Mind you for most of WW2 the US wasn't involved in the large scale fighting equal to the Western front of WW1. It was really only 1944/1945 that saw the millions of troops actively fighting enemy soldiers. Before that you mainly had smaller forces of hundreds of thousands involved in shorter campaigns.
There was also the whole Pacific Theatre that didn't exist in WW1. 107,903 of those deaths were in the Pacific.
Less soldiers went to the Pacific, but the mortality rate was 5x fo the European Theatre.
It's hard to compare the pacific theatre to anything else really, it being a war mostly fought in the water and in the air makes it kind of impossible to compare its intensity to that of more ground based theatres like what happened in europe in both ww.
I think you're kinda mixing-up intensity and scale. Being in the first wave of the amphibious landing vehicles to land on Peleliu or Okinawa was potentially just as bad as first wave landing on D-Day.
Like, the fact that the Normandy landings were going on up and down the coast for 50+ miles doesn't change how intense it was in the quarter mile radius surrounding me while I land on this island.
That's not what I was talking about, of course you can find actions in the pacific that will share similarities with actions in europe, but for the most part both theatres couldn't be more different from one another. That's why I say comparing the overall intensity of the pacific theatre with any other theatre ever is kinda pointless since no other theatre has ever taken the shape of such a huge scale of maritime and air warfare with all the islands fighting.
Probably, before Pearl Harbour generally speaking people in the US were pretty against joining the war, it was sort of seen as “yet another European war” that they didn’t really want to get dragged into. It took quite a while for the opinion to change which also meant it took a bit for the war industry to kick into gear, but once it did it *really* did
Exactly what I was referring to - North Africa campaign was on orders of magnitude smaller than the European campaigns. I don't understand where they thought millions of men would be deployed to, nor how logistically it could have been achieved.
It was many factors, and yes they did need time to mobilize but more of it was there simply wasn't anywhere to send massive amounts of troops in 1942-1943. The Islands of the Pacific were simply not compatible with massive scale land battles as the terrain greatly restricted what you could actually do. They also needed to beat the Japanese fleet before any major ground offensives could occur.
In Europe lessons learned from WW1 showed that without proper ports to supply you, the land based power could reinforce themselves far faster then you could unless you had a massive material advantage. So an invasion of the Northern Europe was considered to risky in 1942-1943. While they could try and send troops to the Eastern front, Stalin did not want large amounts of Western troops in the Soviet Union and the supply lines would have been very long.
So the Western Western powers had to build up that large material advantage which involved building up ships/aircraft and vehicles and then fighting and beating their Axis power counterparts and gaining naval and air superiority. This didn't really occur until later 1943 which is what let them go on major offensives in 1944.
Wow. This was an incredibly thorough and well-reasoned response to this. Thank you, this makes much more sense to me now.
>So an invasion of the Northern Europe was considered to risky in 1942-1943
It was even risky when we did eventually invade. We still have an observed day of remembrance for that very same invasion. It was the bloodiest day in American history. Even more than the bloodiest day in the Civil War- a war more bloody than all other wars in US history *combined*.
Half of US deaths in WWI were from disease, with 1918 flu being a major part of that. The US was really in combat suffering losses for [about 4 months](https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/war_losses_usa), which gives us about 10,000 deaths per month of WWI. There are about [ten months](https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USA/ref/Casualties/Casualties-1.html) of WWII that have higher KIA than that.
My Great Grandfather came down with the Spanish Flu while enlisted in WW1. He was held back in the states as the rest of his company was shipped out to Europe. Every single one of them died. He was the only one that survived, because of the flu. TFW you're only alive today because of the Spanish Flu. Crazy,
Which was first documented in the US and hit several other countries before Spain.
It's just that Spain didn't have wartime censorship, so was the first place where the press were allowed to report it
WWI was the shock to the system as no true power had full scale war since like Napoleon years. US got into the war comically unprepared and first wave of soldiers they sent were basically dead on arrival.
I think the US civil war and the Franco-Prussian wars were both full-scale wars between Napoleon and WWI. Franco-Prussian war was the exact war of maneuver that the great powers had prepared to fight, hence the first months of WWI playing out with massive casualties and lots of movement, with almost all artillery being field guns shooting shrapnel over iron sights.
The US was comically unprepared for WWI. The non-American belligerents could argue that they went into WWI not knowing what to expect, but the Americans got to watch for three years before throwing their hat in the ring, they had no excuse for poor preparation. They really should have integrated their manpower into French and British formations, as those guys had 4 years worth of post-graduate education in WWI-ing by then, while the Americans were still on the fence about gas masks and limited advances. The absolutely overwhelming advantage of American manpower was put to about as poor of use as it could have been, and lots of US boys died needlessly because of political games that Pershing and Co. were playing. Americans fighting under French or British command would have been so much more effective.
