So, what would be the largest one day death toll in history. I have heard reference that, as far as natural disasters go, there have been some very devistating earthquakes in China… although I’m guessing that all of the deaths did not happen in one day.
And how about man-made disasters? I have heard that the World Trade Tower disaster (5,097) set the new US record, surpassing the battle of Antietam, when some 4,300 people were killed.
I’d have to guess that the day the bomb fell on Hiroshima would be right up there.
Legend has it that when Genghis Khan invaded Afghanistan (of all places), his forces massacred over a million people in one day.
More verifiable is the China earthquake of 1556, which killed 830,000 people.
“The greatest death toll in modern times was from the Tangshan earthquake in eastern China in 1976. It’s believed that between 655,237 to 750,000 people were killed by the quake and the subsequent fires.”
…from a translated page. I’m Looking for corroboration. Earthquakes for some reason can happen days apart and be considered the same quake.
Incidentally: Estimated 140,000 dead in Hiroshima blast, and 70,000 in Nagasaki.
Are you including all the people who just happened to die on that day or just the incident?
Here is an article which details some of this century’s worst disasters http://www.rense.com/politics6/99s.htm .
An earthquake in China in 1976 is officially listed as causing 225,000 deaths, but the total is unofficially estimated as 655,000. A flood in Bangladesh in 1970 killed about 300,000.
Deaths due to blast and later radiation sickness killed about 103,000 combined in Hiroshima and Nagasaki; firebomb deaths in two raids on Tokyo were about 183,000 combined.
I should have given a cite for the A-bomb deaths; it seems there are a lot of different numbers. Here is an article written by the technicians with the Manhattan Project http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/abomb/mp10.htm (and it has a different total than the one I first listed) The totals for the Tokyo raids I got from here http://web2.iadfw.net/markpowl/nuclear.html but I’m sure there are a wide variety of numbers for those events also.
I’ll look it up this evening for verification, but a Mayan welcoming ceremony for the Spaniards went horribly wrong and 125 Spaniards managed to kill close to 80,000 while incurring no casulties themselves.
Is the number of fatalities at the WTC getting less? I saw a number this morning that indicated that there were 3800+ missing and 500+ confirmed fatalities. Was this right?
Big dates worth researching:
July 27/28, 1944: Fightng on Guam & Tinian; CBI theater; Normandy; Ukraine; Italy; firestorm in Hamburg.
February 13/14, 1945: Soviets invading Hungary, Allied troops in western Europe, Italy; CBI; Iwo Jima being bombarded; mopping up on Mindanao; 600-plane carrier raid on Tokyo and surrounding areas; firestorm in Dresden.
March 9/10, 1945: Fighting on Iwo Jima; American crossing of the Rhine at Remagen; collapse of German Eastern Front; Italy; CBI; firestorm in Tokyo.
I’d say that those dates are likely candidates for the 20th century, but that’s not the kind of math I want to do.
You are no doubt thinking of Pizarro’s attack on the Incas at Cajamarca in Peru in 1532. According to accounts by the Spanish, they routed an army of 80,000, but the Inca death toll was 6,000-7,000. These figures may have been exaggerated.
I saw it was less than 3,000 a few days ago. Read it on the Drudge Report. Something about the number of death claims was about half of the 5,000 number they’ve been touting.
Interesting dates, to be sure, but I don’t see any WWI dates in there. How about the first day of the battle of the Somne, where the English alone suffered 60,000 casualties on the first day, including close to 20,000 dead? Estimates put the whole cost of the Somme at around 1,050,000 casulaties, including roughly 250,000 dead. Mind you, The Somme was stretched out over four months, but still a bloody bill.
Estimates place WWI total dead at around 8.5 million dead for the whole war.
Still, nothing and no one kills like God, and the 1976 Chinese earthquake, or the 1556 Chinese earthquake, or the floods in Bangladesh pretty much take the cake.
Here is a nifty little table that lists out disasters by year, location, and death toll.
It looks like the champion is the earthquake in Northeren Egypt, 1201, but there are plenty o’ contenders, mostly in China.
Yes, that’s exactly what I was thinking of. Thank you. Sorry I didn’t have the details at hand. 168 Spaniards vs about 80,000 of Atahuallpa’s “troups.” Estimates are, as you said, around 7,000 dead.
Not as large of a death toll as I had first thought but that’s still an extremely large number. I mean, it’s an average kill of 42 Incans per soldier.
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The Civil War battle at Antietam lost a lot of people in a couple of days - around 20,000 I think. For US wars I believe that is a record.
When Iraqi troops were withdrawing from Kuwait in the Gulf War they took what is called The Highway to Hell. They became completely trapped and because they were considered to be retreating rather than withdrawing 25,000 of them were turned into charcoal. No-one knows for sure how many were killed, of course, but if you do an internet search that’s the number that comes up most frequently.
If this thread serves no other purpose, it should alert us to how speculative estimates of death are, whether talking about an earthquake in 1201 or 1976.
Inky-'s post quoted a death toll of 650,000-750,000 for the Chinese earthquake in 1976. To Ink’s credit, he/she noted it was a translated page and was continuing to look for corroboration.
Tranquilis offered a nifty chart. It showed the 1976 earthquake in China had a death toll of 240,000.
And how do you arrive at a death toll of 1.1 million in Egypt in 1201? Who did the math? What was the population of the affected area at the time?
I think that WWII deaths and Civil War battle deaths would be somewhat accurate, but third world disasters, especially if they occured hundreds of years ago would be more problematical.
The Korsun slaughter on 2/17/44 killed over 20,000 German soldiers in the space of three hours. The Germans were retreating when they ran into a large force of SOviet tanks, as well as Cossack cavalry. http://members.iinet.net.au/~gduncan/massacres.html
And the Yellow river flood of 1938, when Chinese Nationalists blew up the flood dykes of the Yellow River, killing 893,303 by drowning, and displacing about 4 million others. http://members.iinet.net.au/~gduncan/massacres.html
Assuming a worldwide population of 5*10[sup]9[/sup], and average life of 50 years (probably too high on a world-wide scale we arrive at 100 million ‘normal’ deaths per day. I would guess that this has seasonal fluctuations, and a cold winter day in China, or an exceptionally hot day at the end of a tropical dry season can seriously change this. Any disasters or massacres are simply too small not to disappear in the statistical fluctuations.
[cynic conclusion]I all shows that even when it comes to killing large populations, we cannot (yet) beat mother nature. Maybe with a serious deployment of H-bombs we’d come close…