When the war in the Pacific ended with the Japanese surrender, the fighting in Europe had been over for more than four months. In both areas, peace was accompanied by turmoil. In East Asia, the stages of Japanese forces surrendering in widely scattered areas from Burma to New Guinea, from Luzon to Java,were a lengthy and complicated process, and one followed soon after by new troubles between local nationalist groups and returning colonial powers. Only in Japan itself, ironically, was there a real peace at a time when China was about to dissolve in renewed—or continued—civil war. But everywhere there was at least a sense of hope that, with the end of the fighting, things would somehow be better.

The world looked back on years of fighting which had caused enormous casualties and vast destruction. The Soviet Union had suffered the largest number of deaths. Earlier estimates of 20 million, which were occasionally derided as too high, now turn out to have been too low. New research growing out of the more open atmosphere in recent years has been pointing to figures closer to, and possibly in excess of, 25 million deaths. Of these, at most one-third were military, thus demonstrating in this case what was true for the war as a whole: the civilian casualties exceeded the military. Chinese casualties are much more difficult to estimate than those of the Soviet Union, but 15 million dead is a reasonable approximation. In Poland, close to 6 million lost their lives, while Yugoslavia suffered between 1.5 and 2 million deaths. About 400,000 United Kingdom soldiers and civilians lost their lives; about 300,000 from the United States. Germany lost over 4 million and Japan over 2 million lives in the war. The total for the globe as a whole probably reached 60 million, a figure which includes the six million murdered because they were Jewish.

At the war's end, the movement of people caused by the great upheaval did not come to a halt. Millions had been displaced as refugees or deportees, and many of them found it difficult or impossible to go home.