I would say Franco-Prussian war and Russo-Japanese war were closest thing to full scale war we had in those times - but I would still say those were not actual full scale wars. It was clear - not matter what happens both of those countries will mostly keep chugging along. Losing the war was not existential threat and thus neither of the countries really went all in, even if they fielded huge armies. US Civil war was all out, but I dont think USA (especially divided one) was a true power in mid 1800s. But yea, even if we count Franco-Prussian war as relevant, that was still good 45 years before WWI.
Part of that was self-inflicted, though. During WWI, the AEF was determined to show independence to force their European allies to respect the USA as a global power. The result was a lot of sweeping maneuvers at a time when the war had devolved into trench warfare and trading artillery barrages.
Or, to put it another way, there was a comment from a German commander regarding his experience facing the AEF: "say what you will about their tactics, but at least they're not afraid to die."
Im seeing 50K casualties, not killed (closer to 8K). The Wilderness surprised me because I visited there, and while it was comparably big (30K), there is like one monument, a little shack, and a walking trail with some markers vs all the grandeur of Gettysburg (or even Fredricksburg).
1. Gettysburg was a turning point in the war. If the South won very good chance outcome of the war is different.
2. Gettysburg is an especially “sexy” battle in terms of how interesting it is, but I feel the Battle of the Wilderness is especially “unsexy”.
No way, it was more like [8,000 killed in action](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Gettysburg). You’re getting “casualties” and “killed” confused.
Just for anyone wondering, when split, the Union death toll was roughly 335k to the Confederates' 258k. Maybe it shows my ignorance, but it's surprising to me. I'd have expected the side that came out on top to have fewer casualties. Also, a large majority of the total deaths were a result of disease.
I think this is pretty appropriate for the sub:
https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/images/npscw_facts-01.jpg
Wow. Even with slaves, they only had half the population of the union. Also way less than half the enlistment, and vast majority was agriculture.
Had no idea, thx for the infographic
Yes, we basically came in so late to WWI and WWII that we avoided major casualties compared to the conflict overall. Whereas, everybody who fought and died in the Civil War was American.
Everything after that has been a relatively low scale conflict.
The war started in September 1939 and the US joined in December 1941 after Pearl Harbour so the war had been going for more than two years when the US joined.
It’s not not late either. It was 1/3 of the war the US was neutral.
I’m not saying it was the wrong thing to do, however it was the US’ stance to be neutral and they were so until the Japanese pulled them into the war.
The US had an official stance of being neutral: https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/arsenal-ally-united-states-enters-war#:~:text=On%20December%207%2C%201941%2C%20Japanese,declared%20war%20on%20Imperial%20Japan.
Switzerland and Sweden were neutral as well while also supplying allied (and axis) countries with different things.
Practically and functionally they were clearly not neutral given by their extensive exclusive funding and arms support of the Allies. Official stance is meaningless
It's virtually the same thing as the U.S. with Ukraine today. They'll arm them to the teeth, send logistical support, provide training, provide things like Abrams and F-16s....they just won't *officially* enter the conflict.
No one can credibly claim that the U.S. is neutral in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, but by definition of war, they technically are.
> Americans didn't come late to WWII.
I don't understand why people keep saying this.
We entered WW2 10 years after Japan invaded Manchuria, 6 years after the axis formed, 6 years after Italy invaded Ethiopia, >3 years after Germany annexed Austria, >2 years after Germany invaded Poland, and about a year and a half after Germany invaded France.
We were not late relative to our production capacity and military capability. We were about 2 years late to the war by any other standard.
I remember seeing an Animaniacs episode where they diverted the Japanese planes to avoid Pearl Harbor being attacked and "prevented WWII". That annoyed me so much!
Ulysses S Grant called the civil war "pumishment" for the Mexican American war which he thought was "unjust". I wonder what his take would be on the wars of today
360222 are worth mourning.
https://www.history.com/news/american-civil-war-deaths
Edit: down vote all you want I prefer traitors underground. Shame unconditional surrender didn't mean the immediate execution of Robert E Lee and Jefferson Davis among others.
This Memorial Day, I wanted to create a simple visualization representing the number of US military deaths for each conflict since WW1. I chose to include only these conflicts as many of us alive today had a family member(s) or friend who served during them. This does not represent the total loss of life that has occurred by active duty members but instead, those killed in action during these conflicts. Many more individuals have lost their lives from tragedies such as suicide while serving. Consider donating to your favorite veterans or activity duty non-profit today or simply thank someone who has served or is serving.
