To start, I want to apologize if this is in anyway insensitive or juvenile. The question stems from a crude joke I made in a history class in which I compared the loss of American lives to Soviet lives during the Second World War. Afterwards, I reflected on the idea and I actually became rather intrigued. History is all about intrigue about the past and knowing little facts that help us better understand those that came before us. So to this, I pose this question.
To elaborate, I was curious how many kills (Essentially combat motivated deaths caused directly or indirectly by opposing forces) were totaled compared in a ratio to that country's own combat related deaths. As a simplistic example if say the United states lost five hundred men in the European Theater, and in response they killed one thousand Axis soldiers, their ration would be 2:1.
In a way, this would hypothetically determine how "efficient" a country's soldiers were during the war, with the understanding that this "efficiency" would be affected by a multitude of other factors. In general, I'm just curious on a statistical level.
The nature of the statistics, such as whether they include civilians, one specific country's losses compared to another specific country's losses, and what should be counted as a combat inflicted death is purely up to you historians. Thanks for helping me out with this tedious, slightly sadistic question!
I have Churchill's history of the that war and the totals are 484600 Germans, 4938000 French, 2706000 British on the western front. Throughout the war the Germans inflict more deaths then they take and it is usually 3:2 or better. The only time it deviates is during the German offensive of 1918 when it was approximately 9:8.
The World Crisis pages 564 and 565
This is a very difficult question to answer.
Just taking, for example the case of the Second Sino-Japanese War, we see that there are very different estimates from different sources.
Japanese official records list about 480,000 soldiers who died fighting in China. However, some Historians put the number a bit closer to 400,000. The Chinese, however, officially claim to have killed over a million Japanese soldiers.
Death tolls for Chinese forces are also difficult. The number of military deaths could be 2 to 3 million.
The numbers could also go higher and lower depending on what one wants to count as a "kill" - do you only count soldiers who die in battle? Soldiers who are killed in air raids? Soldiers who died from disease and starvation? And what about soldiers who were killed or worked to death after surrendering?
There were also tens of thousands of Chinese who served in the armies of Japanese puppet regimes in China and Manchuria. How does one count them?
In other theaters, it gets even more complicated with the introduction of multiple countries. It is generally though that over 2 million Japanese soldiers died in World War 2: after one subtracts the estimated total deaths from the China theater, one need to figure out how many were killed by American forces, how many were killed by British forces, how many were killed by Soviet forces, how many were killed by Australian forces, and so on....
An Allied defeat could result in thousands of wounded and un-wounded soldiers becoming prisoners of war, but many Japanese either engaged in suicide attacks or simply committed suicide instead of allowing themselves to fall into enemy hands. The Japanese tendency to commit suicide instead of surrendering would also make it hard to calculate just how many Japanese soldiers had been "killed by" enemies in those battles.
With so much estimation required, I doubt the value of any precise-looking kill ratio statistics. General statements can be made: the Japanese dealt more casualties than they took in China. In battles between the Japanese and Americans, Japanese had very high death totals compared to the Americans (but if one counts the wounded, battles like Iwo Jima are shown to be very costly to the Americans).