July 12, 2004

Casualties of World War II

Every so often you read something that makes sense, but that you might not have thought of if you hadn't read it. I had one of those moments reading Dan Baum's "The Price of Valor" in the July 12 & 19 issue of The New Yorker. It's an interesting article on the psychological damage that soldiers suffer from being in combat. One statistic in it really leaped off the page. "During the Second World War, the American military lost more front-line soldiers to psychological collapse than to death by enemy fire." That's a harrowing number for a lot of reasons, and it makes this an issue we need to better understand. As the article shows, presently the military (and the military psychiatrists who's first job is to keep soldiers fighting, not to look after their health) and more broadly the government seem to be doing a weak job of dealing with this problem.

For another look at rarely-discussed casualties in World War II, this is an interesting site. There are quite a few tales to be discovered in this review of maritime disasters, but I think one of the saddest has to be the extraordinary number of prisoners of war who were killed when ships carrying them were sunk. Thousands upon thousands died that way.

Posted by armand at July 12, 2004 10:24 AM | TrackBack | Posted to


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