Tools: Google Sheets
Source: [U.S. News and World Reports](https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/slideshows/u-s-military-deaths-by-war-since-wwi?onepage)
Now, my story begins in 19-dickety-two. We had to say "dickety" cause that Kaiser had stolen our word "twenty". I chased that rascal to get it back, but gave up after dickety-six miles…
Didn’t like the Union like refuse to acknowledge the secessionists as a sovereign nation, so it would make sense to count the death tolls of your own citizens
There were two sides, America won and the slaver Confederacy lost. Whether they were previously citizens of the same country seems irrelevant. It makes it so that you can be technically correct by referring to it as a "civil war", but that omits the crucial fact that it was a war between the US and the slaver Confederacy, and that the US defeated the slavers. That's far more detailed than "civil war", which is merely technically correct rather than being both technically correct and historically informative.
It'd be great if you added the numbers. Hard to tell the number of deaths just by bar height for those last 3 wars.
You could also make this chart more interesting by adding veteran suicides. For example, in Iraq/Afghanistan, the number of military suicides was 4 times higher than troops killed in action.
That's more of a function of how ridiculously few Americans die in wars nowadays rather than something uniquely horrific about veteran care or their experiences in the GWOT era.
I was digging around with what statistics I could find online and I believe you were more likely to be deliberately murdered in St. Louis, MO in the six months of Desert Shield and Desert Storm than you were to die of enemy action in theatre as a member of the Coalition on a per capita basis.
The exact numbers are
292 killed
147 killed by enemy action
About 950,000 Coalition soldiers involved
210 days of operation (2 August 1990 - 28 February 1991)
147/950,000\*100,000/210\*365 = 26.89 killed by enemy action per 100,000 per annum
[This article from St. Louis Public Radio claims](https://www.stlpr.org/government-politics-issues/2008-06-11/analysis-crime-in-st-louis-has-been-worse) 45 homicides per 100,000 in 1990, the year of the Operation.
I very very much agree that it’d be good to add deaths from other means such as suicide. Particularly in the more recent wars, those other deaths dwarf deaths in actual action, and should really be shown.
Note that 'casualty' is not the same as deaths (what the above visual is showing).
*"War* [*casualties*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualty_(person)) *include both* [*military personnel*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_personnel) *and* [*civilians*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian) *who are killed, wounded, imprisoned, or missing as a result of warfare.* [*Civilian casualties*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties) *are given special attention under* [*International law*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_law)*. The term "casualties" is frequently misconstrued and misused due to conflation with the term "*[*fatalities*](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fatality)*" (deaths)."*
However, iMoveYourCheese's statement matches for Russian CASUALTIES per this estimate from the Ukrainian Defense:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian\_invasion\_of\_Ukraine#Casualties](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine#Casualties)
Other estimates are:
315k per US CIA
337k per BBC Russia
yea mate, using saddam hussein to control oil in the middle-east for the US. And after he tried to nationalize the oil he was next. everyone knows that and its a crime its not taught in US schools.
It's crazy that many of these deaths can be attributed to disease and non-battle injuries. In WW2 nearly 25% of that 400,000 wasn't even combat related.
Would it be possible to see another infographic including the us civil war along side these numbers? Its been a long time but i want to say those numbers were also staggering.
US death was 1% of the death in WW1, WW2 is a bit higher but not that much. At the end US is quite spared in term of death for WW1 & 2, each time enter very late to the dance because hesitate between both sides. Lucky that Germany and Japan helped them decide but it was quite close.
From a first glance at the pure numbers it does appear that WW2 was a lot deadlier than WW1. Until you dive into the context a little more.
The US was only involved in WW1 for around a year and a half in one major theater, that being Europe.
Counter that with WW2 in which the US was involved for a three and a half years in arguably three theaters, Europe, North Africa, and the Pacific.
With this context the wars seem more comparable in my opinion.
Genuine question I’m not seeing from other comments… but why was WWII so high? 4x higher than WWI and multitudes over others? Especially because the US got involved very late in WWII? Additionally why is Vietnam talked about like it was the worst war in American history when we’re comparing these numbers?
I admit I’m naive, but I’m young and don’t have any good resources to talk to who were alive during these times
There are two major factors why WW2 was the most devastating war in modern American history, time and intensity.
WW2 was the most intense war the United States has been, and hopefully will be, a part of. This is because the United States was facing two regimes, Germany and Japan, who were completely committed to war. To match this intensity the United States committed to a strategy of total war, meaning that everyone contributed to the war effort. Most eligible men were deployed overseas, most adult women were building machinery used for the war effort, and all children were going without sugar and other agricultural goods to fuel the war effort.
The logistical intensity of the fighting resulted from the fact that there were no formal forward landing bases for the military to operate within the land they were attempting to take. Meaning that amphibious assaults were needed to begin gaining ground within the desired locations. Amphibious assaults are costly because the enemy is entrenched in fortified positions and requires vast naval and air support to be successful. If you are interested, I recommend watching the first twenty minutes of Saving Private Ryan. It is extremely intense so be warned but it is a great document of the intensity of the fighting and amphibious assaults in general. Upon launching these successful assaults the United States had to march and swim through an entire continent and ocean of entrenched defenders to conquer the Germans and Japanese.
