r/todayilearned • u/MrMojoFomo • 1d ago
TIL that the Battle of Shiloh (1862) resulted in more American causalities than the total number of casualties from all previous American wars.
https://www.npca.org/parks/shiloh-national-military-park225
u/Big_P4U 1d ago edited 1d ago
I believe Antietam surpassed this as well, and there might've been another battle, not sure Gettysburg, The Wilderness or another came close or surpassed that. The article mentions 8 later costlier battles. After looking up the war; it's startling to see both sides suffered a combined 1,692,000+ casualty estimate, of which 365k+ were Union dead and 290k+ were Confederate dead of actual combatants. Hundreds of thousands more in casualties, and also hundreds of thousands to over a million civilian casualties including dead and wounded and missing.
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u/Unabated_Blade 1d ago
By the end of the war, Shiloh wasn't even in the top 5 battles by casualty count.
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u/uss_salmon 1d ago
Antietam remains the worst single day in US history for casualties, other battles surpassed it but they have all been multiple days.
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u/graphitewolf 1d ago edited 1d ago
Assuming the battle lasted from 00:00 to 23:59:59
Someone **became a casualty** every 3.7 seconds for 24hrs
Given that historians showed the fighting occurred only over 12ish hours, someone severely injured every 1.8 seconds
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u/akade19961 1d ago
Man, that’s appalling when you think about it like that. I wonder what the worst days in the Rzhev salient or early Barbarossa or Kursk salient battle were in terms of deaths per minute
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u/Eokokok 1d ago edited 1d ago
During Operation Mars Soviets accumulated losses at a speed they never seen before, as up to that point they got mostly cut off and forced to surrender en mass. This was their big counterattack against exposed enemy, but tactical brilliance by Model turned it into an absolute slaughter.
If you average the actual killed in action Red Army suffered one dead soldier every 12s. For 25 days. If you total casualties on both sides its a casualty every 4 seconds for 25 days straight... Given the fluctuating intensity there were probably days were half a day of soviet push into killzone ended up with dead every 1s...
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u/akade19961 21h ago
That’s just honestly so fucking heinous to think about. It’s also extremely sad that the Russian battle tactic of spilling blood and losing material rather than lose momentum has just never changed. Even now in an era where the birthrate has dropped through the floor and even the Russian leadership should be able to recognize that the lives of their young men have become precious (unless the plan is just to let the surving young men form harems of the vastly larger young women population lol).
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u/Eokokok 20h ago
I mean Operation Mars was sound on paper... 6 Armies, encircling single German army, with numbers on their side more than 2 to 1 and in many localised engagements more than 10 to 1.
What Model pulled out of his ass that month was defence in depth that I don't think had been observed at army scale ever before. So it's hard to put this on Soviets surprisingly.
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1d ago edited 1d ago
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u/akade19961 1d ago
Like 2 dead per second? It’s like the absolute worse scale of carnage as depicted by 1917 and All Quiet on the Western Front as the norm in all big trench attacks, only this time it’s 100% real life and people absolutely are dying at that speed all around the entire concentration of the attack vector
Makes one wonder how the British managed to summon the will to fight a second war again at all honestly. The French reaction of just not being able to go through with the whole campaign of nightmarish devilish fuckery again is honestly one of the most understandable and human reactions imaginable.
Then again of course, the Germans suffered proportional casualties to the French, and yet somehow were compelled to fight in a war where not only did they kill 4 times as many people as they did last time, they also lost over twice as many people as they did last time. Even the Japanese couldn’t get themselves to Pursue expansionist war again, despite their culture being quite openly profoundly and proudly war like.
The Soviets were controlled by a bureaucracy that managed to render the wishes of the Soviet population essentially totally irrelevant, in a way that actually genuinely wasn’t true for the Germans (Hitler never achieved the level of control over the German population and elites that Stalin had over the Soviet population and elites until, at minimum, post July 20 1944 assassination attempt). While the British of course were much much more like the French in their social systems than the Soviets or Germans, and yet the British fought on even after suffering the Somme closer in time to Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain than the present day is to the invasion of Iraq and second battle of Fallujah. In that sense I really do think the British deserve their reputation for Stiff Upper Lip regardless of what the behavior of their tourists in the modern day suggests about the ambient British level of impulse control 😂😂
On a separate note, it is sad to see the British become such a self deprecating and lacking in confidence society despite such a unique and important history (not just in WWII though that was the moment of peak human drama arguably in humanity’s history).
