The Fallen of World War II: Neil Halloran's Animated Data Film

The Fallen of World War II is an animated data documentary by the American designer and filmmaker Neil Halloran, released in 2015. In roughly a quarter of an hour it turns the death toll of the Second World War into moving bar charts and rows of tiny human figures, then compares that toll with earlier wars and with the conflicts that followed. You can watch it below; the rest of this page explains what the film shows, where its numbers come from, and how to read its hopeful but debated ending.

What the film is

Halloran wrote, directed, coded and narrated the project himself, with original music and sound design by Andy Dollerson. It was first published as an interactive piece on his website, fallen.io: the narration plays in a straight line, but viewers can pause at key moments and explore the charts on their own. A standard video version was posted to Vimeo for people whose computers or phones struggled with the interactive one. The site describes the running time as about 15 minutes, and news coverage of it began in early June 2015.

Halloran called it a pilot, hoping to make further episodes on subjects such as drones, terrorism, democracy and peacekeeping if viewers supported the work. The project asked viewers for a small voluntary "ticket", with a suggested price of $2.50.

How the story unfolds

The film moves in three parts.

1. The soldiers

It starts with military deaths, nation by nation. Each small figure stands for a fixed number of people, and the columns grow as the narrator adds country after country. Western viewers used to thinking of the war through American or British films often find this part the most surprising: the American and British columns are short next to the towering column for the Soviet Union.

2. The civilians

The second part adds civilians, including the victims of the Holocaust, of famine and disease, and of bombing. Here China's losses, often overlooked in the West, become clear. The film handles this section slowly and without dramatic music, letting the scale speak for itself.

3. War before and after

Finally the film zooms out. It sets the Second World War next to other major conflicts in history, then follows battle deaths from 1945 to the present. This closing section draws heavily on the psychologist Steven Pinker's 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature, which argues that violence has declined over the long run.

The numbers behind the charts

Halloran credits his data to Wikipedia's "World War II casualties" article and the Uppsala Conflict Data Program for post-war battle deaths. It helps to know how wide the estimates are, because no one counted every death at the time. Current figures from that Wikipedia article include:

• All deaths: an estimated 60 to 75 million people, about 3% of the world's population in 1940. Some tallies that include war-related famine and disease reach 70 to 85 million.
• Soldiers: about 21 to 25 million military deaths, including some 5 million prisoners of war who died in captivity.
• Soviet Union: about 26.6 million dead, according to Russian government figures, the largest national loss of the war.
• China: estimates range from 10 to 20 million; the Chinese government uses 20 million.
• Poland: around 5.9 to 6 million, roughly a sixth of its pre-war population, half of them Polish Jews.
• Germany: roughly 6.9 to 7.4 million, including about 5.3 million soldiers.
• Japan: about 2.5 to 3.1 million.
• United Kingdom: about 451,000 including colonies; United States: about 419,000, almost all military.
• The Holocaust: around 6 million Jews murdered, with scholarly estimates ranging from about 4.9 to 5.9 million in some reference works and 5.7 million in Martin Gilbert's count.

Because sources disagree, you may notice small differences between the numbers in the film and those in later reference works. That is normal. Historians keep revising the totals as archives open and methods improve, and civilian deaths from hunger and disease are especially hard to pin down.

The "long peace" and its critics

The film ends on a cautiously optimistic note: since 1945, deaths in battle between states have fallen, and wars between great powers have not returned. Historians sometimes call this the "long peace", a phrase popularised by John Lewis Gaddis, and Pinker built a large part of his argument on it.

Not everyone accepts the conclusion. Statisticians such as Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Pasquale Cirillo have argued that wars are rare, extreme events, so a few calm decades cannot prove a lasting trend; a single large war could change the picture overnight. Others point out that battle-death counts leave out many people who die from the hunger, disease and displacement that conflicts cause. Halloran himself presents the decline as hopeful rather than guaranteed, and that is the most honest way to watch it. Since the film was made, the wars in Syria, Ethiopia's Tigray region, Ukraine and Gaza have pushed recent battle deaths up again, which makes the debate feel less academic.

Why the visual approach works

Large numbers numb us. A total of "70 million" is almost impossible to imagine, while a column of figures that keeps rising past the top of the screen is not. By building each total step by step, the film gives viewers time to register each country's loss before adding the next. It also avoids graphic images of the dead, which makes it suitable for classrooms. Shown alongside a textbook, it can help students grasp why the Eastern Front and the war in China shaped the twentieth century as much as the battles more familiar from Hollywood.

If you watch it with children or students, a few questions make good discussion starters: Why are estimates for some countries so uncertain? Why do civilian deaths outnumber military deaths? And what would it take for the post-war decline in battle deaths to continue?

Watching it today

The interactive version needs a fairly modern computer and browser and does not play well on most phones, so the Vimeo video above is the easiest way to see it. More than a decade after its release, The Fallen of World War II remains one of the clearest short introductions to the human cost of the war, and a reminder that behind every bar on a chart are individual lives.

Sources: fallen.io: The Fallen of World War II (archived project page and credits); History News Network, June 2015: This animated data visualization of World War II fatalities; Wikipedia: World War II casualties; Neil Halloran on Vimeo.

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