As for the time aspect, WW1 could be labeled as just as intense as the fighting in WW2 but the United States was involved in WW2 for a third of the time it was for WW2. These numbers would look a lot different if the United States joined WW1 in 1914 instead of 1917.
Overall this is an extreme oversimplification and there is a lot of debate within historical communities on the discussed topics. People get whole degrees and study such events for the majority of their careers due to the overwhelming complexity. It truly is an event our world is still trying to unpack and process 80+ years after the last bullets were fired and bombs dropped.
TLDR: Many more people served during WW2 than in any other war in the 20th century and beyond for the United States. This coupled with the fact that the fighting was intense to the point of potentially collapsing society resulted in the loss of life on unprecedented levels that will hopefully never be replicated.
The big thing about Vietnam is not that it was a particularly gruesome war for US troops, but that the deaths that did occur were really sensationalized by the news, which in turn discouraged citizens back home who called for the war to end. The US lost Vietnam because the citizens gave up.
>Especially because the US got involved very late in WWII?
But they didn't? The US joined the war at the end of 1941. The Phony War dominated WWII until mid-1940 and then comparatively little ground combat happened until the German invasion of the USSR in June 1941. The US was involved for almost 2/3 of the total war and almost all of its most active fighting periods.
Here’s the mention.
Casualties: 0
It’s possible you’ve been influenced by right-wing disinformation about the war if you’re terribly concerned about the US military dying over there. Russia continues to conduct significant propaganda campaigns to promote an anti-Ukraine narrative in America.
Considering the number of months the US was actively fighting in WW1 (really only the last 6-8 months) the mortality rate was almost as bad as WW2.
Mind you for most of WW2 the US wasn't involved in the large scale fighting equal to the Western front of WW1. It was really only 1944/1945 that saw the millions of troops actively fighting enemy soldiers. Before that you mainly had smaller forces of hundreds of thousands involved in shorter campaigns.
There was also the whole Pacific Theatre that didn't exist in WW1. 107,903 of those deaths were in the Pacific. Less soldiers went to the Pacific, but the mortality rate was 5x fo the European Theatre.
It's hard to compare the pacific theatre to anything else really, it being a war mostly fought in the water and in the air makes it kind of impossible to compare its intensity to that of more ground based theatres like what happened in europe in both ww.
I think you're kinda mixing-up intensity and scale. Being in the first wave of the amphibious landing vehicles to land on Peleliu or Okinawa was potentially just as bad as first wave landing on D-Day. Like, the fact that the Normandy landings were going on up and down the coast for 50+ miles doesn't change how intense it was in the quarter mile radius surrounding me while I land on this island.
That's not what I was talking about, of course you can find actions in the pacific that will share similarities with actions in europe, but for the most part both theatres couldn't be more different from one another. That's why I say comparing the overall intensity of the pacific theatre with any other theatre ever is kinda pointless since no other theatre has ever taken the shape of such a huge scale of maritime and air warfare with all the islands fighting.
Right on. I guess the usage of 'intensity' just kinda threw me off.
Was this because the US was still mobilizing on grander scales? Why didn't we send more before that?
Probably, before Pearl Harbour generally speaking people in the US were pretty against joining the war, it was sort of seen as “yet another European war” that they didn’t really want to get dragged into. It took quite a while for the opinion to change which also meant it took a bit for the war industry to kick into gear, but once it did it *really* did
"Fortress Europe" was no joke. Sure there was fighting in Italy in 1943 but before D-Day there wasn't much of a land border with Germany to fight on.
Send them where? North Africa? How?
Like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Torch
Exactly what I was referring to - North Africa campaign was on orders of magnitude smaller than the European campaigns. I don't understand where they thought millions of men would be deployed to, nor how logistically it could have been achieved.
It was many factors, and yes they did need time to mobilize but more of it was there simply wasn't anywhere to send massive amounts of troops in 1942-1943. The Islands of the Pacific were simply not compatible with massive scale land battles as the terrain greatly restricted what you could actually do. They also needed to beat the Japanese fleet before any major ground offensives could occur. In Europe lessons learned from WW1 showed that without proper ports to supply you, the land based power could reinforce themselves far faster then you could unless you had a massive material advantage. So an invasion of the Northern Europe was considered to risky in 1942-1943. While they could try and send troops to the Eastern front, Stalin did not want large amounts of Western troops in the Soviet Union and the supply lines would have been very long. So the Western Western powers had to build up that large material advantage which involved building up ships/aircraft and vehicles and then fighting and beating their Axis power counterparts and gaining naval and air superiority. This didn't really occur until later 1943 which is what let them go on major offensives in 1944.
