Graphic by me, created in excel, all data from the US Department of Veteran Affairs.

Prior year data acquired using the wayback machine.

WW2 Deaths Source

Posted by TA-MajestyPalm

11 comments

  4. This depresses me. My grandfathers generation everyone served and everyone new multiple hero’s. Last US WW1 vet died in 2007.

  5. Good work. Timely, to me at least: I was just recently talking to a friend about how the passing of the last American WWI vet (Frank Buckles) in 2011 feels only a few years ago. My attitude then was something like “it will be super sad when the WWII vets are all gone, but thankfully we have plenty of time left with them.” It’s been much quicker than I thought it would be.

    Understanding the past is critical to how we deal with things that happen outside our immediate scope of experience. To that end, exposure to living memory is extremely important, and fleeting. If you know a WWII please talk to them and ask them about their lives back then, about anything really, not just about the war. OPs chart serves as a great wake up call to the fact that there aren’t many opportunities left to do so…

  6. We’re losing the people who really know about the evils of fascism. That’s a problem.

  7. My family’s generations are somewhat closer, age-wise, than average (a delicate way of saying we start having kids early, I suppose) and my paternal great-grandfather is alive, 99, and served in WW2 and Korea. He’s doing well for someone of that age group, but you never know when… 😞

  9. Wow, that’s more than I thought would be alive since if you were 18 in 1944 you would be 98 now.

  10. I feel like people do not realize how common veterans used to be in general. In the 80s-90s *30-40%* of all adult males were veterans. Today its 10%, and that 10% is overwhelmingly in their 70s or older now.

    I remember that if you talked to a guy who was above the age of 50, it was seemingly more likely than not that they served in WW2 and saw incomprehensible levels of bloodshed. The way we viewed older people was fundamentally different than how we view them today because of that.

  11. Now contrast that with the rise in ultra right wing politics.

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