I heard Mayor Guillani on SNL say that more Americans died on 9/11 than on D-Day. I really find that hard to believe. Less than 6000 Americans died on D-day? It seems that number is too small. Now, I’m really no WW2 scholar, and I don’t know a lot about it, but it just seems that number is too small.
Google is your friend
The bloodiest day on American soil (prior to this) was the Battle of Antietam during the Civil War. Estimates on that day were around 5000 dead.
Not that D-Day was on American soil…
For D-Day, it seems to be 2400 casualties for Omaha Beach and 300 casualties for Utah Beach. Can’t find figures for the Airborne anywhere. Keep in mind that casualties don’t equal deaths. Wounded enough to stop fighting is a casualty as well.
Google is your friend, but getting a straight answer to this one is more difficult than you might expect. Photog’s cite is a bit odd because of its mention of 4,000 French casualties – so far as I know, the Free French had only a token force involved on D-Day. (Maybe it refers to civilian bombing casualties?)
With considerable digging, I found this, which comes from a 1945 War Department publication on the D-Day landing at Omaha Beach:
“In the course of a week’s fighting casualties had mounted to 5,846 of which 1,225 were killed in action; more than half of these casualties came in the first day. Heaviest losses had fallen to the 29th Division, with 2,440 for the period; the 1st Division had 1,744 casualties, and
the 2d Division 855.”
Mind you, I think this only includes troops at Omaha Beach. So casualties in, say, the 101st Airborne wouldn’t be included; nor would the 210 casualties at Utah Beach.
See: http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/academic/history/marshall/military/wwii/D-Day/omaha.beach/omaha.txt
Don’t forget… Hawaii wasn’t even a State yet! Not that it should matter, but it’s not like it was the vacation spot we know today! Pearl Harbor was a military base - our foothold in the Pacific.
Hard to say for certain. I guess someone needs to look at the unit records.
From this Brit site:
This site speaks of Utah beach:
So 2500 at Omaha, 250 at Utah and 6000 paratroopers (but how about the less seriously wounded?), plus support losses, plus MIAs.
Re Antietam: This site states
All the numbers we’re seeing indicate that the WTC deaths do indeed outnumber American D-Day deaths. 3,393 Americans were killed or missing on D-Day itself, according to the following site:
http://history.acusd.edu/gen/WW2Timeline/Europe07.html
However, it doesn’t indicate whether “missing” includes captured POWs.
That 6000 casualties figure for airborne troops seems a bit off. According to the following site, there were 6035 American casualties on D-Day total:
That more-or-less coincides with the numbers given in the first link.
In any case, this demonstrates that the Web is not an all-purpose research tool. I spent about an hour fiddling around with this and still didn’t get an acceptable answer. Someone sitting in a research library could get a good answer in about ten minutes by looking in the official military history.
What do you know–the official US Army history of D-Day is online. Here’s the chapter about D-Day itself:
http://www.army.mil/cmh-pg/books/wwii/7-4/7-4_cont.htm
No table of casualties, alas. However, there is casualty information for the airborne units:
82nd Airborne: 156 killed, 756 missing.
101st Airborne: 182 killed, 501 missing.
Note that “missing” includes both MIAs and captured POWs.
The chapter explains the probable source of the 6,000 casualties figure for the airborne units. At the time, the 82nd Airborne reported 4,000 casualties, simply because so many of the paratroopers were dropped off-target and were lost. Of course, many of those lost troops eventually found their way back to the Allies. In August 1944, the figures were revised down to the ones quoted in this post.
As Wumpus has shown, numbers are not necessarily to be trusted.
That having been said, I offer this table from the Information Please Almanac.
If we accept the current estimates of 6,000 dead and 7,000 injured, combine the two and call them “casualties,” we see that the 13,000 victims of the attack on the World Trade Center exceed the total battlefield dead and wounded for
- The Gulf War (approx. 1,000)
- The Spanish American War (approx. 2,000)
- The Mexican War (approx. 5,900, not including those who succumbed to the vomito)
- The Indian Wars (1817-1898) (approx. 1,000)
- The War of 1812 (approx. 6,800)
- The Revolutionary War (approx. 10,500)
Leaving only the Civil War, World Wars I and II, Korea, and Vietnam with more “casualties,” as I am defining it. Not one of those wars above claims more battlefield dead than the 6,000 presumed missing in New York, according to the above cited source.
Please note that these numbers don’t include deaths due to illness, exposure, or privation, or civilian deaths, so the comparison is not strictly accurate.
Nevertheless, I think it is a sobering comparison.
Wasn’t Iwo Jima our bloodiest battle in WW2, moreso than D-Day? Although I’m not sure that was all in one day.
For the most Americans lost in a day, the hurricane at Galveston, Texas in Sept 1900 cost 7000 (according to my World Almanac).
Not to lessen the tragedy of the WTC attack or the losses in the battles cited, but this might lend some additional perspective.
The site referenced below puts the annual death rate at 9 per 1000 for the US. It also puts the US population at 284.5 million. This works out to about 7000/day.
http://www.prb.org/Content/NavigationMenu/Other_reports/2000-2002/sheet1.html
What does that have to do with D-Day?
Because the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor.
Duh.
And was it over when they did that? Hell no!
Not to be overly morbid or anything, but what about outside America? What has been, so far, the single bloodiest day in history?
My guess is sometime in WWI (I’ve heard things like 40,000 total casualties in two days for battles, but I’m not up on my history of it.)
- The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor
- It’s wasn’t on D-Day
okay I admit it, I’m too lazy (and, um, inebriated) to plod through Google at the moment. But a friend has advised me that the deadliest day prior to the WTC attack was not the Battle of Antietam, as so many news reports lead us to believe. Apparently some hurricane/flood in Texas (Galveston???) long ago was deadlier. Anyone have info on this?
The invasion of Normandy (D-Day) took place June 5, 1944.
The bombing of Pearl Harbor Hawaii by the Japanese took place December 7, 1941.