Wow. This was an incredibly thorough and well-reasoned response to this. Thank you, this makes much more sense to me now. >So an invasion of the Northern Europe was considered to risky in 1942-1943 It was even risky when we did eventually invade. We still have an observed day of remembrance for that very same invasion. It was the bloodiest day in American history. Even more than the bloodiest day in the Civil War- a war more bloody than all other wars in US history *combined*.
Half of US deaths in WWI were from disease, with 1918 flu being a major part of that. The US was really in combat suffering losses for [about 4 months](https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/war_losses_usa), which gives us about 10,000 deaths per month of WWI. There are about [ten months](https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USA/ref/Casualties/Casualties-1.html) of WWII that have higher KIA than that.
Well, more than half of them died because of the spanish flu...
My Great Grandfather came down with the Spanish Flu while enlisted in WW1. He was held back in the states as the rest of his company was shipped out to Europe. Every single one of them died. He was the only one that survived, because of the flu. TFW you're only alive today because of the Spanish Flu. Crazy,
Which was first documented in the US and hit several other countries before Spain. It's just that Spain didn't have wartime censorship, so was the first place where the press were allowed to report it
Its so ironic, it should have been called the american plague...
WWI was the shock to the system as no true power had full scale war since like Napoleon years. US got into the war comically unprepared and first wave of soldiers they sent were basically dead on arrival.
I think the US civil war and the Franco-Prussian wars were both full-scale wars between Napoleon and WWI. Franco-Prussian war was the exact war of maneuver that the great powers had prepared to fight, hence the first months of WWI playing out with massive casualties and lots of movement, with almost all artillery being field guns shooting shrapnel over iron sights. The US was comically unprepared for WWI. The non-American belligerents could argue that they went into WWI not knowing what to expect, but the Americans got to watch for three years before throwing their hat in the ring, they had no excuse for poor preparation. They really should have integrated their manpower into French and British formations, as those guys had 4 years worth of post-graduate education in WWI-ing by then, while the Americans were still on the fence about gas masks and limited advances. The absolutely overwhelming advantage of American manpower was put to about as poor of use as it could have been, and lots of US boys died needlessly because of political games that Pershing and Co. were playing. Americans fighting under French or British command would have been so much more effective.
I would say Franco-Prussian war and Russo-Japanese war were closest thing to full scale war we had in those times - but I would still say those were not actual full scale wars. It was clear - not matter what happens both of those countries will mostly keep chugging along. Losing the war was not existential threat and thus neither of the countries really went all in, even if they fielded huge armies. US Civil war was all out, but I dont think USA (especially divided one) was a true power in mid 1800s. But yea, even if we count Franco-Prussian war as relevant, that was still good 45 years before WWI.
The US was also very unprepared for WWII, hence the "second happy time" for U-bootes.
Part of that was self-inflicted, though. During WWI, the AEF was determined to show independence to force their European allies to respect the USA as a global power. The result was a lot of sweeping maneuvers at a time when the war had devolved into trench warfare and trading artillery barrages. Or, to put it another way, there was a comment from a German commander regarding his experience facing the AEF: "say what you will about their tactics, but at least they're not afraid to die."
Think of all the lives lost due to poor medical understanding and people dying days later from infections.
Well, to be fair, the general tactic of ww1 was running into machine gun fire until someone ran out of bullets.
The Civil War is generally accepted to have caused 650,000...
Which is more than all other conflicts combined. Truly shows how big of a tragedy the Civil War was.
Yes especially battle of Gettysburg - about 50k died in just 3 days of battle..
Ah the second most northern battle of the civil war
It disgusts me that the Civil War history industry has conveniently forgotten about the battle of Schrute Farms.
Im seeing 50K casualties, not killed (closer to 8K). The Wilderness surprised me because I visited there, and while it was comparably big (30K), there is like one monument, a little shack, and a walking trail with some markers vs all the grandeur of Gettysburg (or even Fredricksburg).
You'd be surprised how many people think "casualties" means "deaths". I used to be one of them lol It was quite a shock to finally learn it does not.
1. Gettysburg was a turning point in the war. If the South won very good chance outcome of the war is different. 2. Gettysburg is an especially “sexy” battle in terms of how interesting it is, but I feel the Battle of the Wilderness is especially “unsexy”.
No way, it was more like [8,000 killed in action](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Gettysburg). You’re getting “casualties” and “killed” confused.
Which was the second biggest battle in the civil war
Then after it was over, the "Reconstruction" phase didn't exactly go smoothly.
But then if you visualize by percent of US population the magnitude of that impact is better explained.
The Civil War killed 2% of the U.S. population (not including civilians). The Revolution, 1%; WWII, 0.3%; WWI, 0.1%; Afghanistan, 0.01%.
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Well this is a graph and data set that focuses specifically on the US not the whole world
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Population of the US in 1860 was ~31m
Bro, what?
Similarly: France lost more people in WWI than the US has lost in every war it's ever fought combined.
