Killing Civilians

The numbers are numbing. All the quotations below are from Walter Russell Mead.

“In the last five months of World War II, American bombing raised killed more than 900,000 Japanese civilians, not counting the casualties from the atomic strikes against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is more than twice the total number of combat deaths (441,513) the United States has suffered in all its foreign wars combined.”

The nuclear attacks killed over 127,000 Japanese, nearly thirty percent of the total number of Americans killed in over two centuries of war.

American bombs killed 83,793 Japanese on March 9-10, 1945, more “than the 80,942 combat fatalities the United States sustained in the Korean and Vietnam wars combined.”

“More German civilians died in the three-night-long Anglo-American firebombing of Dresden than American soldiers died in World War I.” One historian says that “at the time the Dresden raids constituted the larger slaughter of civilians by military forces in one place at one time since the campaigns of Genghis Khan.”

“Out of a prewar population of 9.59 million, an estimated 1 million (North) Korean civilians are believed to have died as a result of the actions of American forces during the 1950-53 conflict there..”

The radio was 30:1: “Almost 34,000 American soldiers were killed during [the Korean war], meaning that U.S. forces killed approximately 30 North Korean civilians for every American soldier who died.”

Mead admits that casualties in Vietnam are even more difficult to estimate than in other conflicts, but claims that “some 365,000 Vietnamese civilians are believed to have died as a result of the war during the period of American involvement.” Again, the ratio is remarkable: “8 Vietnamese civilian deaths for every American killed in the war.”

For comparison’s sake: “German forces are estimated to have suffered slightly more than 2 million combat deaths in the war against the Soviet Union, and to have been directly responsible for approximately 10 million (Soviet) civilian deaths, with a ratio on the order of 5 Soviet civilian deaths for every German soldier killed.”