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?
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.
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.
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.
Stalingrad is certainly up there then…More than 300,000 dead.
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”)?
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…
Not to dispute Cannae but The Battle of Towton 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)
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.
I vaguely remember hearing that the Somme battle/campaign saw something like 40,000 deaths in a one-hour period.
True?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.