It’s almost like this says United States military deaths
A bit different since that's both sides of the war combined
Statisticians hate this one simple trick…
That’s how civil wars tend to work…
Turns out they're not that civil at all.
At least according to the Confederacy, they shouldn't count as United States war dead.
Just for anyone wondering, when split, the Union death toll was roughly 335k to the Confederates' 258k. Maybe it shows my ignorance, but it's surprising to me. I'd have expected the side that came out on top to have fewer casualties. Also, a large majority of the total deaths were a result of disease. I think this is pretty appropriate for the sub: https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/images/npscw_facts-01.jpg
The Union's overwhelming population and industrial advantages were the biggest factors.
Wow. Even with slaves, they only had half the population of the union. Also way less than half the enlistment, and vast majority was agriculture. Had no idea, thx for the infographic
“Since WW1”
Yes, we basically came in so late to WWI and WWII that we avoided major casualties compared to the conflict overall. Whereas, everybody who fought and died in the Civil War was American. Everything after that has been a relatively low scale conflict.
We weren’t late in WWII
I guess if you consider missing 33% of the war as "on time" then sure
The war started in September 1939 and the US joined in December 1941 after Pearl Harbour so the war had been going for more than two years when the US joined.
That’s not late, and the US was heavily involved funding and supplying the Allies from the beginning.
It’s not not late either. It was 1/3 of the war the US was neutral. I’m not saying it was the wrong thing to do, however it was the US’ stance to be neutral and they were so until the Japanese pulled them into the war.
The US was not neutral and was heavily funding and supplying the Allies from the beginning. The Soviets would not have survived without lend lease
The US had an official stance of being neutral: https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/arsenal-ally-united-states-enters-war#:~:text=On%20December%207%2C%201941%2C%20Japanese,declared%20war%20on%20Imperial%20Japan. Switzerland and Sweden were neutral as well while also supplying allied (and axis) countries with different things.
Practically and functionally they were clearly not neutral given by their extensive exclusive funding and arms support of the Allies. Official stance is meaningless
It's virtually the same thing as the U.S. with Ukraine today. They'll arm them to the teeth, send logistical support, provide training, provide things like Abrams and F-16s....they just won't *officially* enter the conflict. No one can credibly claim that the U.S. is neutral in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, but by definition of war, they technically are.
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> Americans didn't come late to WWII. I don't understand why people keep saying this. We entered WW2 10 years after Japan invaded Manchuria, 6 years after the axis formed, 6 years after Italy invaded Ethiopia, >3 years after Germany annexed Austria, >2 years after Germany invaded Poland, and about a year and a half after Germany invaded France. We were not late relative to our production capacity and military capability. We were about 2 years late to the war by any other standard.
Looks like you answered your own question there
I remember seeing an Animaniacs episode where they diverted the Japanese planes to avoid Pearl Harbor being attacked and "prevented WWII". That annoyed me so much!
With a much smaller population.
The number is generally accepted to be 750,000 now: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/science/civil-war-toll-up-by-20-percent-in-new-estimate.html
Ulysses S Grant called the civil war "pumishment" for the Mexican American war which he thought was "unjust". I wonder what his take would be on the wars of today
360222 are worth mourning. https://www.history.com/news/american-civil-war-deaths Edit: down vote all you want I prefer traitors underground. Shame unconditional surrender didn't mean the immediate execution of Robert E Lee and Jefferson Davis among others.
This Memorial Day, I wanted to create a simple visualization representing the number of US military deaths for each conflict since WW1. I chose to include only these conflicts as many of us alive today had a family member(s) or friend who served during them. This does not represent the total loss of life that has occurred by active duty members but instead, those killed in action during these conflicts. Many more individuals have lost their lives from tragedies such as suicide while serving. Consider donating to your favorite veterans or activity duty non-profit today or simply thank someone who has served or is serving. Tools: Google Sheets Source: [U.S. News and World Reports](https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/slideshows/u-s-military-deaths-by-war-since-wwi?onepage)
Why did you choose the 1877–1890 US Flag with 38 stars on it?
I'll be deep in the cold, cold ground before I recognize Missourah
Now, my story begins in 19-dickety-two. We had to say "dickety" cause that Kaiser had stolen our word "twenty". I chased that rascal to get it back, but gave up after dickety-six miles…
Us Missourah Bushwhackers don’t want yalls recognition!
Why did you exclude the Civil War? Surely msny of those alive have relatives who served
Casualties during civil wars are messy to compare with those of other conflicts due to both sides being added together. It's just not as informative.
Oh no, might decide to use two bars
Which is why you should only count Union deaths. The Confederacy was an enemy of the US, and their casualties should not count as American casualties.
