My Father was army and fought in the war. He never spoke a word of it but you could see his anger come out now and then. Very easy going man but once every year or two when we were groing up would go into a complete rage. We learned to follow orders like a soldier. I can’t say how it affected me but I know it had a large effect.
I was born in the eighties , but WWII had a fairly profound effect on all my grandparents., who with the exception of my paternal grandfather (who was in his late 30s/early 40s), would’ve been about 15-21 during the war.
On the maternal side my grandfather forged his own birth-certificate to fight in the British army/RAF* as 15 year-old and was badly-wounded, the effects of which lived with him throughout his life. On the positive side he met my grandmother, who would’ve experienced the blitz in London, as result of her writing letters to him whilst he was serving. He also so much more of the World than he ever could’ve hoped to at that time fighting in Europe and North Africa - he even saw Mussolini’s dead body hung up in Milan.
On the paternal side my grandfather and great-grandfather were held prisoner by the Japanese and faced starvation and watching their friends die. My paternal grandmother escaped shortly before the Japanese invaded to Africa, but when going to England the boat she was on was sunk by the Germans.
Obviously being two generations removed from the war the effects on me are less obvious, but it profoundly affected both sides of my family and both my maternal and paternal grandparents met as a direct result of the war.
Great Username/Post! 
There’s a scene in the 2011 movie Captain America: The First Avenger that resonated with me well: Cap’s rescuing a bunch of POW’s from a German camp and an Asian guy steps out of one of the cells. There’s a brief awkward moment before the prisoner says, “Hey, gimme a break. I’m from Fresno!”
I wasn’t born until 20 years after the war ended. Still, I spent my school years (1970’s to early 1980’s) encountering rudeness and hatred and stereotyping from people who can’t or won’t let go of the need to stoke the fires of anger and feed the US vs THEM mentality…
Yeah, that’s what I received from children and grandchildren who learned from a veteran that the only good Jap is a dead one.
In the late 1980’s the justification turned from WWII to “They’re selling us electronics and buying up everything in America!”
…but it was still just another excuse to hate and discriminate.
In contrast, it was always enheartening to read news stories about WWII reunions where veterans from the US and Japan (or US and Germany) would get together and share stories and confirm they had forgiven each other for Military behaviors that are now in the past and they’ve moved on with their lives. And I eventually decided to be a better person than the discriminators; to get along in spite of the prejudice I encounter all the time. In fact, my wife observes and gets irritated by incidents that I no longer notice. I prove discriminators wrong by being kind to everyone, speaking English clearly and fluently and intelligently, and having a pretty thorough grasp of culture and customs and manners.
There’s a scene in Dragon: the Bruce Lee story that resonates like with me well:
Three guys at the college gym are challenging Bruce and one says, “…yeah! You killed my dad in Korea! I owe you one!”
After Bruce wins the fight, he tells the guy, “Sorry about your dad. That was Korea. I’m Chinese.”
–G!
And I won’t get Kamakiri started, but I will point out that the scholars of History, Japan, and Warfare in general have all concurred that up until WWII, the way nation-states solved their economic difficulties was by annexing (by force) neighboring (or distant) territories for their resources. It’s why Spain, Italy, France, and Portugal use Latin grammar (Romance languages); it’s why central and south America speak variants of Spanish; it’s why Scandinavia, Germany, The Netherlands, and England speak variants of ancient Norse. It’s why India and the United States speak English (though it could have been Spanish). It’s an asinine way to improve a country’s economy, but the inspiration for Japanese expansionism came from learning about Western examples and trying to emulate those successes. They tried, first, to go west and figured that would be too difficult. They turned east and stomped on the wrong dog’s tail. And despite the fact that, since WWII, enlightened people look down upon colonialism and imperialism, it continued throughout the cold war. Hell, Putin and Netanyahu are doing that right now, as if they didn’t learn from WWII to be more ethical.
Dad went to college on the GI Bill. Mom’s father earned enough money storing explosives for the government on his farm to send her to college. They went to different colleges, but met while working on a newspaper as reporters, jobs they wouldn’t have had without those degrees.
My father moved from south Georgia to the Charleston Naval Shipyard during the war to be a pipe fitter and decided to settle down there. So the war determined where I was born.
Not a huge impact: world population in 1940 was 2.3 billion. So assuming 72 million casualties, that would be 1/32 of the population.
Today’s population is something like 7.2 billion. Assuming the same rate of increase would have applied to the missing 72 million, they would have grown into 225 million; so the present population would, presumably, be 7.425 billion, rather than 7.2 billion had those people not been killed (making a bunch of no doubt unsupportable assumptions).
I’m with you as far as not fanning the flames of hatred, but I don’t understand the anecdote above. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops fought Americans in Korea.
