Did cigarettes distributed to WWII GIs kill more men than died in battle?

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
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The article Did cigarettes distributed to WWII GIs kill more men than died in battle? is one of the least rigorous articles I have ever seen from Cecil.

Granted, and he admits, he is barely doing better than a Ouija board but right from the start his standard is WAY off evincing, to me, nothing more than an extreme bias against smokers rather than an attempt at the truth.

The title of the question sets the parameters. Did cigarettes or war kill more soldiers. Cecil decides that if a cigarette kills you by age 65 then that counts. :smack:

The only reasonable way to do this is figure how many people died from enemy actions DURING World War II and how many people, in that same time frame died from smoking.

Counting how many people died from bullets in four years of war versus how many people died in 65 years seriously skews the results. By that reckoning I could say living increases your chances of dying. The longer you live, the more likely you are to die.

I think it is interesting that if you look at your chances of dying (from any cause) before 65 it is 17.4%. (CITE PDF). That is 2002 stats so may be different from Cecil’s 1965 stats but I would be surprised if they were very different.

According to Cecil’s article the chances of dying from a smoking related disease before age 65 is 8.7%. Former smokers add another 4.7% chance.

So, if Cecil is right then smokers account for a 13.4% chance of dying before age 65. According to the CDC your odds of dying before age 65 are 17.4% so Cecil would have it that out of 100,000 people 17,400 will die and of those about 13,400 (77%) will die from smoking.

Cecil himself stipulated smokers + ex-smokers = 70% of the population back then. So less than that 77%. Even if we assume anyone who ever touched a cigarette ever and died eventually did so because they smoked a cigarette.

In short that whole article is hugely misleading.

EDIT: FTR I used to smoke but quit awhile ago. Not sure that it matters but there FWIW.

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Cecil looked at the causes of death and asked “How many people died of combat-related deaths?” and “How many people died of smoking-related deaths?” The fact that the people in the first group tend to be younger than the people in the second group doesn’t change the total size of each group.

The point I would dispute is his assumption that the cigarettes distributed during the war caused all these deaths. That’s not likely. We have to assume a large proportion of these veterans would have taken up smoking on their own without the free wartime cigarettes and their deaths, even if smoking related, can’t be attributed to those wartime cigarettes.

To get accurate date, you’d need to get a sample group of veterans and a sample group of non-veterans the same age and compare their smoking habits. Then you could determine what effect wartime smoking had on their lifetime smoking habits.

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Credential: I used to be an actuary, so I do know something about comparing causes of death. There are a number of problems with your approach, because cigarette smoking doesn’t cause instant death, nor even death in the first few months or years.

Hence, the soldiers killed during the war were young; the people who die of smoking-related diseases are older. And there was large population growth following early in the century. So mere comparison of number of deaths from various causes wouldn’t be a reasonable approach.

I also note that medical science was not very advanced in those days, and smoking-related deaths would be hard to quantify. Not all lung cancers are smoking-related, for instance.

In short, Cecil was asked a question for which it’s pretty much impossible to find reasonable statistics and he did the best he could.

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That doesn’t make any sense. Combat deaths tend to be pretty instantaneous. Maybe you bleed out over a few minutes. I suppose you get the odd soldier that makes it back to base camp, and then dies in the hospital a few days later and whatnot. Do those count as combat deaths?

But smoking is not an instantaneous killer. Very few people die from inhaling a cloud of ciagarrette smoke. It is the long term health effects that lead to death. And that was the actual question asked -

The real problem with Cecil’s calculation is as Little Nemo points out - smoking was such a part of the culture then, how do you identify the people who took up smoking because the cigarettes were freely provided, versus the people who already smoked, or the people who took up smoking after the war?

At best, Cecil tried to statistically answer the question “how many WWII vets died from smoking related illnesses”, which is not the question asked, but is perhaps the closest to a question that he could answer.

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Another way to think about it could be this–did combat veterans take up smoking at a higher rate than civilians did during the war? What about the same age cohort of young men in the years prior and years just after the war? If the uptake was higher during the war, then perhaps that could be the basis of comparison–how many “excess smokers” and therefore extra deaths did the free cigarettes contribute?

ETA, I suppose there’s probably no way to figure this out, but maybe it’s a better framing at least.

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This study indicates that “military service increased the smoking rate of WWII and Korea veterans by 30 percentage points” and that “military-induced smoking explains 64-79 percent of excess veteran deaths due to heart disease and 35-58 percent of excess veteran deaths due to lung cancer, between the ages of 40-75.”

Does that help?