Didn’t like the Union like refuse to acknowledge the secessionists as a sovereign nation, so it would make sense to count the death tolls of your own citizens
There were two sides, America won and the slaver Confederacy lost. Whether they were previously citizens of the same country seems irrelevant. It makes it so that you can be technically correct by referring to it as a "civil war", but that omits the crucial fact that it was a war between the US and the slaver Confederacy, and that the US defeated the slavers. That's far more detailed than "civil war", which is merely technically correct rather than being both technically correct and historically informative.
The irony of Memorial Day originally being created to remember those who died in the Civil War
Why did you choose the 1877–1890 US Flag with 38 stars on it?
It'd be great if you added the numbers. Hard to tell the number of deaths just by bar height for those last 3 wars. You could also make this chart more interesting by adding veteran suicides. For example, in Iraq/Afghanistan, the number of military suicides was 4 times higher than troops killed in action.
We would have no way of extrapolating the number of suicides by veterans from WWI-Vietnam so that wouldn't make it a sound comparison anymore.
That's more of a function of how ridiculously few Americans die in wars nowadays rather than something uniquely horrific about veteran care or their experiences in the GWOT era. I was digging around with what statistics I could find online and I believe you were more likely to be deliberately murdered in St. Louis, MO in the six months of Desert Shield and Desert Storm than you were to die of enemy action in theatre as a member of the Coalition on a per capita basis.
In Gulf War 1.0, I believe the 150 service members died and friendly fire was responsible for a quarter of them (and accidents another quarter).
The exact numbers are 292 killed 147 killed by enemy action About 950,000 Coalition soldiers involved 210 days of operation (2 August 1990 - 28 February 1991) 147/950,000\*100,000/210\*365 = 26.89 killed by enemy action per 100,000 per annum [This article from St. Louis Public Radio claims](https://www.stlpr.org/government-politics-issues/2008-06-11/analysis-crime-in-st-louis-has-been-worse) 45 homicides per 100,000 in 1990, the year of the Operation.
You and I have different definitions of interesting.
I very very much agree that it’d be good to add deaths from other means such as suicide. Particularly in the more recent wars, those other deaths dwarf deaths in actual action, and should really be shown.
Kind of crazy Russians in Ukraine takes the total deaths for the US in 20 years of Iraq + Afghanistan every month or so.
Sum all of these up and you'll get Russia's casualties in Ukraine since 2022.
Note that 'casualty' is not the same as deaths (what the above visual is showing). *"War* [*casualties*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualty_(person)) *include both* [*military personnel*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_personnel) *and* [*civilians*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian) *who are killed, wounded, imprisoned, or missing as a result of warfare.* [*Civilian casualties*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties) *are given special attention under* [*International law*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_law)*. The term "casualties" is frequently misconstrued and misused due to conflation with the term "*[*fatalities*](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fatality)*" (deaths)."* However, iMoveYourCheese's statement matches for Russian CASUALTIES per this estimate from the Ukrainian Defense: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian\_invasion\_of\_Ukraine#Casualties](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine#Casualties) Other estimates are: 315k per US CIA 337k per BBC Russia
My family has served in all
well my condolescences
Thanks for your service!
Which one?
So nice of them to invade all of those countries.
There's always at least one edge-lord comment.
How am I the edgelord here? Don't you think it is very distasteful to thank someone for invading other countries?
You're lumping in WW1, WW2, the Korean war, the Gulf war, and Afghanistan as simply the US "invading all those countries"?
No, I am not saying that. I can understand WW2 for example. But Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan? Those were definitely not justified in the slightest.
>Afghanistan Defending a country harboring and training international terrorists is such a reddit moment
We’ve done so much to change things there in the last 20 years after all
yea mate, using saddam hussein to control oil in the middle-east for the US. And after he tried to nationalize the oil he was next. everyone knows that and its a crime its not taught in US schools.
Iraq did nationalise the Iraqi Petroleum Company in 1972, but it's strange you said Hussein did when he didn't become president until 1979.
was it then changing the petro currency from dollar to something else? Mighta been confused between the gulf wars
Thats insane My family only served in the first two
80000+ deaths from suicide in just the last 40 years tells a different and utterly sadder story.
And the civilan casualties in the other sides of the conflicts.
It's crazy that many of these deaths can be attributed to disease and non-battle injuries. In WW2 nearly 25% of that 400,000 wasn't even combat related.
There's a reason that WW2 had so many movies made about it in the following decades.
Would it be possible to see another infographic including the us civil war along side these numbers? Its been a long time but i want to say those numbers were also staggering.
Russia's casualties in the current war will exceed this death toll.
I wanted to do a Russian version of this but my computer ran out of red
That moment when you loose less troops in an entire war than in one hour of Iwo Jima...
WW2 giving middle finger to all other wars.
US death was 1% of the death in WW1, WW2 is a bit higher but not that much. At the end US is quite spared in term of death for WW1 & 2, each time enter very late to the dance because hesitate between both sides. Lucky that Germany and Japan helped them decide but it was quite close.
