[Ed. Note: This article is part of a collection of essays entitled “Critical Reflections on the 80th Anniversary of the End of World War II” published in August 2025.]
World War II was the deadliest military conflict in history. War is—above all—an act of death and destruction on a scale difficult to comprehend at the time and therefore even harder to remember 80 years later. While we often discuss war in terms of victors and vanquished, the great divide is actually between places where a war was fought and where it was not because war’s intrinsic logic is of ever-escalating devastation. Once it starts, all the pressures are toward more destruction. Great conflicts can begin with almost no thought, as did Japan’s war with China in summer 1937. Local commanders allowed a tiny altercation to balloon into a large one and were surprised at how easy it was to capture Beijing. In a fit of over-confidence, they impetuously widened the war to South China, where they were immediately shocked at how hard it was to subdue Shanghai. They reacted to both urban experiences with massive escalation. Victories—even ones that are useless in their larger context—encourage people to press on while casualties and territorial losses put pressure on leaders to make sure the dead “did not sacrifice in vain.” The consistent logic is of escalation, making it much harder to stop a war than to start one.
Some escalation is intentional: when a warning shot is not heeded, the next volley will aim for the heart. But often, it is driven by the relentless logic of war itself: if a civilian population sympathizes with the enemy, they too are dangerous, and soon the line between protecting oneself from a uniformed armed force and from non-combatants will blur. Strategically, the prudent short-term move nearly always is to “harden one’s defenses,” which often means disproportionate retaliation.
In general, soldiers eventually prey on civilians, often those they are sworn to protect. How could it be otherwise when some people have weapons and some do not? If food is scarce, the men with guns will eat it. They will help themselves to grain, including the sacks held back for planting next spring, to farm animals, to wood to roast them on, and all the fruits and vegetables ripening in the field. The logic of war requires that good commanders keep their garrison at fighting strength, rather than using up precious food on non-combatants, such as prisoners of war.1 Armies also feel free to trample the crops, foul the water supply, and burn the shelters. They are in a hurry to reach friendly territory, and they wish to deny resources to the enemy following in their wake. Famine, pestilence, and exposure to the elements do the real dirty work after their passing.
Policies can certainly affect such behavior and both the Japanese and the Chinese Nationalist high commands made things worse for the Chinese population because both armies had instructions to procure food from local suppliers. This was an unrealistic plan, given that their forces crossed and re-crossed the same territory for nearly a decade, eventually overwhelming all possible sources of reprovisioning. Nor was the staggering callousness in that conflict restricted to civilian lives. Many of the Chinese officers pocketed the funds meant to buy food for their own soldiers, whom they replaced by seizing other underfed men off the street and forcing them into uniform.2 Japanese military leaders also stranded their own men, and tens of thousands starved to death. They consistently ignored the high likelihood of this outcome by not accepting the difficulty of quickly moving enough supplies to support their geographically vast warfront, the homefront, and the occupied territories. This too is the logic of war: like all resource-poor militaries, the Imperial Japanese forces emphasized bravery, tactical agility, and spiritual mobilization, all of which spoke to their vision of themselves as warriors. Suggesting that an army should turn back because it had run out of such mundane commodities as rice and blankets was treated as defeatism and inadequate commitment to the cause.3 The relentless pressure to risk more lives for ever-slimmer odds of victory is also intrinsic to the logic of war.
Environmental destruction can be massive and long-lasting. Indeed, what may be the single most environmentally damaging act of warfare in world history occurred when Chiang Kai-Shek’s forces deliberately bombed the dykes on the Yellow River to wash out the railroad in a largely futile attempt to stop a Japanese advance on Wuhan in June 1938. The cost was staggeringly high. They broke the dikes without warning, destroying most of the year’s harvest in twenty counties and displacing 4.8 million people. It was hard to rebuild the dykes properly, given shortages of labor and supplies, causing subsequent floods in 1939, 1940, and 1941. The disruption to water flow also caused silt deposits to build up in the drainage system, creating new problems. The devastated area became a perfect habitat for locusts, which swarmed in vast numbers in 1942, devouring about 75% of the crops.4 Half of the 15 to 20 million Chinese who died during the war perished from such causes.
Nor was this the only example of unplanned but near-inevitable starvation resulting from military actions in WWII Asia. A famine in Bengal in 1943, controlled by Great Britain, and another in Vietnam in 1944, controlled by Japan, each killed over a million people.5 Both were caused by disrupted food supply chains even though they were not the sites of active fighting. These deaths are in addition to the already enormous numbers of unarmed civilians who died in battle. In the Philippines, where by far the largest number of American civilians to directly experience the war lived, both the American and the Japanese armies targeted the 100,000 civilians who died in the vicious battle for Manila in 1945, then the sixth largest city in the United States.6 Shortly thereafter, in the savage 12-week battle for Okinawa, both American and Japanese forces once again protected themselves at the expense of civilians, explaining why 90,000 of them died. This is the logic of war.
Notes:
- Sarah Kovner, Prisoners of the Empire: Inside Japanese POW Camps, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020.
- S.C.M. Paine, The Wars for Asia, 1911-1949, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
- “The Asia-Pacific War,” Yuki Tanaka in The New Cambridge History of Japan, ed. Laura Hein, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023, pp. 138-167.
- Diana Lary, “The Waters Covered the Earth: China’s War-Induced Natural Disasters,” in Mark Selden and Alvin Y. So, eds., War and State Terrorism: The United States, Japan, and the Asia-Pacific in the Long Twentieth Century, Lanham MD: Rowman and Little Field, 2003, pp. 143-170. Micah Muscolino The Ecology of War in China: Henan Province, the Yellow River, and Beyond, 1938-1950, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
- For total World War II deaths, broken down by military vs. civilian deaths and those caused by battle vs. indirect destruction, see Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties#Total_deaths.
- Daniel Immerwahr, “The Greater United States: Territory and Empire in U.S. History,” Diplomatic History, 2016.6. 40.3 pp. 373-391.
