Was the Soviet 1923 Male Birth Cohort Doomed by World War II? (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Was the Soviet 1923 Male Birth Cohort Doomed by World War II? (2014)

blogs.warwick.ac.uk

15 pointssoundsop11 comments

Shocking is also how they died. On 40 years ago on our farm worked a heavily alcoholic tank-driver from the eastern front- when drunk he would ramble about what happend there.

The sovjet officers told there hastily trained recruits that they had Anti-Tank-Guns who could penetrant german tanks. They could not. So the tank would drive along the dug emergency trench. One Tankchain in the trenches. They would fire. They would be crushed. Dont remember the length - but about one day of nightmarish driving of this.

Despite having tried to google it a few times, I have never found a table of deaths by birth year over WWI or WWII for any country. You'd think it would be on Wikipedia. Even rough estimates would make for a nice blog post.

A Google search for "world war 2 mortality demographics" pops this out:

http://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol13/16/13-16.p...

It discusses problems with the records leading to difficulties in figuring out such statistics (they go on to model the death rate vs age for the war years).

edit: Here's another interesting link from that search: http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/markharrison/entry/was_the_soviet...

Don't you just need a general table of death rates for the 20th century? Such as this for the UK

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/--_yGIwe9rks/TpwbBfZB6AI/AAAAAAAAAR...

You can see the pattern you'd expect: a rise in the death rate, compared to the surrounding years, during the world wars. Though there are other peaks, such as the higher peak just before 1920, which is probably influenza, not WWI.

edit: Oh, this doesn't show annual death rate by year of birth, which is what you were looking for

Look for actuarial tables. They are used to set life insurance rates.

They frequently exclude WWII as an extraordinary event.

Possibly more shocking, more than 60% of men who were born in 1923 and still alive in 1941 would die during the War (assuming I've understood the article correctly and my maths is sound).

No. Surviving to 1941: 1,800, wartime mortality: 700, surviving to 1946: 1,100.

700/1,800 = 38%

Oops. You're right, I took the 1946 figure as the 1941 one (700/1100 > 60%).

Still, 38% is pretty bad.

http://www.aircrewremembered.com/

Although a classic case of Betteridge's Law, it's a fascinating article.

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