World War II Facts

About 665,000 Soviet soldiers were captured when German forces closed their encirclement around Kiev in September 1941.

The encirclement was completed on September 16th, 1941, trapping the Soviet Southwestern Front east of Kiev. German forces entered the city on September 19th, 1941, and the battle ended on September 26th, 1941. The loss of so many soldiers in a single encirclement was a catastrophic blow to the Soviet Union early in the war.

During the Siege of Leningrad, a frozen lake became the only supply route keeping the city alive, and Soviet drivers crossed it in trucks that could sink through the ice at any moment.

Lake Ladoga, east of Leningrad, was the one gap in the German and Finnish blockade. In winter, Soviet workers built a route across the frozen lake called The Road of Life, driving trucks loaded with food, fuel, and supplies into the city. The drivers knew the ice could crack or break under the weight of a loaded truck, yet they made the crossing anyway, because without that route the city had no other way to receive supplies from the rest of the Soviet Union.

The Battle of Kursk, fought from July 5th to August 23rd, 1943, left both sides with an estimated 800,000 total casualties combined.

Soviet losses were very heavy, with estimates of around 250,000 soldiers killed and roughly 600,000 wounded or captured across the full campaign. German losses were also severe, with hundreds of thousands of soldiers killed, wounded, or missing. These losses weakened the German army badly and made it much harder for Germany to launch large offensives on the Eastern Front again.

At least 5 million people died from famine caused by Soviet collectivization, with the heaviest losses falling on Ukraine between 1932 and 1933.

Stalin's government forced peasants off their private farms and into large state-controlled collective farms starting in 1929. Grain was taken from the countryside to feed city workers and fund factories, leaving rural communities with almost nothing to eat. The famine that followed was especially deadly in Ukraine, where millions starved while the Soviet government continued to export grain abroad.

At the Battle of Midway in June 1942, Japan lost roughly 3,057 sailors and airmen killed along with four of its most powerful aircraft carriers.

The battle lasted from June 3rd to June 7th, 1942, near the Midway Atoll in the Northern Pacific Ocean. The four carriers lost were Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, and Hiryu, and their destruction cost Japan a large share of its trained naval aviators. The United States lost about 307 men and one carrier, the USS Yorktown, making the battle a major turning point in the Pacific.

The word 'kamikaze' does not mean 'suicide attack.' It is a Japanese word that means 'divine wind.'

The term comes from a legendary story about powerful typhoons that are said to have destroyed Mongol invasion fleets headed for Japan in the 13th century. Japanese pilots in World War II were given this name because their leaders believed they were protecting Japan in the same way those storms once had. The pilots flew their planes directly into Allied ships on purpose, turning the aircraft itself into a weapon.

During the Allied counteroffensive that set the stage for the Siege of Tobruk, over 130,000 Italian soldiers were captured in just two months of fighting.

Operation Compass ran in late 1940 and early 1941. British and Commonwealth forces under General Archibald Wavell pushed Italian forces back across Libya and dealt them catastrophic losses. The scale of that defeat was a key reason Adolf Hitler sent Erwin Rommel and the Afrika Korps to North Africa in February of 1941, leading directly to the siege that began on April 10th, 1941.

The man whose body the British used in Operation Mincemeat was not a soldier at all.

In 1943, British intelligence dressed the body of a Welsh civilian named Glyndwr Michael as a Royal Marines officer named 'Major William Martin.' They placed fake secret documents on the body and let it drift ashore in Spain, hoping German spies would find the papers. The plan worked, and Germany moved troops away from Sicily before the Allied invasion on July 10th, 1943.

On D-Day, June 6th, 1944, Canadian forces suffered around 5,021 casualties storming Juno Beach in Normandy.

Of those casualties, about 1,074 were soldiers killed in action. Canadian troops were assigned to Juno Beach, one of five Allied landing zones along the Normandy coast. Despite heavy losses, the Canadians pushed farther inland on June 6th, 1944 than almost any other Allied force that day.