The Lack Of Diversity In America's World War II Combat Deaths

One group bore the burden far more than others.

The Globalist American Empire teaches its subjects that America’s armies were always diverse and people from a wide variety of backgrounds gave their lives for this country. There is some truth in this propaganda, but there is one group that fought and bled for this country more than any other.

Unfortunately, no one wants to credit whites. Instead, their contributions are being erased or denigrated in official history. Any great deeds they may have done, they only did as individuals. You’re not supposed to uphold their great deeds as a tribute to their people. It’s a very different story for black, Asian, Hispanic, and Amerindian soldiers. Any great deed done by an individual minority soldier reflects the virtue of his entire people. You are also more likely to be told how a particular minority group died for your freedom than the majority group. 

But this is a false picture. The real story of American combat deaths is not very diverse, particularly in World War II. Despite the War being treated as a testament to America’s diversity, the overwhelming majority of American soldiers, Marines, sailors, and airmen who died in combat were white. Whites were at least 96 percent of Americans killed in action, based on my own research and calculations.

You wouldn’t know this from contemporary depictions of the war, especially in video games like Call of Duty: Vanguard. It’s also hard to find this data from official records. You can’t just Google how many white American soldiers died in combat and get an answer. You have to do your own research to find out this percentage.

So let’s break down the numbers. American combat deaths in World War II totaled 291,557. Black combat deaths totaled 708. (This is out of over one million blacks who served). Japanese-American deaths totaled around 800. Puerto Rican combat deaths totaled 747.

These are three of the largest minority groups that served in the war, but they don’t represent all of them. For the other groups, we don’t have set figures. The only group we get some kind of estimate is for American Indians. One source lists that they suffered over 1250 casualties of war. Casualties of war would also include non-combat deaths, wounded, missing, etc. We can’t get an exact number so we can only make a rough estimate. Twenty-seven percent of American casualties of war were combat deaths. Applying that percentage to the number of Indian casualties of war yields a number of around 340. We will use that as the total for Indian combat deaths.

It’s hard to estimate how many deaths were for other minority groups. We can only guess on the number of men from those minority groups inducted into the Army. For Chinese-Americans, the number was 13,311. For Filipino-Americans, the number was 11,506. For Hawaiians, the number was 1,320. Combined, this would be a slightly higher figure than the estimated number of Amerindians who were inducted into the Army (20,000). The maximum total of combat deaths among these three groups is probably 500, when compared to other minority groups and their battlefield losses.

So far, we have a total of about 3,100 minority combat deaths. But this doesn’t include what may be the largest possible minority group in the war: Mexican-Americans. We don’t know how many Mexicans actually served in the war because most of them were marked down as white. A House of Representatives resolution says 400,000 to 500,000 Hispanics served. The World War II Museum says 350,000 Mexican-Americans served. Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez said in 2007 over 9000 Hispanics died in World War II. This is the only death toll figure I could find.

It’s tough to know how many Mexicans and other Hispanics besides Puerto Ricans served as the Census didn’t properly account for Hispanics until well after World War II. The 1930 Census says 1.3 million people of “Mexican origin” lived in the U.S. The 1950 Census reported that 2.3 million people with Spanish surnames lived in the U.S. (This would of course include many non-Mexican Hispanics). The American wartime population of Mexicans was at least 1.3 million and probably under 2 million. The 350,000 figure is likely too high, as that would mean more than 20 percent of all Mexican-Americans served. That’s significantly higher than the percentage of all Americans who served (roughly 11 percent). 

Sen. Mendendez did not give a source for his death toll, nor did he clarify whether these were combat deaths or all deaths. But let’s just say 9000, a figure probably higher than the actual total, is the combat death toll for Hispanics. This would include the 747 Puerto Ricans killed in action. If you subtract that number from 3100 and add 9000, you would get 11,353. Let’s round it up to 11,500 to include other minorities we may have missed. That would be about four percent of all Americans killed in action. Whites would account for 96 percent of combat fatalities. 

That percentage is higher than the share of white Americans inducted into the military in WWII. Whites were 87 percent of Army inductees. (The Air Force was part of the Army at the time and this would include their service members). While I can’t find the exact figures for the other three branches (Navy, Coast Guard, and Marines), based on black induction rates, every other branch would have had an almost exact same rate of white induction. The one exception is the Marines, the last branch to allow blacks to serve in it. And remember, the white induction rate would also include many Hispanics. The white population of America as a whole was just under 90 percent in 1940, but, again, this figure would have included nearly all Hispanics. Eighty-seven percent is probably the best figure to settle on for the share of non-Hispanic white inductees.

So, despite being roughly 87 percent of American service members in World War II, whites were 96 percent of our nation’s battle casualties.

There was one area where a minority group was disproportionately represented among the dead. Blacks were the vast majority of soldiers executed after military courts-martial. In the European theater, 79 percent of the soldiers executed for murder, rape or both were black. One of them was Louis Till, Emmett Till’s father. Blacks comprised less than 10 percent of American soldiers.

Another key factor to remember is that whites were virtually all of the enlistees in the war. Nearly 99 percent of the men who enlisted in either the Army or the Navy from July 1, 1944 to June 30, 1945 were white. Only 1.3 percent of enlistees in that time frame were black.

As liberal elites create a new American history that casts whites as the villains of our nation’s history, it’s worth remembering who actually fought and died for America.