This post consists of grabbing this data, cleaning it up, and summarizing the results in a pivot table.

If you want to see how I processed the data, here is my spreadsheet.

Analysis

The historians were correct if you strictly take casualties listed as Killed in Action (KIA) or air combat deaths. To keep things simple, I focused on the data for the US Army, Navy, and Marines – I could not find yearly Coast Guard data, but did find yearly Merchant Marine data (shown in the attached spreadsheet). I grabbed all the KIA data on pages listed above and generated a pivot table (Table 1), which I show below.

It was during 1943 that the number of military KIA exceeded the number of workers dying in factories. The table also shows that military casualties really surged during 1944, which makes sense when you think of D-Day and the increasing tempo of operations in the Pacific War. Note that the official records list some deaths as occurring in 1946. I have included these deaths in 1945, which is why I label 1945 with a plus.

Table 1: US Army, Navy, and Marine World War 2 Killed in Action Statistics. Year Army Marines Navy Military KIA Factory Deaths 1941 467 99 2,181 2,747 18,000 1942 4,497 1,239 2,890

8,626 18,500 1943 19,548 1,732 4,839 26,119 17,500 1944 107,437 5,892 8,187 121,516 16,000 1945+ 57,747 8,414 15,907 78,678 16,000 Totals 189,696 17,376 34,004 237,686 85,500

I would argue that these numbers are not really fair because there are many other battle deaths not listed as KIA. I get Table 2 if I count all the battle and non-battle-related deaths, and you can see the military deaths swamp out the civilian deaths in 1942.

Table 2: US Army, Navy, and Marine World War 2 Battle and Non-Battle Killed Statistics. Year Army Marines Navy Military KIA Factory Deaths 1941 493 165 2,217 2,875 18,000 1942 17,612 1,607 3,278

22,497 18,500 1943 22,592 1,839 5,251 29,682 17,500 1944 126,170 5,746 9,348 141,264 16,000 1945+ 68,007 10,376 16,856 95,239 16,000 Totals 234,874 19,733 36,950 291,557 85,500

These totals agree with those reported by the Wikipedia. For total Army, Navy, and Marine casualties, see Appendix B.

The US Marine's listed their casualties by battle and not by year. I obtained the list of US Marine casualties by year from a book quote on a forum post (see Appendix A).

Conclusions

Here is what I learned from this data:

US factory work in the early 20th century was dangerous. For comparison, there were 4,679 fatal work injuries in the US during 2014. There were ~149 million employed workers in the US during 2015. (Source) There were ~53 million employed workers in the US during 1945. (Source) Roughly, there was more than 3 times the number of fatal work injuries with a workforce ~1/3 the size.

48% of all US military KIA occurred during 1944. The number of KIA in 1945 was lower than in 1944 because most of the fighting ended by June 1945. 1945 casualty rates dropped enormously after the Battle of Okinawa and VE day.

The size of the European theater was massive compared to the Pacific theater. Just look at the US Army casualties after D-Day. The US Army in July 1944 had 16.8K soldiers killed, where the US Marines lost 19.7k for the entire war.



Appendix A: US Marine Casualties By Year

I was able to find a forum post that summarized the Marines casualties by year using data from the book The US Marine Corps Story (ISBN 0316585580). Table 3 summarizes this information.

Table 3: Marine World War 2 Killed in Action Statistics. Year Killed Wounded Captured Missing Total Casualties

1941 165 80 740 0 985 1942 1,607 3,336 1,292

85 6,320 1943 1,839 4,996 0 27 6,682 1944 5,746 21,078 0 117 26,941 1945+ 10,376 37,717 238 0 48,331 Totals 19,733 67,207 2,270 229 89,439

Appendix B: Battle and Non-Battle Casualties

Table 4 shows the total Army, Navy, and Marines casualties during WW2 (Source). Note that there were a significant number of non-battle related casualties. This is true in all conflicts.

Table 4: US Army, Navy, and Marines WW2 Casualty Summary. Service Total Serving Battle Deaths Non-Battle Deaths Total Deaths Wounded Army 11,260,000 234,874 83,400 318,274 565,861 Navy 4,183,466 36,950 25,664 62,614 37,778 Marines 669,100 19,733 4,778 24,511 67,207 Totals 16,112,566 291,557 113,842 405,399 670,846

Appendix C: Industrial Casualty Table.

Figure 2 is my screen capture of the government's data on factory deaths (Source).

Appendix D: Alternate Industrial Casualty Reference.

Figure 3 is my screen capture from The Cambridge History of the Second World War: Volume 3, Total War: Economy, Society and Culture (Link). The data in this post is consistent with this reference.