The Hidden Victims: Civilian Casualties of the Two World Wars.Cormac ÓGráda, (Princeton University Press, 2024. Pp. 520. ISBN 9780691258751. Hbk £40)
本书系统梳理两次世界大战中平民伤亡的多重原因，挑战传统死亡统计，强调战争引发的饥荒是最大杀手，适合研究战争史、人口学及暴力问题的学者参考。
Cormac Ó Gráda's The Hidden Victims: Civilian Casualties of the Two World Wars is ambitious in scope but careful in execution. Best known for his pioneering work on famine, Ó Gráda now moves beyond it to address broader global themes – civilian casualties from multiple causes in the two world wars. The transition feels natural. He is well placed to apply his expertise to wartime civilian deaths. His command of demographic, historical, and economic dynamics lends the book authority, reinforced by judicious use of secondary literature. Although examples digress as far afield as Julius Caesar, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, they are deployed without ostentation or faux-encyclopedism. From the outset, the study defines its agenda: ‘Many histories of war are military histories – but not this one. It focuses instead on the millions of civilians killed and injured during the twentieth century's two world wars’ (p. 1). Although the title suggests a focal point on the two world wars, Ó Gráda's temporal frame is broader. He situates the Second World War in a continuum beginning with Japan's invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and the interbellum conflicts in Ethiopia, Spain, and China. He traces vestiges of the First World War into the Russian Civil War and the Greco-Turkish War. The aftermath of the Second World War, too, extended into 1946–7, underscoring porous boundaries. Around this axis, Ó Gráda constructs a wide-ranging synthesis. The book comprises 11 thematic chapters, with the Introduction and Conclusion being notable for their clarity, brevity, and caution against relativizing suffering or constructing hierarchies of victimhood. Chapters 1–3 address the area where Ó Gráda is most authoritative – famines. He challenges the conventional tallies of 9.7 million civilian deaths in the First World War and 25.5 million in the Second World War as too low, arguing that war-induced famines alone may have claimed 30 million lives or more – far exceeding bombing, massacres, or genocide. This is the book's most original contribution: a reminder of the occluded cost of famine. The strength of Ó Gráda's treatment lies in its genuinely global perspective. He provides concise accounts of European episodes while extending the canvas to Persia, the Ottoman Empire, Africa, colonial famines, Java, Vietnam, India, and China. He is incisive when warning against false precision, emphasizing methodological impediments and preferring ranges to specious exactitude. Yet famine is not overrepresented. The structure remains proportionate, and subsequent chapters demonstrate the breadth of Ó Gráda's inquiry. Chapters 4–7 address genocides, aerial bombardment, and migration/displacement – refugees, forced labourers, and flows possibly exceeding 100 million. Chapters 8 and 9 consider sexual violence and atrocities, categories difficult to quantify but central to the civilian experience. Chapter 10 explores morale and trauma. Chapter 11 concludes with broader reflections. One of the book's most compelling features is Ó Gráda's reflective restraint about the pitfalls of quantification. As he warns, ‘big anonymous numbers may have shock value, but they compromise compassion and empathy. And counting deaths risks equating them in morally troubling ways’ (p. 15). These tensions form the methodological backbone. The Introduction highlights another key theme: the ‘dark figures’ of war (pp. 13–4), underscoring the uncertainty of civilian tolls. Soldier deaths are quantified more accurately than civilian deaths. The politicization of data is another thread. Governments tend to obfuscate civilian losses. As he puts it, ‘spurious numbers have a habit of taking on a life of their own’ (p. 13). Wikipedia's inconsistent estimates illustrate the point. Ó Gráda's reminder that ‘sometimes no numbers are better than bad numbers’ (p. 13) is a valuable corrective. Some cases rest on such flimsy guesstimates that they are essentially unquantifiable. Another important theme is Ó Gráda's insistence that numbers do matter. As he stresses, ‘this is not a book about numbers for the sake of numbers’. But in an era of conspiratorial denialism – ranging from Holocaust denial to newer forms of minimization – politicized statistics play a central role. Ó Gráda's dispassionate, evidence-based approach could hardly be more timely. ‘Without getting the numbers right when possible and pointing out when that is impossible’, he argues, historians cannot confront those who ‘deny or exaggerate wartime savagery’ (p. 2). The present reviewer is not in a position to judge the full range of Ó Gráda's synthesis beyond my specialization. What follows are, therefore, a few modest critical observations, not an attempt to foreground my field of penal history, but simply to indicate where figures might profit from correction. In a work of such reach, some contexts are necessarily treated briefly or omitted. Thus, while Ó Gráda devotes attention to Nazi concentration camps, Japanese rōmusha labourers, and prisoner-of-war (POW) camps, the Gulag – mentioned only once – was the primary engine of civilian death in the Soviet rear between 1941 and 1945 (especially if special settlers are included). Instead, he emphasizes Soviet efforts at combating mortality – ‘strenuous and broadly successful efforts’ at epidemic control and a ‘massive increase in reliance on the potato’ (pp. 94–5). In doing so, he follows the accounts of Donald Filtzer and Wendy Z. Goldman. Yet, this is only part of the story, for statistical deception in the Gulag concealed prisoner deaths, central to the Soviet wartime civilian mortality landscape. The ongoing controversy over its toll, ranging from 1.7 to 6 million, is not engaged with. Ó Gráda's estimate of two million Soviet civilian deaths in the unoccupied Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) seems too conservative (p. 95). Archival evidence points to nearly a million registered Gulag deaths, over half a million ‘medical releases’, 300,000–400,000 deportee deaths, and 700,000 victims of the Leningrad blockade – already close to three million, even before rear-area famine losses – a neglected theme. Ó Gráda notes that ‘civilian fatalities frequently went uncounted; indeed, figures were often deliberately obscured’ (p. 13), yet his discussion of Soviet concealment remains impressionistic. The USSR, unlike many other theatres of mass death, possessed a developed statistical apparatus. In contrast to the genuinely ‘unquantifiable’ cases he highlights – wartime rapes, the Armenian genocide, the genocide of the Roma, or Chinese civilian losses under Japanese occupation – Soviet numbers abound, but in distorted form. Gulag statistics were systematically manipulated through practices such as medical release, which displaced hundreds of thousands of deaths from the record – an extreme manifestation of the ‘dark figures’ he describes (pp. 13–5). Any picture of the wartime Soviet Union must reckon with its duplicitous statistical thinking (to borrow Theodore Porter's phrase). Ó Gráda emphasizes cannibalism in Nazi camps, but it was likewise widespread in the wartime Gulag. This unevenness reflects the state of scholarship rather than an omission yet highlights how asymmetrically labour camp systems of the twentieth century have been studied. A final note on the Epilogue. Ó Gráda cautiously estimates a 1:20 civilian-to-military death ratio in Ukraine by late 2023 (p. 401). Yet, this excludes the devastation of Mariupol, a city of nearly half a million before the invasion. Anecdotal evidence suggests mass deaths and graves in courtyards, none of which are reflected in UN estimates. With the war ongoing and such episodes unaccounted for, any tallies remain premature. Despite these provisos, the book is elegantly written, rich in information, and equipped with tables. It will be invaluable for students and scholars interested in the history of civilian fatalities and wartime violence. Ó Gráda has produced a scholarly success.