The Shocking Sizes Of Armies In World War II (Compared To Present Day)

World War II Armies By The Numbers

Grant Piper
6 min readSep 29, 2023
(Wikipedia / CC BY 4.0)

World War II was history’s bloodiest conflict. It consumed the world and led to millions of deaths. One of the reasons that the war was so horrible was due to the size of the militaries involved. World War II saw tens of millions of people serve in theaters around the world. Compared to military sizes today, the armies in World War II were absolutely massive. In fact, some of these numbers are shocking.

Here are the sizes of the armies involved in World War II compared to their modern counterparts.

Axis Armies

(Public domain)

Compared to the Allied nations, the Axis nations were relatively small. They had smaller populations, smaller resource bases, and less territory overall. This was a major hindrance to their war effort in the long run. Despite the bottlenecks, the Axis nations managed to field some truly spectacular military forces. Germany’s armies in World War I and World War II were some of the largest and most formidable forces in history.

Nazi Germany

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Grant Piper

Professional writer. Amateur historian. Husband, father, Christian.