Look, this is a stupid argument not worthy of this board.
The Russians made the greater sacrifice in sheer numbers.
The Poles made the greater sacrifice as a share of their nation as a whole.
Both nations made HUGE sacrifices and suffered enormous losses and it gets silly and disrespectful of those losses to argue which of these means more from the outside of it.
Well, I’ll spell out the implied explanation, since you’re not satisfied.
No one is saying one life is less valuable than another in any absolute sense.
What we are saying is essentially:
Moving beyond individual humans into the realm of nation-states…these gigantic superorganisms are composed of humans as individual parts in the same way a human body is composed of cells. Sadly, a given superorganism doesn’t concern itself with the loss of an individual human any more than you or I grieve for a single cell in a paper cut we just got.
In the giant competition between superorganisms that we call World War II, which superorganism lost proportionately the most of its blood?
That is both an interesting question and one that can be answered by proportions (percentages) without in any way devaluing any human person or class of persons.
What if we somehow use the peace vs war average life expectancy of the different nations?
A peace-time Soviet citizen stood X chances (take their society’s infant mortality, overall health etc.; but also including shooting, famine, 5-Year Plan accelerated industrialization accidents, etc.), versus Y chance of being killed by the Wehrmacht. The average (white and Black) US citizen stood X chance of dying an unnatural death, versus the 1-in-80 US service members who comprised 10% of the overall US population.
Instead of what county made the greatest sacrifice, we measure which theoretical life insurance company took the biggest bath. Because insurance companies actually (actuarianally) do assign comparative worth to human life all the time.
Something else to note is that it was US Army doctrine to maintain divisions in the field at or near full strength with replacements, while German and Soviet divisions would steadily become smaller the longer they spent on the line. If they were lucky they would eventually be pulled off the line to be rebuilt, but otherwise they would only receive a slow trickle of replacements that would only make up for a small fraction of their losses. Divisions that had an authorized strength in the 10,000-12,000 range would more normally operate with strength in the 5,000-6,000 range on the Eastern Front.
Yes, the minute I saw Dissonance’s post I knew I screwed that number up. The only thing I can think of is that I must have used the wrong table for the Soviet numbers - I’m guessing I used a table for all tanks for the U.S., and probably for some specific subgroup for the Soviets.
In any event, that number was wrong and I apologize for that.
The basic point of the post remains, however - once America was fully committed to the war, there was no way for Germany or Japan to ‘win’, other than some game-changer like a nuclear weapon.
The fact is, by the end of the war the U.S. was producing astounding amounts of weaponry, and could have produced even more if necessary, as it was already voluntarily curtailing production after 1943 because the end of the war was in sight. The U.S. economy was growing all through the war, and its fighting force and production infrastructure was relatively unscathed. It lost only a very tiny fraction of its fighting men.
In the meantime, the other combatants were losing infrastructure, losing large percentages of their fighting capability, and the axis powers were only maintaining field strength by accelerating training and recruiting younger and older men, resulting in a big decline in fighting effectiveness. Most of their best pilots and most experienced soldiers were dead. There was no possibility of an axis victory with the U.S. in the war, so long as the U.S. could keep the sea lanes open.
But as I said, you could say the same thing about Hitler’s decision to open a second front against the Soviets. Had he maintained a non-aggression pact with them, he might have been able to have enough military superiority in Europe to cause the allies to sue for peace. But who knows? Once you make a change of that magnitude to history, all bets are off.
You can make that ‘war-changing’ determination over many other decisions. Had Hitler continued bombing British air bases instead of redirecting his bombers to the cities, he might have gained air superiority over Britain and that could have changed everything. But war is chaos and hindsight is perfect, and we’ll never know how all the other hypothetical scenarios would have played out.
In any event, this is a hijack from the original question in the thread.
“As a whole” is vacuous. We are talking about countries, so naturally we are talking about countries as a whole. USSR lost x number of lives as a whole. They lost a certain percentage of their population as a whole, but that has no implication for whether one Pitcairn is the equivalent to 20 million Chinese in terms of sacrifice.
I disagree. Some of you want to turn this into a moral question about the value of human life. That’s a fine thing to debate, but when studying history it’s not always the important criterion. It is important to examine and understand not just the causes of war and their impact on individuals, but also how they change the balance of forces or the fortunes of the countries that took part.
There are plenty of examples of turning points in history where the country that came out ‘on top’ after a war also suffered the most damage. Sometimes you can break the spirit of the enemy, or a war can cause a geopolitical shift in your favor. When we study the history of warfare and its effect on history, that’s typically what we look at - if a war breaks up an empire, then the empire ‘lost’ even if it inflicted 10X the damage on its enemy. Obvious examples from modern history would include the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which helped collapse the Soviet empire even though they inflicted far more damage than they received, or the U.S. war in Vietnam, which caused major changes at local and global levels and which the U.S. ‘lost’ despite inflicting far more damage on the enemy than it received.
It seems we can have debates like that over the Romans or the Persians, but if we try to do it with WWII the debate gets derailed over moral issues. But it’s still a useful and important debate to have.
Seems I was wrong - Poland made the great proportional sacrifice of any Allied country (and in case someone question the designation of “allied”, those members of the Polish military that were able to escape their country before the Germans and Soviets divvied it up, fought for the Allies during the war (including making significant contributions to winning the Battle of Britain).
What the hell?
I misunderstood then; I thought you were saying that their casualties were primarily in the 1939 invasion, which is not the case.
