1102 Ch. 26 • World War II

(Left) A mushroom cloud envelops Nagasaki after the U.S. Army’s deployment of

an atomic bomb. (Right) The destruction after the atomic blast at Hiroshima.

had come. The death camps became perhaps the most awful symbol of the
total war that was World War II, during which 6.2 million Jews perished,
including 2.7 million Polish Jews. At the end of the war, only about 40,000
to 50,000 Polish Jews had survived the Holocaust.
World War II brought mass military mobilization and mass death. At least
17 million people were killed in the fighting and another 20 million civil­
ians perished, half in the Soviet Union, not including those who died in
Stalins gulags. About 30 million people in China perished in the war begun
by Japan in Manchuria in 1937. Germany lost more than 6 million people,
Japan 2 million, and Britain and France lost about 250,000 and 300,000
respectively. Part of the horror of the period is that we will never really
know the full extent of human loss. Millions had been wounded, many crip­
pled for life. Millions of survivors had been carried far from home. Hus­
bands, wives, children, and other relatives were often lost forever. Europe
became a continent of “displaced persons,” as they were called.
The psychological damage to those who lived through night bombing in
shelters, those who spent years waiting for definitive news about missing
loved ones, or those who had somehow survived the death camps, cannot
be calculated. Europe seemed haunted by the sad memories of last conver­
sations and letters. One survivor recalled his determination to hold on
against all odds “to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive, we