What Are Among the Bloodiest Battles in History?

[tsunamisurfer]

What battles do historians generally consider to be the absolute goriest and deadliest?

(I realize historical data are incomplete, the term "bloodiest" is ill-defined, and many confounding variables complicate answering this question, but give it your best educated guess--in the way you choose to define "bloodiest," whether it involve absolute numbers of deaths, kill-to-combatant ratios, etc.)

Where, for instance, would the battle of Okinawa rank? The Somme? Antietam?

[Epimetheus]

The battle of Cannae is reputed to be the bloodiest. No single battle has seen more dead. Out of 70,000 Roman troops, only about 2000 survived.

[MEBuckner]

Moderator's Note: This will probably be answered differently depending on different defintions of "bloodiest" (or "battle"), and there will be differences of opinion on the actual numbers even if the definitions are agreed on, but I think it will still fit best in General Questions.

[paperbackwriter]

My definition of "bloodiest" is most casualties (dead, wounded, missing, or captured). I would think World War One has good candidates:
Verdun Total French casualties: 377,000, Total German casualties: 337,000
Somme (1916) British & Empire casualties: 419,654, French casualties: 204,253 German casualties: 450,000-680,000
Brusilov's Offensives (1916-1917) German casualties: over 450,000 Russian casualties: estimated around 1,000,000

Just for illustration. Although maybe if the definiotn of bloodiest is fewest survivors, or highest casualty rates, these are not the best examples.

[Daoloth]

Stalingrad is certainly up there then...More than 300,000 dead.

[Huerta88]

Antietam: seems to be agreed bloodiest single day.

Wasn't there some fairly ghastly carnage in the Taiping business in China ca. 1850?

Tsunami: Maybe specify a time frame (i.e., length of "battle")? Stalingrad lasted 900 days. Isn't that more of a siege? Specify "bloodiest" (deaths? deaths as a proportion of forces? deaths per day? deaths+injuries+invalided ("casualties")?

[SenorBeef]

The somme, verdun, and Stalingrad aren't really battles, as such. They're operations or campaigns. Battle tends to denote a specific action or series of actions against the same core forces in a short period of time, at least to me.

[Daoloth]

Originally posted by SenorBeef
The somme, verdun, and Stalingrad aren't really battles, as such. They're operations or campaigns. Battle tends to denote a specific action or series of actions against the same core forces in a short period of time, at least to me.

Then I'd say Cannae. Or perhaps some of Genghis or Tamerlane's exploits...

[Chez Guevara]

Not to dispute Cannae but The Battle of Towton (http://www.fifteenthcentury.net/towton.html) on 29/03/1461 during the Wars of the Roses puts down a marker for a single day conflict on British soil.

28,000 combatants died in 10 hours. The battle took place during a snowstorm and contemporary reports describe the snow turning red with blood.

The surviving Lancastrians ultimately fled the battle scene and, pursued by the Yorkists, many dived into a river and drowned. Towton was a truly brutal engagement.
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(Modern historians give no credence, on logistical grounds, to the figure of 200,000 allegedly killed in a single day at Chalons (Huns v. Romans) in AD 451)

[China Guy]

Go back through Chinese history and there are some incredibly bloody battles. The Taiping uprising was not a single battle but millions and millions died. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms mentions numerous battles and campaigns for a single objective where over a million soldiers died.

[tsunamisurfer]

I vaguely remember hearing that the Somme battle/campaign saw something like 40,000 deaths in a one-hour period.

True?

[jimmmy]

Cannae is generally accepted as the single bloodiest day in a War.

If 10 months of fighting in pretty much the exact same place fits the definition of a "battle", then the "Battle of Verdun" an orgy of death between the French and German armies is my nomination for the Bloodiest battle. There were an estimated 540,000 French and 430,000 German casualties*. Recall Nothing came of this. No strategic advantages were gained for either side. The Battle of Verdun site itself is remembered as the "battlefield with the highest density of dead per square yard."

