I note there are some similar GQ threads, but not quite exactly this one, so…
I’m reading a history of warfare, and the author says that Tannenburg had the most casualties of any battle in history. I would have guessed WWI, but would have thought it would be one of the big trench-against-trench battles in the west.
It invites the question (one avoids saying it “begs the question!”) of “what is a battle?” Tannenburg might be seen as a series of battles, not just one. But the same might be true of Somme/Ypres/etc.
If not Tannenburg, then what would take first prize for the deadliest battle in history?
Tanneberg I think was one of the most lopsided battles- it was something like 78000 Russian KIA to 1800 German, but Gallipoli had a higher overall KIA count, and longer battles like the Ypres battles or Verdun had dramatically higher numbers of dead.
But then you start looking at what constitutes a battle; is it something like say… Zama or Gettysburg where the armies squared off and fought until one side was destroyed or disengaged over the course of a day or three, or is it something longer, like say… the Battle of Stalingrad, where the battle had millions of men fighting over the course of six months or so? I mean, Stalingrad is definitely bloodier, but something like Gettysburg or the first day of the Somme was probably more intense.
I though you were talking about this Tannenburg and immediately got confused. I mean sure, it was a serious defeat for the Teutonic Knights, but bloodiest in history? I have a hard time dragging myself into the modern era sometimes .
Anyway, yeah - what counts as a battle is of course the crux of things. Back in the 15th century it was pretty clear - battles lasted a day or sometimes two at the very most and were measured by the period of time the opposing armies were very roughly in contact.
But the Battle of the Dniepr took place over four months over an 870 mile front. It was very technically two armies in very roughly continuous contact, hence a “battle.” But war on this kind of industrial scale really can’t be compared to pre-modern examples. It is apples and oranges.
So my answer is that there is no one answer. Only multiple potential answers, separable by time and circumstance. Also a lot of hearsay, because estimating pre-modern armies and casualty figures is as much art as science. Cannae in 216 BC seems to have been tremendously bloody and maybe generated 10:1 casualties in one day. Maybe.
But you can come up with all sorts of metrics - Carrhae in 53 BC generated bucket-loads of Roman casualties for apparently only a relative handful of Parthian losses. Which is worse? More killed or a higher proportion of one side killed?
That confusion is intentional. It was Hindenburg who insisted on the WW1 battle to be referred to as the Battle of Tannenberg, to overshadow the defeat of the Teutonic Knights in the earlier fight of the same name. The eponymous place was a fair distance away from the 1914 events.
According to the following article, Tannenberg didn’t even make the top ten bloodiest battles in WWI. That “honor” went to the Brusilov offensive in 1916 (2.3 million casualties).
Thank you all for insight (and spelling correction…) I was afraid it would come down to a question of “what is a battle.”
I, personally, am minded not to count Verdun and its kin, because there were distinct separate “impulses” of fighting, with at least some rests between. On the other hand, I don’t want to deny multi-day battles like Gettysburg, just because there were overnight rests… Aiee! A “strong” definition is probably not possible!
True… I wasn’t aware of the Battle of Blood River. But again, the question really is what @Tamerlane and I are getting at- battles have changed in nature multiple times over the millenia- you can’t really compare something like Zama, Pharsalus, Hastings or Bosworth with something like the Somme, Stalingrad or Sedan. And even there, something like Sedan is a different animal when compared to the Battle of the Dniepr, the battle of Normandy or the Battle of Kursk.
For some points of comparison- there were about 200,000 men, more or less present at Gettysburg. Sedan had about that many on the Prussian side alone. And the Battle of Normandy had about that many casualties on the Allied side. So at each step, the numbers grow dramatically, and so does the scale in general.
This is an arbitrary line but perhaps counting the most killed in a single day (24 hour) timespan.
Certainly those bigger battles went for many days but presumably they all had a “worst” day in there somewhere.
Also, I think you would want to distinguish between a lopsided victory where one side gets massacred as opposed to a slugging match where both sides got heavily damaged.
For this I would guess the “winner” would be found in WWI (Ypres or Somme probably but there were some others such as Verdun, Marne or Passchendaele.
It isn’t quite the same, but it certainly has the advantage of being clear and concrete, without too much wiggle room for definitions. Tannenberg might still have some claim to fame here, but, yeah, the big trench attacks are the likeliest winners.
Bloodiest 24 hour battles (with reliable casualty records’ are generally considered to be Borodino, First Day on the Somme, and Battle of the Frontiers.
The fighting involved around 250,000 troops and left at least 68,000 dead, making Borodino the deadliest day of the Napoleonic Wars and the bloodiest single day in the history of warfare until the First Battle of the Marne in 1914. SOURCE
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