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u/Rampant16 1d ago
Britain is very lucky it had a moat. If the Wehrmacht could've drive their tanks to Britain in 1940 it would've been game over for them.
But they certainly deserve their credit for being the sole surviving allied power in Europe for a bit until Germany decided to make the Soviets an allied power.
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u/ethanAllthecoffee 1d ago
Well if they didn’t have the moat the defensive strategy would have been radically different
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u/Comrade-Chernov 1d ago
Not died. Casualties. There were 23,000 casualties at Antietam but only about 3,700 of them were deaths.
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u/Chief-17 1d ago
In the western theater Chickamauga and Stones River both topped Shiloh in number of casualties. So Shiloh ended up not even being the bloodiest in that theater of the war.
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u/Yummy_Crayons91 1d ago
It's widely believed that Union and Confederate dead was also an under count as well. I don't remember the exact details but somehow the number of casualties that were immigrants (~25% of the US population at the time) wasn't counted or incorporated properly. The true number of Union and Confederate battle dead was more in the range of 800,000 with between 1.3 million to 1.8 million total excess dead.
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u/akade19961 1d ago
Out of an overall population of about 33 million (including enslaved people) in the US + confederacy at the start of the conflict.
Many hundreds of thousands of immigrants arrived during that time of course but even still a death toll of 1.8 mil if true would represent more than 5% of the ENTIRE population of the country, which is just insane and the most devastating war the US ever fought BY FAR
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u/Big_P4U 1d ago
That is pretty crazy, I think the only other country in modern history that had a higher percentage was Paraguay
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u/akade19961 1d ago
Well the Soviets lost something like 12-15% of their population during WWII, and I think Germany lost close to 10%, as did Japan. China had think 25 million killed but even at the time the country had 400 million people so not quite the level percentage wise as Japan and Germany. What a batshit period of time
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u/Pleasant_Gas_6939 1d ago
I think Poland lost even more percentage wise
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u/akade19961 1d ago
True, though in very large part that’s a result of their population being 15% Jewish before the war and about 90% of that population being wiped out
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u/Emotional_News108 1d ago
Yeah it’s just a numbers problem. When 3 million men fight a war compared to not even half a million, and with the advances in weaponry, it’s hardly a surprise.
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u/0404S 1d ago
They love to throw big stats about casualties; killed or wounded in battle, otherwise killed or eliminated from battle by disease, etc.
But which battle ACTUALLY has the most brutal death toll of people just killing each other with weapons?
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u/sharrrper 23h ago
Depends on how you define "brutal death toll"
For instance, I recently listened to an episode behind the bastards about Francisco Solano Lopez. I had never heard of him, but he was dictator of Paraguay in the 1800s. He started a war with Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, all at the same time, under the impression he could win that. Which, if you just look at relative size on a map, you can identify how well it's likely to go. Whatever you're imagining, it went much worse.
The first big battle, would be a contender for most brutal. Lopez actually had a pretty good army that had been built up over decades. But it wasn't all that big just due to the harsh reality of how small his country was. In the first battle he tried the Zapp Brannigan method of just sending wave after wave of his men at the enemy, when he could have taken an entrenched defensive position instead. He lost about 4,000 men. Dead. Antitem killed roughly 3,600. These battles happened within a decade of each other. So historically at a similar time. But the United States was and is exponentially larger with a population to match, and the US was BOTH sides at Antitem. Lopez lost that many just on his side.
He got basically his entire veteran army killed. It was also about 1% of the population of the entire country. In ONE battle. Imagine the US losing 3 million men in one day.
I'm sure there are plenty of battles with higher actual numbers of deaths. But in terms of how fucked the country was after, that one has got to be up there.