My mom’s Japanese. Not Japanese-American, Japanese. She remembers firebombing. Remembers B-29s and shattering explosions and her house in ashes and living in the woods until they could make their way to a relatives’ out in the country.
If Enola Gay had been forced to attack its secondary target, or Bockscar had the opportunity to bomb its primary target, I probably wouldn’t exist, because Mom came from the area of Kokura.
She still doesn’t much like airplanes, and still has a tendency to worry and hoard… the immediate post-war famine and economic collapse still haunts her, along with the memory of her older sister, dying of a fever which would have been perfectly treatable in a nation not devastated by war, or her older brother, proudly marching off to fight in Burma and never coming back.
Malthus, you of all people should know about population. Male deaths do not affect population growth. In order to figure WWII casualties’ affect on population growth, you need to know how many were women of child-bearing age or younger and what the birth rate was. That’s the effect on population growth. So for each Chinese peasant (girl) killed, how many children (2? 6?) went unborn?
Dead kamikaze pilots don’t affect the birth rate because the children they would have fathered were simply fathered by someone else. (I’m sure there were some kamikaze widows who never remarried and remained childless, but those numbers are insignificant when compared to a country’s total birth rate.)
My father did not fight in the war because he was the only child of a farmer and he had flat feet. There was a slight stigma to this in my small South Dakota town- the good old boy clubs were the American Legion and the VFW and our family could not take part. I always thought that the stigma was odd since farming was certainly considered “war work”.
Actually, though I can’t ask him he recently passed, his dentist told him. Both my sisters have pitted , modeled teeth.
Surprisingly little. Born in the early sixties. My parents were young children when the war was going on and didn’t have much recollection of the war years, let alone taking any part in the war effort. My grandfather on one side was in the navy for part of the war, but he died before I was born (not in the fighting) and I don’t know any details; my grandfather on the other side did work that helped the war effort at home, but he died when I was small and I don’t know any details there either. A great-uncle fought in the war and I had a couple of teachers who were WWII vets–that’s about it.
It seems to me, looking back, that there was almost a conspiracy of silence about the war. When I started school, it was only about 20 years in the past; when I graduated from high school, it had been over for less than 35 years. And yet…people rarely talked about it. There weren’t school assemblies that made reference to the war. My teachers who were vets didn’t discuss it except very briefly in passing. My older relatives seemed to have nothing to say about it. “We don’t talk about that” seemed to be the prevailing perspective.
More recent things, on the other hand…school assemblies at the school where I teach part-time still focus on the civil rights era and the reminiscences of those active in the movement, though that was much longer ago (now) than WWII was (then). 9-11 is now 14 years in the rearview mirror, not much more than WWII’s end was when I was born, and I don’t see any sign of people choosing to not talk about it. I’m always surprised at the way things have changed regarding how we talk–and how much we talk–about Big Things since WWII ended.
Yes, hence my saying that the estimate was based on “making a bunch of no doubt unsupportable assumptions”. You may have missed that statement.
In short, even assuming all things were equal (which, as you point out, they may well not be, and if they aren’t, they will likely be in ways that minimize the impact on population loss), it would not have had a huge impact.
It isn’t intended as a serious, exhaustive analysis, but merely as a simple exercise to demonstrate that the impact could not possibly be very great.
If the German 88 mm shell had impacted my father’s tank about six inches higher, I wouldn’t be typing this.
Interesting. Can you clarify this?
My dad was a tank commander in WW2. If the 88mm shell had blown up about six inches higher on the front of his tank, I wouldn’t be posting this today.
My paternal grandmother had to make her way from Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia to the British Zone (and then to Denmark) in the immediate aftermath, with my father (7) and his sister (3) in tow. It was not a good time and place to be married to a German. (My grandfather was in a POW camp, he’d been drafted into the Wehrmacht. In his 40s at the time. Saved his life by talking his way into a mountain regiment and so not getting sent East.)
As was the way in those days, all 3 just locked their trauma away, with varying success.
My grandmother maintained her composure with an iron will until her mind started slipping in old age and she’d talk about her possessions in Prague and how they were safely hidden with now long-dead friends.
My aunt has severe paranoia and while she’s a lovely person when medicated, she can’t live on her own. Thank Og for the Danish system that lets her live a decent simulation of a normal life.
My father seemed balanced until his late twenties, then started having severe bipolar symptoms. Nobody seems to know if the took his own life or just accidentally ODed on his medication in his 30s, not that it matters - he lived such a self-destructive life, it was just a matter of time.
Took me decades to put that into a coherent pattern, incidentally.
My dad made enough money building warships that he and mom could afford to have a child (me)