Digital History. The Civil War was the deadliest war in American history. Altogether, over 600,000 died in the conflict, more than World War I and World War II combined. A soldier was 13 times more likely to die in the Civil War than in the Vietnam War.
Heart diseases were the most common cause, responsible for a third of all deaths globally. Cancers were in second, causing almost one-in-five deaths. Taken together, heart diseases and cancers are the cause of every second death.
The Shaanxi earthquake killed 830,000 people. As days go, January 23 1556 was a proper stinker. According to most accounts, this fateful date saw more human lives extinguished than any other day in history, with the vast majority of these deaths occurring in the Shaanxi province of northwest China.
In WWII there were 384,000 soldiers killed in combat, but a higher civilian death toll (70,000, as opposed to 2,000 in WWI), largely due to German bombing raids during the Blitz: 40,000 civilians died in the seven-month period between September 1940 and May 1941, almost half of them in London.
The Vietnam Conflict Extract Data File of the Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS) Extract Files contains records of 58,220 U.S. military fatal casualties of the Vietnam War.
Some of the United States' most prominent defeats include the American-Algerian War, the War of 1812, Red Cloud's War, the Formosa Expedition, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Bay of Bigs Invasion, and the War in Afghanistan.
The tonnage of bombs including chemical arms used by the US in Vietnam exceeds that was used throughout the Second World War. This is the reason why some historians consider this war more brutal than the Second World War.
World War II was the deadliest conflict in human history marked by 50 to 85 million fatalities, most of whom were civilians in the Soviet Union and China.
More than 2,600 Americans perished around the world on October 24, 1944—more than on any other single day of the conflict—yet the day remains overshadowed by more widely remembered dates in WWII history. Catch up on all podcasts from The National WWII Museum. Subscribe and continue the conversation: YouTube.
Approximately 24,000 to 25,000 British soldiers are estimated to have died over the course of the American Revolution. While about half of the British forces were loyalists who lived in the colonies, the other half was composed of soldiers who had traveled overseas.
The deadliest single-day battle in American history, if all engaged armies are considered, is the Battle of Antietam with 3,675 killed, including both United States and Confederate soldiers (total casualties for both sides were 22,717 dead, wounded, or missing Union and Confederate soldiers September 17, 1862).
Total deaths of coalition forces (Britain, USA and allies) totalled 3,486. A further estimated 2,000 British military and civilian personnel were wounded in action.
In 1973, the United States listed 2,646 Americans as unaccounted for from the entire Vietnam War. By October 2022, 1,582 Americans remained unaccounted for, of which 1,004 were classified as further pursuit, 488 as non-recoverable and 90 as deferred.
The USA was afraid that communism would spread to South Vietnam and then the rest of Asia. It decided to send money, supplies and military advisers to help the South Vietnamese Government.
In total around 36,000 U.S. military servicemembers were killed in Korea, out of a total of around 40,000 deaths for the UN forces combined. The war was the United States' second deadliest conflict of the Cold War, as well as its fifth deadliest ever, after the Vietnam War, World War I, World War II, and the Civil War.
The Soviet Union lost around 27 million people during the war, including 8.7 million military and 19 million civilians. This represents the most military deaths of any nation by a large margin.
A British tech entrepreneur used a search algorithm to find out a day in history where nothing of note happened. He determined it was 70 years ago. April 11, 1954 has the dubious honour as being known as the most boring day in history.
Patterns of violence appear to peak in the Copper Age (Circa 4500 BC to 3300 BC), as indicated by bashed skulls and weapon-inflected wounds, and then decline in the early/mid Bronze Age (Crica 3300 BC to 1500 BC).
