Twenty Amazing Facts About World War II

1. Though vilified by Hitler and the Nazis as the cause of Germany’s ills, there were just 520,000 Jews in Germany in 1933, comprising less than one percent of the general population.
2. In 1940, France had the largest army in Europe, fully modernized and mechanized, but was defeated by Germany in less than six weeks.
3. The average age of a Royal Air Force fighter pilot during the Battle of Britain was 20 years.
4. The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, involving more than 3 million men and 3,400 tanks, advanced across a front as wide as Chicago to Los Angeles.
5. During the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, 1,100 sailors and Marines lost their lives on the USS Arizona, including 23 sets of brothers.
6. In retaliation for Chinese peasants aiding downed Doolittle Raid fliers—a raid that killed 87 Japanese civilians—Japanese occupying forces slaughtered an estimated 250,000 Chinese men, women, and children.
7. During the 1942-1943 Guadalcanal campaign, 1,600 Americans were killed on the island over a period of six months. In November 1943, 1,100 US Marines were killed on Tarawa in barely three days.
8. By January 1944, 100,000 African Americans had enlisted in the US Navy, but the Navy refused to commission a single officer among them.
9. At peak production, the Ford Motor Company’s Willow Run factory outside Detroit was producing B-24 Liberators—a four-engine heavy bomber—at a rate of one per hour.
10. More than 26,000 pilots and crewmen of the Eighth US Air Force perished in the skies above Europe, exceeding the death toll for the entire US Marine Corps during the war.
11. Fighting in Italy, the men of the 442^nd Regimental Combat Team, comprised of Japanese Americans, earned 7 Presidential Unit Citations, 21 Medals of Honor, 350 Silver Stars, and 3,600 Purple Hearts.
12. Women served in critical wartime roles, such as cryptography and aviation, particularly in the US and Britain, but in the Soviet Union, more than 400,000 women were sent directly into combat as tankers, sharpshooters, and bomber pilots.
13. Chrysler’s Detroit Tank Arsenal produced more than 22,000 tanks during the war – nearly as many as every German factory combined.
14. One out of every 26 men who served in the US Merchant Marine was killed during the war – a higher casualty rate than any of the military services.
15. On D-Day, more French civilians were killed in the pre-invasion bombardment of Normandy than American soldiers were killed on Omaha Beach.
16. After D-Day, Allied armies swept across France, Belgium, Holland, and Germany in 10 months, but the campaign in Italy dragged on for 19 months and cost the Allies more than 300,000 casualties.
17. The number of American sailors killed in kamikaze attacks in the waters off Okinawa was more than double the number of those killed during the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor.
18. In March 1945, 279 American B-29 Superfortress bombers dropped 1,665 tons of incendiary bombs on Tokyo, annihilating 16 square miles of the city and killing 100,000 civilians.
19. Projected US casualties for an invasion of the Japanese home islands were 400,000-800,000, while the number of expected Japanese dead was between 5 and 10 million.
20. Some 5.5. million Poles were killed during the war, equaling one-sixth of Poland’s pre-war population.

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