The truth is 'we all' experienced both wars in very many wildly different ways - varying from 'the best of times' to 'the worst of all possible times'.
'Follow the death trail'
No single statistic fully encapsulates that awkward and un-popular fact.
However, looking at the total number of deaths caused by each war as a percentage of each nation or colony's pre-war population , is a crude but vivid start.
Hollywood's America lost .13% of its population in WWI : Serbia (and their opponents the Ottoman Empire) lost 100x as many people !
We know exactly how many of those Serbs - children, old women , men - died : because postcards of their mass garrotting were as popular among Austrian soldiers as postcards of similar killings of Jewish Serbs were in WWII .
(Postcards of genocide seems to have gone out of fashion by the time today's Serbs set to in Moslem Bosnia.)
WWI Romania and Bulgaria weren't far behind in dying like human flies.
Far behind these horrific totals but still way ahead of America , were the better known combatants of WWI : Germany, France and Britain.
The list of Peoples who didn't suffer at all during WWI , peoples who suffered far less than even the Americans but instead positively prospered, begin with the export-oriented Neutrals of Latin America.
WWII ?
America's deaths as percentage of total population doubled in WWII over WWI , but was still 50x lower than that of Poland , and 100x lower than that of Belarus (of which much of it was part of 1939 Poland).
So America putting on the spectacles of diplomatic realism/ realpolitik and viewing the 1939 German invasion of Poland as something that didn't bother American interests (as opposed to American consciences) obviously paid off for America's total body count.
More ?
How about the 'high above the fray' morality of the world's leading Neutrals when Germany invaded Poland ?
Unfortunately for the Neutrals' cant , the highest percentage of national Jews who were killed by Hitler were not in the expected places - like Germany or Poland - but was in Neutral Netherlands instead !
Canada wins the no-Good War, one consumer purchase at a time
Canada went to war against Germany in the beginning of 1939, but only stopped producing her last car for the domestic consumer market at the end of February 1942 - even after the Americans - who had only entered the war mere weeks earlier!
Canadian consumer spending on things like cars , jewelry, stoves and movies went up and up all during Canada's Total War while (limited) rationing didn't begin till years into the war, lay lightly on most and often ended before war's end.
(And WWI Canada never had coupon rationing at all.)
Meanwhile , elsewhere in our so-called "shared war experience", hunger-and-cold-induced diseases was the second biggest killer of WWII - just behind death by murder and well ahead of war-related accidents.
Interested to discover more ?
It may help to be too young to actually remember the war - you have no share in collective half truths to defend.
I myself am ten years too young to remember WWII .
So I can actually read primary documents like Canada's WWII newspapers and magazines almost wide-eyed and innocent.
I simply lack the pre-focused blinkered eyes of so many of our older Canadian historians born in the 1920s and 1930s.
Graham Broad
So I was not at all discomforted to read Graham Broad's eye-opening "A SMALL PRICE TO PAY" , a revisionist's hard look at the collective myth of how Canadians suffered along with WWII Europe when it came to rationing and shortages.
Anyone who has ever trolled through microfilm of WWII era newspapers or magazines looking for another (non-consumer-oriented) story can't help but notice (just in passing) the many lush consumer ads.
Enough ads consumed in passing to cast wide doubt on our high-school-originated myth about Canada's Home Front as a time of shortages and rationing.
My own opinion is this myth of 'hard times patriotically endured' originated after the war , among adults and teens who had actually lived through Canada's WWII and knew better.
They personally remembered WWII generally as good times and exciting, purposeful times - particularly compared to the lost hopes of the Dirty Thirties.
Yes, the good times feeling were dampened every time those on the Home Front learned that boys down their street had died overseas.
But perhaps one 'boy' in fifty the right age to serve overseas actually died overseas in the two thousand days of the war - mostly in the last year of the European part of WWII.
Still if a close relative was overseas, particularly in a combat arms, the worry never stopped.
But the amount of Canadian worry was moderated by the fact that Canadians combat deaths were probably less than training deaths for many months of the war .
By contrast British and German families saw heavy death notices in the local papers every single month of their long war.
At war's end, Canadians, like much of the rest of the world, were stunned by a shocking year of revelations.
It became obvious that the Germans and Japanese had indeed murdered millions in non-combat situations and had ensured that many hundreds of millions more had almost starved to death.
Unconsciously, Canadian began to mute their discussion of 'the good times' in front of their children and grandchildren.
Instead they talked more of the 'boys' who died overseas and of the shortages at home and of our tremendous industrial contribution making up for Canada's relatively low death rate.
"We all - Canadians at home and Dutch in the Netherlands - we all suffered."
Yes indeed suffered - but the surviving Poles and Dutch Jews would say - not at all equally ....
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