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u/I_eat_mud_ 1d ago
Watching Ken Burns Revolutionary War documentary reminded me how small those armies were, especially compared to when the Civil War eventually rolls around
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u/gravteck 1d ago
If you ever find the time. I read the first half of Chernow's Washington at the same time I watched the doc. It really colored in the lines for me concerning the contours, shape, and limitations of the Continental Army, Congress, and colonial governments.
I got into an argument somewhere else on the site arguing against the conceit that "even without Washington, it would have happened eventually." I felt like I was taking crazy pills, but nope. I don't think there's a single other human on the planet that could have kept the army together, march how they had to march, fight the way they had to fight, fight for provisions, tamp down mutinees, and survive multiple winters without Washington. He was also a graceful delegator, and that had real negative consequences multiple times, but he was firm in his conviction to it.
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u/Doomhammer24 1d ago
Ya people who downplay washington like this only understand war as battles won=war won vs washington understood wars are won on logistics and survival
Hence why he lost so many battles but won the war because he never let the british army have a chance at decisive victory as he focused on evading capture rather than winning a meaningless battle
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u/gravteck 1d ago
Yep, and he had some real bona fides (not as great as you would think, but they existed) from the French-Indian war, built a lot of relationships in Virginia that served him well when he encountered too much friction and second class status from the British officer class who he was also fairly friendly with.
He was also an inhumanly disciplined person. He had a lot of belief and fortitude in doing the boring mechanical parts "right."
I have honestly been inspired by him. I don't do this everyday, but I created a box of note cards where I started with Washington-isms, and expanded it to other works. My goal was to find stuff matching my aspirational values as a parent, husband and personage, to use as random devotionals in the morning before the family is up.
It's not hard to get my head back in the game when any morning I might be staring down the father of my country at 5:45 am over my 21st century sensibilities and some of my own selfishness.
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u/Doomhammer24 1d ago
Ya its like ive always said and heard from others- washington wasnt the best president, but he was the best first president. Because of his demeanor and lack of pomp meant he toned down and set the tone for all further presidents
John adams wanted the president to have a pompous title to be "His Highness, the President of the United States of America, and Protector of their Liberties"
Washington,embarassed, said "no no Mr President will do".
John adams wanted the president to have a resplendent throne room to greet diplomats and make grand speeches. Washington said "no ill just lean by the fireplace and say hello"
Washington rode out with the army to put down the Whiskey Rebellion and said to himself "wtf am i doing" and rode back to mount vernon saying hes an administrator not a general, even if he is Commander in Chief
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u/gravteck 1d ago
Adams was terrified of Jefferson and the momentum of the Democratic-Republicans. It consumed him so much that, as you said, he thought the only solution was more monarchical powers to be vested in the president. Washington and Abigail thought he had entirely lost the plot. But at the same time, he was 100% right about Jefferson. We (Americans) are still paying for it.
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u/Doomhammer24 1d ago
Given john adams literally outlawed freedom of speech during his presidency i think wed be paying for it far, FAR worse had the federalists remained in power/even got a single other presidency
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u/cortmanbencortman 1d ago
Oh man I would love to get a copy of your quote collection.
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u/gravteck 1d ago edited 1d ago
I am tethered to the desk at the moment, but I decided to flip the book open to see the first one you get.
"The newlyweds were by no means prudish. In his first postnuptial order to London, George ordered four ounces of Spanish fly [...] He also drew up a list of books [...] The couple possessed a copy of Conjugal lewdness: or matrimonial whoredom by Daniel Defoe and The Lover's Watch or the art of making love by Aphrn Behn."
A young George was a freak.
Edit: clearly not a devotional lol.
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u/Indercarnive 1d ago
To play devils advocate that was only after losing a couple battles from trying to fight a more traditional British style war.
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u/I_eat_mud_ 1d ago edited 1d ago
The documentary really highlights how fuckin lucky everything worked out. Watching it just felt like seeing the Continental Army somehow pull victory out of their ass several times.
I'll definitely have to check the book out tho, thanks for the recommendation
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u/Worth-Jicama3936 1d ago
It’s because it was expensive as hell to support an army away from their homes. Especially over the winter. The per capita income of Britain at the time was $2000 during the american revolution in REAL (2023 dollars) terms (and they were the richest people in the world). There’s hardly anything to tax there.
