When German submarine torpedoed the British passenger ship Athenia on the first day of World War II, Sept. 3, 1939, the final death toll included 112 innocent men, women and children. The British immediately sought to condemn Germany’s Nazi government for this “barbarous act” by publicizing it around the world. Yet, at the end of the war nearly six years later, the world had largely forgotten this event.

In previous blogs we explored various reasons why Athenia faded into history’s shadows: the fact that 90 percent of Athenia’s passengers and crew survived the attack, that Germany denied responsibility for the attack until the Nuremberg trials in 1947, that the attack did not bring the U.S. into the war despite the deaths of 30 Americans, and that within months of the start of hostilities, Germany abandoned the treaties governing maritime conflicts and conducted unrestricted submarine warfare on merchant shipping for the duration of the war (followed by all other combatant nations).

One circumstance, however, likely bears the greatest responsibility for Athenia’s relative anonymity: the utter destruction wrought by World War II on humanity.

As the war progressed, people became inured to the casualty figures for individual battles: D-Day and the Battle of Normandy cost nearly 130,000 lives; the Battle of the Bulge, 187,000 lives; the Battle of Stalingrad, more than 1 million; and 112,000 killed instantly in Japan with the explosion of two atomic bombs. With the war’s end came the horrific revelation of the six million people killed in the Holocaust.

In terms of the total number of dead, the war was the most costly military conflict in history. The number of men and women in uniform who died during World War II is estimated at between 21 million and 25 million.
The number of civilian deaths, however, is estimated at between 50 million and 55 million, including deaths from war-related disease and famine.

Even taking the lower range of the military and civilian deaths, the total represented 3 percent of the world’s population, estimated at about 2.3 billion in 1940.

It is easy to see how these astounding casualty numbers overwhelm the deaths of 112 people on the first day of the war. Still, we can remember the Athenia dead as harbingers of the fate that awaited civilians around the world in the nearly six years of war that followed.