Political Parties

. Sixteen million American men and women served in uniform during the war; two-thirds were in the army and army air force. The rest were navy and marines. Though not in any branch of the service, the merchant marines risked their lives to supply the troops; oil provided by the Esso fleet, for example, was vital to the war effort. The war's approximate death toll: 50,000,000. The US lost 300,000 dead, Britain, 500,000; German losses exceeded 4,500,000; Japan lost around 2,000,000; France, 500,000; Russia, 20,000,000; Holland, 200,000; China, 30,000,000; India, 1,500,000; Yugoslavia, 1,000,000; Hungary, Poland, Rumania, and Bulgaria, 500,000; and Italy, 1,500,000. Historians and statisticians compute the participants' costs of World War Two (in millions of US dollars, 1946 value). Allies: Australia, 10,036; Belgium, 6,324; Canada, 20,104; China, 49,072; France, 111,272; India, 4,804; Netherlands, 9,624; New Zealand, 2,560; Norway, 992; South Africa, 2,152; United Kingdom, unknown; United states, 288,000; USSR, 93,012; Axis: Germany, 212,336; Italy, 21,072; Japan, 41272. Governmental expenditures during World War Two for war material and armaments added up to $1, 154 billion. Britain, $120 billion; the United States, $317 billion; the Soviet Union,$192 billion; Italy, $4 billion; Germany, $272 billion, and lesser amounts for other nations. (These and all figures continue to be US dollars in 1946 values). Official government expenditures did include allowance for damage to civilian property. Approximate losses due to damage: Soviet Union, $128 billion; Britain, $5 billion; Germany, $75 billion; and other European countries, approximately $230 billion total.

Epilogue:
On October 25, 1945: UN Charter signed. Macarthur orders all military statues in Japan destroyed, so naval officers cut Yamamoto's in half and threw it into a lake. However, they made a chart of where it sank, and later men dredged up the head and shoulders.
Liberated American POWs are forced to sign confidentiality documents drawn up by the Army stating they would not tell what happened in the Japanese biological warfare and slave labor prisons. If they did, they faced Court Martial.
At the War Crimes trials, MacArthur finds some Japanese guilty, exonerated others. Mitsuo Fuchida of Pearl Harbor fame, for example, survived, prospered, and writes his memoirs. The men who hang go to the gallows shouting,"Banzai!"On February 23, 1946: General Yamashita executed in Los Banos in the Philippines after sham of a Amilitary trial. Though generally considered innocent of any specific war crimes, he had the misfortune to have done combat mano a mano with MacArthur in the Philippines. MacArthur executes him. In 1989, the Japanese government offered the Philippine government $250 million to return General Yamashita's bones for a proper Shinto burial. The Philippine government refused. Crown Prince Akihito had planned a birthday party for himself the day of the executions, but he cancelled it. He did, however, get in his usual round of golf. In 1989, Hirohito died after the longest reign of any 20C monarch. August 1, 2001; Prime Minister Ichiro Koizumi made an official visit to the Yasukuni Shrine, where the bodies of the war criminals hung by the allies are interred; the monument is the symbolic heart of Japanese militarism. In protest, China and Korea threatened to sever relations with Japan.