfortunates could be gassed every day. It is not known how many Germans and their collaborators in occupied territories were involved or connived in this mass slaughter, but certainly it was not restricted, as was believed immediately after the war, to Heinrich Himmler and his entourage and a few German civil servants and police officials, with the bulk of the German population unaware of what was going on-the network of the guilty appears to have been much wider than that.
C. Human losses: As well as this monstrous programme of extermination, the human cost of the war was appealing for most of the belligerents. The USSR lost the most- at least 20 million civilian and military personal killed-including large numbers of Russian prisoners deliberately starved to death in German prisoner-of-war camps. Poland lost around a fifth of its civilian population. Allied civilian losses were 44 million; Axis losses, 11 million. The military deaths on both sides in Europe numbered 19 million, and in the war against Japan, 6 million (which included a sizeable number of elsewhere). Only the United States was spared any significant civilian losses, with 292,131 military deaths in battle and 115,187 military deaths from other causes.
The highest number of deaths, military and civilian, were as follows: USSR more than 10 million military and 10 million civilian; Germany 3.5 million and 3.8 million; Poland 120,000 and 5.3 million; Japan 1.7 million and 380,000; Yugoslavia 300,000 and 1.3 million. Romania 200,000 and 465,000; France 250,000 and 360,000; British Empire 452,000 and 60,000; Italy 330,000 and 80,000; Hungary 120,000 and 280,000; and Czechoslovakia 10,000 and 330,000.
D. CONCLUSION: In its early stages the war was depicted in the West as a struggle of the democracies (France and Britain) against a fanatical and evil German National Socialist dictatorship. This perception was magnified after the entry of the USSR and the United States on the side of Britain in 1941, and Italy and Japan on the side of Germany in 1940 and 1941. From then on the Western powers proclaimed the war as a fight to the finish against the totalitarian Axis, a view reinforced by Roosevelt's call for the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers in 1943. As the war dragged on, the distinction between the belligerent people and their "evil " government .
Skills learnt while doing research topic
(a) I learnt how to find primary and secondary information from the local school library and from the Internet.
(b) I learnt how to type up the essay using Microsoft word and windows 95/98
(c) I learnt how to analysis sources.
(d) I learnt how to compile a list of sources and also How to complete a review
2How the project was written up ?
The project was typed up using Microsoft word and windows 95/98.
Then it was spell checked and formatted.
Then finished essay was saved on a disc and printed out.