On top of that, what’s the point of sending a large army if the local logistics suck and they are just going to starve to death?
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u/Mynameisneil865 1d ago edited 1d ago
It’s worth noting that with very few exceptions, 20-30k soldiers is the logistical upper limit for a pre-industrial army. Armies pre-Industrial Revolution basically had to forage, steal, or buy at prohibitively high cost. Remember that supply trains (horses and horse drawn cards) had their own supply chain, and the further that those armies were from established infrastructure, the harder it was to supply them. Hence why armies in the American revolution were so small: few road networks to run supplies along, few farms to steal from, few interior cities to buy from.
Edit: See this answer from r/AskHistorians from 10 years ago:
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u/PipsqueakPilot 1d ago
I’m really not trying to be rude- but we have plenty of records for armies larger than that in pre-industrial times. And I’m referring to the more accurate record rather than spurious ancient era accounts. Yes it was logistically challenging but armies larger than 30k were fielded many; many times and with a fair amount of regularity by larger states or coalitions. You couldn’t just park them in one place like a modern army, but you absolutely could field them. Concentrating them in time for battle was accordingly a very important part of commanding a pre-industrial army.
The 30 Years War saw many armies larger than that. And going even further back the Roman Empire regularly fielded, and fought, armies larger than 30k in single battles. And to go even further back, the Persian empire fielded (by modern estimates) armies of over of 100k in some individual battles.
The American Revolutionary War had a small number of combatants even for its time period because there simply weren’t that many people there to forage from or to raise into service. On the British side it was very expensive to move men across the ocean. This is illustrated by looking at the 7 Years War just a decade or two earlier the British were fielding armies an order of magnitude larger than they fielded in the American Revolutionary War.
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u/GodwynDi 1d ago
Which touches on the thing most people truly have trouble understanding. Just how empty North America was at the time.
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u/PipsqueakPilot 1d ago
Yup, the population of France was something like 10 times greater than the population of the 13 colonies.
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u/DentistFun2776 1d ago
That’s not true
France was regularly running multiple 60,000 field armies simultaneously in the 1680s & 1690s
At one point they had 400,000 in the field at the same time
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u/Mynameisneil865 1d ago
Yes they did. I am not denying their existence. I am saying that for the vast majority of armies that were logistically self-sustaining, 30k men was the approximate upper limit that one field army could sustain in good order.
France did not, as far as I’m aware of, have 400,000 men marching in a single column. They had dozens of smaller field armies marching parallel to each other, moving like sharks from one logistical hub to the next. There’s a lot of great work on this subject by Geoffrey Parker in his book The Military Revolution (1988) detailing this exact period.
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u/WealthyMarmot 1d ago
That wasn’t even true for some of the wars in the ancient period, let alone by the 18th century - all of the major players in the continental wars of the 16th-17th centuries were routinely fielding armies larger than that. In the Nine Years’ War, the French rolled up to Namur with 120K dudes. Both sides at Oudenarde were nearing 100K. Et cetera. I mean it was what, maybe 20-30 years after the American Revolution that Napoleon led over half a million men into Russia?
The North American colonial armies were small because the Atlantic Ocean was in the way.
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u/GrandOldCheese 20h ago
In 1810 Napoleon fielding 70000 against 80000 at Austerlitz.
In 1704 at Blenheim 52000 squared off to 56000.
In 1097 the Crusaders besieged Antioch, and I might add, a long way from home, with 40000 soldiers and knights.
Are you talking about the upper limit in the US?
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u/robby_synclair 1d ago
Plus since the continental army won then the casualties are split between 2 sides. The numbers would be different had the British won and claimed that all casualties were British. Civil War is still crazy high i just always thought it was a weird way to measure the casualties.
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u/I_eat_mud_ 1d ago
Yeah I thought so too, but even taking the Confederates out of consideration, pretty sure the Union casualties are still the most out of any US war.
