World War II started on September 1, 1939, and wouldn't be resolved until September 2, 1945. This great war revolved around practically every country in the world but is mainly known as the Axis power, which consisted of countries such as Germany, Italy, and Japan, against the Allies power, which consisted of countries such as France, Great Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and to a lesser extent, China. World War II is seen to be the most devastating war due to how many casualties this war had. During the war, it has been said to have up to 56,000,000 deaths, which makes it the bloodiest conflict of all time.
We as a group were interested in how many deaths each country had, but to be more specific, which countries lost the highest percentage of their own population.
When beginning our World War II research for this project, our group decided to find two pieces of data, number of casualties per country and each countries population before the war began. We came across many different websites with good information on both topics but none had enough to create a through data set. After a long time of looking we came across a Wikipedia page that had the population per country and then found the information about the casualties from each countries from a different source.
Our goals for this project:
We put the information we found from Wikipedia, which was the population of the countires, in one excel sheet and inserted the information we found from our other site, which consisted of casualties. We then created another sheet titled "% Change" and used the quick excel tool (=casualties!B3/population!B3) to find the precentage of loss between that country, we then used the copy and paste drag technique to copy this formula and find each countries percentage loss. We then ordered the excel sheet to have the biggest percentage loss at the top.
Although this project was challenging to complete it taught our group valuable skills and made us learn a little more about World War II. It was fun to see all of our projects come full circle into an embedded webpage. Combining the data set project with the webpage project and also creating something new was interesting to learn about and practice. Our group especially liked this type of project because it again brought history into the class, which we all have interest in. Specifically from the topic we chose it also shows the sad history our country has and it can be compared to what is going on in the world today.
After our work with the data sets and combining them together, we found the conclusion to be much different than what we had expected. Our theory was that Germany or the Soviet union would have the biggest perentage loss of population, however, we came to realize that poland was the country that had the biggest population loss. This is because, even though the soviet union did have one of the most biggest amount of casualties, they had a much greater population. This resulted into the tragic outcome of poland being the country losing the most percentage of its population, which comes out at about 16%.