*This may beat the 4 month Battle of the Somme where losses on the British 419,654 with German casualties were 450,000, but if the German losses were higher (as a range is sometimes given) then this might be the bloodiest. Also, the Somme took place over a [very] few miles unlike Verdun. In any event, the second bloodiest day (after Cannae) and bloodeist day of WWI, as tsunami mentions, was the first day of the Somme when the British suffered +57,000 casualties to move circa a half mile.

[Frostillicus]

Just for clarification, the Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862 was the bloodiest day in American history, not world history. The many WWI battles mentioned above (the Somme, Verdun, etc.) had much higher single day casualties than did Antietam.

[Tamerlane]

Then I'd say Cannae. Or perhaps some of Genghis or Tamerlane's exploits...

You wrang? ;)

Actually Tamerlane's body count in set-piece battles weren't the highest - His biggest victories like Kanduzcha ( 1391 ), Terek River ( 1395 ), and Angora ( 1402 ), weren't battles of annhilation. Rather it was his slaughters and sacks after major battles and sieges ( especially of cities like Baghdad, Smyrna, Delhi, and Isfahan ), that made his infamy.

The Chingisids score rather higher. The conservative estimate of the body count at the Sajo River ( Mohi ) where Subotai crushed the Hungarians, was 60,000 Hungarian dead ( out of an estimated 100,000 ). Many more of those Hungarians later died in the post-battle mopping up actions.

But for sheer annihilation of a professional army in a single engagement, Cannae may well be tops. Hannibal deserves his reputation.

- Tamerlane

[Hail Ants]

While Antietam was the bloodiest single day in US warfare, the 3 days at Gettysburg was the costliest battle ever fought in the western hemisphere.

[Daoloth]

At least one cite I saw stated that 300,000 died at the Battle of Nicea during the 1st Crusade. I can't vouch for the accuracy, though.

Other battles whose death tolls may rival Cannae include Salamis and Guagamala. Worth investigating.

As to Gettysburg being the deadliest battle in the western hemisphere...certainly the destruction of Tenochtitlan (sp?) rivals, if not surpasses, in bodycount.

[Slithy Tove]

Originally posted by Hail Ants
While Antietam was the bloodiest single day in US warfare, the 3 days at Gettysburg was the costliest battle ever fought in the western hemisphere.

You may be right about that, as a 3-day toll, but as catastrophies in the Western Hemisphere go, I don't think our civil war can compare to the War of the Triple Alliance, 1864-1870, when Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay ganged up on Paraguay. By the end of the war, Paraguay's army was mosly little boys armed with rocks. The 1870 male population of Paraguay was 1/10th of 1864, these men and boys killed or taken as slaves to Brazil.

Another bit of trivia made only more sadder by its obscurity - the bloodiest American battle was not Gettysburg or The Bulge, but the six-week, 60,000-casualty Battle of the Argonne in WWI. We can look back at Gettyburg and weigh it aginst the feed slaves, and the Bulge against the liberated Jews, but we don't have much to show for 1917-18, so we largely ignore that part of our history.

[Daoloth]

Originally posted by Slithy Tove


You may be right about that, as a 3-day toll, but as catastrophies in the Western Hemisphere go, I don't think our civil war can compare to the War of the Triple Alliance, 1864-1870, when Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay ganged up on Paraguay. By the end of the war, Paraguay's army was mosly little boys armed with rocks. The 1870 male population of Paraguay was 1/10th of 1864, these men and boys killed or taken as slaves to Brazil.


Factoid about Paraguay in that war: in those 6 years they lost 58% of their population (dropped from 525,000 to 221,000 for a loss of 304,000).

[I am Sparticus]

I would think Verdun, Somme and Stalingrad would "take the cake" so to speak. 300,000 seems low for Stalingrad, I seem to recall that was the Russian body count for the Battle of Berlin.

[Daoloth]

Originally posted by I am Sparticus
I would think Verdun, Somme and Stalingrad would "take the cake" so to speak. 300,000 seems low for Stalingrad, I seem to recall that was the Russian body count for the Battle of Berlin.

