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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)