Yes, I think people fail to appreciate how overwhelming American military production was during the war. As a good example, consider aircraft carriers. Some people ask the “what if” of Japan sinking the American carriers during the Pearl Harbor attack. But it wouldn’t have really changed the outcome of the war. The United States launched over a hundred new aircraft carriers during the war.
I was going to bring up aircraft carriers as well. The America that ended the war was far more powerful militarily than it was at the start.
At the time of Pearl Harbor, America had eight aircraft carriers in total, with only the Lexington, Enterprise and Saratoga stationed in the Pacific. The Japanese thought that if they could sink those carriers, the U.S. would be forced to sue for peace. And it was certainly lucky that the carriers weren’t at Pearl when the attack happened. But Japan was wrong - America started building the Essex Class carriers, which were larger and better than the 8 that existed before the war, and built 26 of those from 1942 to 1944. They also built a number of smaller carriers. But those Essex class carriers were very good - so good that some of them remained in active service until the mid-1990’s. These were 36,000 ton carriers that in today’s dollars cost a billion dollars each. In comparison, Japan commissioned 16 carriers in total after Pearl Harbor, but most of them were smaller carriers with only five being more than 20,000 tons.
The U.S. never lost a single Essex-class carrier to enemy action in the war. All of Japan’s carriers were sunk except for two, and all but four were sunk by the end of 1944.
The U.S. actually had plans to build 8 more Essex-class carriers, but cancelled them when it became obvious that they weren’t needed. And had America been losing carriers, it could have built dozens more if it needed to.
As an aside, the Japanese did build one monstrous carrier - The Shinano at 62,000 tons. But the thing never saw action - an America submarine sunk it as it was on its way to pick up its first load of Kamikaze bombs.
As another aside, Canada was another WWII power with an immune infrastructure and the capability to build a lot of armaments indefinitely. At the start of WWII Canada’s Navy was tiny: 11 combat vessels, 145 officers and 1,674 men. By the end of WWII Canada had the 3rd largest navy in the world after the Americans and Brits. Its navy included two carriers, five cruisers, twenty-eight destroyers, seventy frigates, and a whole lot of smaller ships.
The point remains that the Axis powers stretched themselves to the breaking point to maintain their war efforts and America outproduced them easily without breaking a sweat.
The scary thing to contemplate is that this situation was known to many of them at the time. Remember Yamamoto’s declaration that Pearl Harbor served only to awaken a sleeping giant. The enemy knew exactly how much production America was capable of and how much America was producing, and knew they had no chance to match it. And yet, they kept fighting. Japan kept fighting until the Bomb stopped them, and Germany didn’t stop fighting until its leadership was captured or dead. Remember that when you think big wars can’t happen any more because people know it’s not in their rational interest. Conflicts have a habit of starting from spirals of events and then becoming chaotic and unpredictable.
The speech was delivered in the House of Commons, where there was no amplification and no sound recording. This happened on 4 June 1940. Other famous speeches of Churchill’s, including “bllod, sweat, toil and tears” and “this was their finest hour” were similarly delivered to the Commons, and similarly not recorded.
Churchill subsequently recorded the speeches at the suggestion of the BBC; this was done in a studio with no audience present. It is these recordings which we hear today. You’ll notice the complete lack of background noise, interjections of support, echo, etc that you would expect in a live recording of the House of Commons.
But does “Produced the greatest amount” equate to “Made the greatest sacrifices”?
No, it doesn’t. As Sam points out, for all that the US provided incredible amounts of materiel to the other allies, at the end of the war it was militarily stronger and more powerful than it had been at the start. In other words, the materiel provided by the US to others did not come at the exense of the US’s own requirements for materiel.
Obviously, there were other costs - most obviously, production of civilian amd consumer goods which did not take place because productive capacity was otherwise engaged.
But this just comes back to the difficulty of measuring “sacrifice”. “Sacrifice” is an abstract and intangible notion. To measure one sacrifice with another, when entirely different things are being sacrificed, is next to impossible. If the OP were more specific (“Which nation bore the greatest economic cost? Which nation lost the greatest proportion of its population? Which nation devoted the greatest share of its wealth to the struggle?”) it would be possible to answer it. But as it is, I think not. How do you measure the greatness of sacrifice?
I, like most in this thread, completely disagree with your argument.
Russia literally sacrificed millions in a head-strong thrust to be the first to capture Berlin. The Pitcairners would’ve had a more nuanced strategy, and would have certainly valued individual lives, militarily speaking, to a higher degree.
But you’re certainly entitled to your absolutist position.
There’s a reason I put this in GD instead of GQ. 
Defining “sacrifice” is difficult. For instance, who has sacrificed more: The mother who has lost her only son, or the mother of five sons that has lost two of them? I think that sacrifice not only involves what has been given, but what is left; what is lost and cannot easily be regained; what is taken vs. what is given reluctantly, but still willingly.
Ah but the mother who lost her only son lost 100 percent of her sons, so hersacrifice is greater.
Doesn’t that directly contradict your position that the Soviet Union made the greatest sacrifice because of the number, and not rate, of casualties?
Each of the sons who lost their lives sacrificed equally.
The mother who lost two sons may or may not have more grief than the mother who lost her only child.
When taking the long view, 100 years on, the descendants of the mother who lost her only child don’t exist, so that family made the greater sacrifice than the descendants of the other mother’s three surviving sons.
Why is this so difficult? It doesn’t devalue a life or its sacrifice to make comparisons. Everyone else understands that each life has value, and that saying Poland made a greater sacrifice than Russia is only speaking from Poland’s and Russia’s perspectives, not from the perspectives of the dead or their survivors.