The main reason for the huge casualties of the Soviet army and civilians in World War II was actually due to the gap in the industrial level, which caused the actual scale of the Soviet-German war to be far greater than our War of Resistance Against Japan. During the war, the peak of the Soviet active duty force reached 12.8 million, and the peak of the German and vassal armies was 7.8 million, that is, more than 20 million troops fought on the huge battlefield, of which 5.5 million Soviet troops were captured during the war, and the Chongqing government's army was only more than 4 million at its peak.
Although the total population of China at the outbreak of the War of Resistance was more than twice that of the Soviet Union (about 400 million to 180 million), due to the weakness of the country and the lack of production capacity of weapons and equipment, China's mobilizable population was disproportionate to the size of the army, because you could not afford to equip and could not afford to raise so many soldiers. Why was the Disarmament Conference held in 1929, at the end of the Northern Expedition? On the one hand, lao Chiang tried to weaken the power of other military blocs, and on the other hand, the agricultural countries really could not afford to raise more than 2 million troops.
Therefore, when the All-out War of Resistance broke out in 1937, the Nanjing government had only 1.8 million active troops (including various local factions), and the Red Army was certainly not more than 2 million people, while Japan only had 510,000 active troops when provoking the war, that is to say, at the beginning of the war, the total number of troops put into the battlefield by both sides was about 2.5 million. When the Soviet-German War broke out, the German army and the servant army dispatched 5.5 million troops, navy and air force, and the total strength of the Soviet army was more than 5 million people, which was a modernization war of tens of millions of people from the beginning.
Throughout the war of resistance against Japanese Aggression, the Chinese army invested more than 5 million troops at most (including the troops of the Eighth Route Army and the New Fourth Army, based on 1944), and 2 million militia and local armed forces, that is, the peak number of Chinese armed personnel was more than 7 million. At the most, the Japanese army invested more than 2 million troops in and around Guanxi, and at the same time there were more than 1 million shameful puppet troops, with a peak strength of more than 3 million. The size of the two sides together, that is, 10 million people, is half the peak of the Soviet-German battlefield, not to mention the number of heavy weapons, this is the gap.
The second reason for the huge casualties is that the density and intensity of the firepower of the Soviet-German battlefield are much greater than those of the anti-Japanese battlefield, these two European industrial countries fought wars of steel, explosives and oil, and they were all large corps battles filled with tanks, aircraft and artillery, so the casualties in a battle were calculated in hundreds of thousands or even millions. For example, at the Battle of Stalingrad, although the Soviets won, the cost was nearly 2 million casualties, while the Germans also lost 1.5 million troops, and the Soviets alone consumed 9568 wts of ammunition and 8353 wts of shells throughout the battle.
In the eight years of our all-out War of Resistance Against Japan, we consumed a total of 3,558,800 mountain artillery shells and 6,047,760 mortar shells, so do you know how many shells those wagons of the Soviet army were? A total of 1.9 million rounds! In other words, the cost of shells in a battle is 20% of your eight-year war of resistance. Coupled with the huge air power and a large number of rapid-fire weapons, the casualty rate on the Soviet-German battlefield was extremely high, with a total of 6.3296 million Soviet casualties, 555,500 sick deaths in the war, and more than 4 million prisoners of war who did not return alive, with a total of no less than 11 million deaths.
The third reason for the huge casualties was that the strategy and tactics of the Soviet-German battlefield were fundamentally different from those of the anti-Japanese battlefield, and in the European theater where mechanized troops were greatly popularized, the Germans and later the Soviets engaged in a large-depth encirclement and annihilation war, which could kill an opponent's heavy army group at a time. For example, the Battle of Kiev wiped out more than 850,000 Soviet troops, and the Battle of Vyazymabryansk was about this scale, with 673,000 Soviet troops captured. Due to the low degree of mechanization, the Japanese army could defeat and defeat the Chiang army, but it was difficult to complete the large-scale encirclement, and after the fiasco in the first theater of the Battle of Zhongtiao Mountain, more than 37,000 people were captured.
As far as the atrocities of the massacre of civilians are concerned, in fact, the German army did not have the tyranny of the Japanese, the German army massacre mainly targeted Jews and Soviet prisoners of war, and the slaughter of the city was extremely rare. The Japanese, on the other hand, often massacre ordinary people to vent their anger, and it is not uncommon in North China and Central China. Therefore, in the war casualties between China and the Soviet Union, China is a relatively high proportion of civilians, while the Soviet Union is a relatively high proportion of soldiers, so when it comes to the degree of brutality, in fact, the Japanese army is higher than the German army, and the Nanjing Massacre is a clear proof.
To illustrate with the data, in the War of Resistance Against Japan, China's army suffered more than 3.8 million casualties and more than 31 million civilian casualties, a total of about 35 million people; while in the Soviet-German War, the total number of Soviet casualties reached 29.6 million, while the number of casualties and civilian casualties was 17 million, the total of the two was 46.4 million, and the casualty ratio of soldiers was 11% and 64% respectively. The Japanese people's blood debt is difficult to write, and the Japanese army invading China is a bunch of animals.
Another kind of data is mainly from civilian statistics, that is, during the War of Resistance Against Japan, the Chinese army suffered more than 6.8 million casualties and more than 35 million civilian casualties, a total of about 42 million people, but even so, the overall casualty figures and the proportion of military casualties were still slightly less than those of the Soviet-German war. However, China and the Soviet Union were indeed the two countries that suffered the most casualties during World War II, but the problem is that we fought for eight years, counting the northeast for a full fourteen years.
From the implementation of the Barbarossa Plan in 1941 to the surrender of Germany in 1945, the Soviet-German War lasted only four years, and there were such huge casualties, which fully shows that the cruelty of the war actually exceeded the anti-Japanese battlefield.