Yeah, Stalingrad had upwards of 800,000 (300,000 Axis, 500,000 Russian, or thereabouts), but I wasn't positive when I first posted.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by China Guy
Go back through Chinese history and there are some incredibly bloody battles. The Taiping uprising was not a single battle but millions and millions died. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms mentions numerous battles and campaigns for a single objective where over a million soldiers died.

That's probably over a period of time with some poetic exaggeration thrown in. I also don't think there were 1 million dead. Probably like 1 million casualties.

[Urban Ranger]

China Guy, check out the Battle of Feishui that took place during the Eastern Jin dynasty. A foreign army with allegedly one million men attacked the Jin army of 80,000 and lost. If that is true, that should be the one battle with the most casaulties.

[casdave]

Among the roll of horror maybe we should include the 3rd battle of Ypres(Passchendael)

This is the engagement that provides the worst and stereotypical image of mud, gas, futility.

Around 550,000 dead.

Although Haig was criticised and this engagement is still used to question his command, Haig had already realised long ago that WW1 would not be a battle of strategic victories of manoever and tactics in the usual sense, but instead strategic victory would come through attrition.

His brutal calculations were simply that the allies had up to 9 million lives to throw into war whereas Germany and its allies had under 3 millions.

This battle hit the British harder in terms of numbers, but these were replaceable, the German casualties were not.

The final result of the battle was not the ground won, but that it set a timetable for Germany to try and win, if they could not do so within the year it was clear that they would lose, Passchendael is the reason for the final German assault in 1918 which was a last ditch attempt to win.

Although the cost in life was apalling and seemed pointless, this battle was instrumental in the defeat of Germany, territory turned out to be of secondary importance, though the ground taken was important in the final German assualt of 1918 as it slowed their advance enough to organise defences and finally halt them.

[hermn8r]

Not entirely relevant to the OP, but I have always found these kind of 'statistics' interesting.

Stats from WWII:

http://www.angelfire.com/ct/ww2europe/stats.html

I never realized the total loss to the USSR during the war.

[Sofa King]

I know it's rather unfair to point this out, but if you want to consider the number of deaths at the hand of military action in a short time-span, we would have to look to the civilians, specifically the fireboming and atomic missions of World War II.

In World War II, Cologne, Hamburg, Dreden, Tokyo, Nagoya, Kobe, Osaka, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki (and probably several others I have inadvertantly omitted) all suffered over 20,000 deaths in a single day, often several times that number. Oddly, I find that the estimates of the wounded very often closely parallel the number of presumed dead. For example, it is widely accepted that 90,000 people died on the night of March 9-10, 1945 in Tokyo, with a roughly equal number of wounded.

By contrast, the Okinawa Campaign probably cost at least 100,000 Japanese deaths, 12,000 American deaths, and up to 150,000 Okinawan civilian deaths, but that was over a period of three full months.

It's a rare day in military history when soldiers die at a rate as prolific as those of civilians being firebombed. Cannae, Borodino, and the first day of the Somme appear to compare well; I'm sure there are others. But none compare to the 50,000 who died in an instant at Hiroshima. It's still war, it's still bloody, and it's damn well worth pointing out that these days civillians can pay a higher butchers' bill than that of the soldiers we assume will do the fighting and dying.

[Motog]

Originally posted by China Guy
Go back through Chinese history and there are some incredibly bloody battles. The Taiping uprising was not a single battle but millions and millions died. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms mentions numerous battles and campaigns for a single objective where over a million soldiers died.

The Taiping Rebellion lasted for 14 years and is estimated to have claimed over 20 million victims (Encyclopedia Brittanica says possibly as many as 30 million) as a direct result - not to mention that the Qing rulers destroyed 60 cities afterwards as punishment of their unfaithful citizens

More relevant to this discussion, when the Imperial troops - led by Tseng Kno-Fan and General Charles G. Gordon recaptured Nanking, they are said to have massacred over 100,000 of the inhabitants over three days (July 19-21, 1864)