Some perspective on the human cost of war.
DESTRUCTION: For a variety of reasons including guerrilla warfare, changes in international boundaries and mass shifts in population, statistics on WW II casualties are inexact. Only for the United States and the British Commonwealth are official statistics cited with some degree of assurance. For the United States, World War II (1941-1946) engaged 16,112,566 soldiers, with casualties of 1,076,245, including 405,399 deaths, 291,557 of which were battle deaths. The emphasis here on U.S. deaths is by no means an effort to diminish the lost of military and civilian lives throughout World War II. By comparison to the U.S. losses, more than 380,000 civilian lives were lost every month of the entire war. Conservatively, this means that for the years 1942-45 alone, approximately 18,240,000 civilians died. [emphasis mine]
One source estimates that the entirety of World War II cost more than 38,000,000 lives, 22 million of which died in Russia (Davis, 1990:310-311; Information Please Almanac, 1992:310). Still another source estimates that the total dead varied between 35,000,000 and 60,000,000. Compared numerically, however, the U.S. was relatively fortunate.
http://sun.soci.niu.edu/~critcrim/dp/dppapers/lil.exec.us.gis