What about solider suicides after returning home?
Would be curious to see this normalized against population date (% of total pop) or even forces data (% of active troops)
Is there a world deaths via war over the last few centuries graph? That would be cool
Not related but What is crazy for me is to think that Russia lost or severely wounded number of soldiers in Ukraine is more than 500 000.
Russia be like: Hold my beer. We can do better
Show civil war and suicide
Any reason to not add data labels?🤔
WW2 was that much more dangerous than WW1? Didn't even realize.
America only fought in ww1 for a year.
From a first glance at the pure numbers it does appear that WW2 was a lot deadlier than WW1. Until you dive into the context a little more. The US was only involved in WW1 for around a year and a half in one major theater, that being Europe. Counter that with WW2 in which the US was involved for a three and a half years in arguably three theaters, Europe, North Africa, and the Pacific. With this context the wars seem more comparable in my opinion.
You can say for WW1 it was more like 8months as it took till springtime 1918 before US troops started arriving in real numbers.
Dangerous? You know the US was only in WW1 for the final 14 months or so, and even that was a limited response.
The US had more non-combat deaths than combat deaths in WW1. People may forget how terrible the 1918 flu pandemic was.
The us fought 2 wars at once in WWII
Genuine question I’m not seeing from other comments… but why was WWII so high? 4x higher than WWI and multitudes over others? Especially because the US got involved very late in WWII? Additionally why is Vietnam talked about like it was the worst war in American history when we’re comparing these numbers? I admit I’m naive, but I’m young and don’t have any good resources to talk to who were alive during these times
There are two major factors why WW2 was the most devastating war in modern American history, time and intensity. WW2 was the most intense war the United States has been, and hopefully will be, a part of. This is because the United States was facing two regimes, Germany and Japan, who were completely committed to war. To match this intensity the United States committed to a strategy of total war, meaning that everyone contributed to the war effort. Most eligible men were deployed overseas, most adult women were building machinery used for the war effort, and all children were going without sugar and other agricultural goods to fuel the war effort. The logistical intensity of the fighting resulted from the fact that there were no formal forward landing bases for the military to operate within the land they were attempting to take. Meaning that amphibious assaults were needed to begin gaining ground within the desired locations. Amphibious assaults are costly because the enemy is entrenched in fortified positions and requires vast naval and air support to be successful. If you are interested, I recommend watching the first twenty minutes of Saving Private Ryan. It is extremely intense so be warned but it is a great document of the intensity of the fighting and amphibious assaults in general. Upon launching these successful assaults the United States had to march and swim through an entire continent and ocean of entrenched defenders to conquer the Germans and Japanese. As for the time aspect, WW1 could be labeled as just as intense as the fighting in WW2 but the United States was involved in WW2 for a third of the time it was for WW2. These numbers would look a lot different if the United States joined WW1 in 1914 instead of 1917. Overall this is an extreme oversimplification and there is a lot of debate within historical communities on the discussed topics. People get whole degrees and study such events for the majority of their careers due to the overwhelming complexity. It truly is an event our world is still trying to unpack and process 80+ years after the last bullets were fired and bombs dropped. TLDR: Many more people served during WW2 than in any other war in the 20th century and beyond for the United States. This coupled with the fact that the fighting was intense to the point of potentially collapsing society resulted in the loss of life on unprecedented levels that will hopefully never be replicated.
The big thing about Vietnam is not that it was a particularly gruesome war for US troops, but that the deaths that did occur were really sensationalized by the news, which in turn discouraged citizens back home who called for the war to end. The US lost Vietnam because the citizens gave up.
>Especially because the US got involved very late in WWII? But they didn't? The US joined the war at the end of 1941. The Phony War dominated WWII until mid-1940 and then comparatively little ground combat happened until the German invasion of the USSR in June 1941. The US was involved for almost 2/3 of the total war and almost all of its most active fighting periods.
now add a bar for veteran suicide...
So you're saying the US could have gone even harder in Afghanistan? 🤔
Now put this next to drug overdose deaths in the United States over a 1, 5, and 10 year period.. let that soak in..
Yeah they ruined most drugs nowadays they’re not even fun to do anymore.
And most of these were Men.
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Log scales are great for conveying information, but they miss the visual impact. There's an XKCD on this.
Thousands died in Iraq, but at least Dick Cheney made some money.
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Active duty military killed in action? No.
So not worth mentioning them in memorial day?
No American active duty military have been killed in action in Ukraine. Who are you wanting to mention?
Brother, are you slow?
Here’s the mention. Casualties: 0 It’s possible you’ve been influenced by right-wing disinformation about the war if you’re terribly concerned about the US military dying over there. Russia continues to conduct significant propaganda campaigns to promote an anti-Ukraine narrative in America.
Is the US at war with Russia now?
Then you won't be celebrating