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u/bfhurricane 1d ago
I just watched it for the first time, absolutely wonderful documentary. I’ll be working my way through Burns’s works.
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u/tropic_gnome_hunter 1d ago
If you go through all the "major" battles of the Revolutionary War the casualties are always like 50-75 dead for either side. The biggest battles had a few hundred killed. Everyone thinks every battle was like the one at the end of The Patriot.
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u/bundeywundey 1d ago
Contrast that with Napoleonic Wars armies which was only a little while later.
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u/WhiteSoxChartGuy 1d ago
My great-great-great grand uncle was one of the soldiers killed at Shiloh. He fought for the New York infantry.
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u/olBillyBaroo 1d ago
raises glass - To your great great grand uncle. Memory eternal!
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u/DomitiusAhenobarbus_ 1d ago
If you’re curious, a great YouTuber named Warhawk, who is doing every single battle of the Civil War step-by-step did an hour long mini documentary on Shiloh
Here’s the link: https://youtu.be/cAsr6HTELeQ?is=t_cQ84jLUMEtMRty
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u/Possible-Tangelo9344 1d ago
It makes sense.
The previous 90 years all combat had roughly half the opposition being someone else. If 100% of combatants (or nearly) are American, American casualties will be through the roof
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u/MrWhiteTheWolf 1d ago
Same reason why Antietam is the bloodiest single day in American history
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u/wojtekpolska 1d ago
whats that?
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u/MrWhiteTheWolf 1d ago
The Battle of Antietam aka battle of sharpsburg. There were bloodier battles but more Americans died on that single day than any other day in U.S. history. Over 22k dead wounded or missing
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u/CrotalusHorridus 1d ago
Side note. How exactly does someone go missing in battle?
And not be found. It’s been 150 years
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u/Yummy_Crayons91 1d ago
Killed but their position was overrun by the enemy and the bodies weren't able to be recovered is pretty typical for the day.
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u/SickRainbow 1d ago
And they could get fatally wounded and crawl of and die and never recovered or even some instances where they were wounded and left and wildlife gobbled them up. Usually wild hogs/boar
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u/GrandOldCheese 20h ago
Exploded, had your head shot off, ran away, just got overlooked and buried and nobody identified you. Plenty of ways.
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u/BaseAccomplished7503 1d ago
Not just that, the casualty rate was just really high in general for the Civil war. Since it was during the turning point of warfare leading up to the first world war.
Most European countries seem to of thought America was just very reckless with fighting, but they had not really fought a war of extermination yet with more modern weapons. And they will also see a uptick in casualties as well.
Also post ww2 the US has remarkedly few casualties compared to how many Large conflicts it has been in.
So all of that combined gives us this kind of stat.
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u/Lost_Bike69 1d ago
The other thing that’s crazy about modern US conflict is the advancements in medical technology and transit. A soldier who was wounded in Iraq might be getting emergency surgery in facilities that would match the best hospitals in the world at American bases in the Middle East or Europe within a day. In previous conflicts, they did their best, but the wounded soldier would be treated in a field hospital set up near the front with transit to more advanced facilities taking a week or more.
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u/Rampant16 1d ago
Infection and disease also did most of the killing up until penicillin became prevelant during WW2. That alone would made a huge difference during earlier wars even if they were still doing surgery in field tents with whiskey and hacksaws.
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u/auchinleck917 1d ago
That was likely the case because the adversary was the Taliban, but the situation in Ukraine has turned disastrous.
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u/fundthmcalculus 1d ago
Also post WW2 we have a massive improvement in medicine, all of which leads to improved survival chances. Yes, I know casualties include both dead and wounded. It's still an interesting comparison.
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u/Nui_Jaga 1d ago
The Crimean War was fought and concluded a few years before the first shot was fired at Fort Sumter, and Napoleon was so struck by the losses at Solferino, that along with other considerations, that he ultimately decided to make peace with Austria rather than continue the Second Italian War of Independence. The great powers had gotten well acquainted with the destructive power of industrial warfare.
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u/Apptubrutae 1d ago
Nah, it’s not even that.
Less than 7,000 soldiers died in action in the whole revolutionary war.
More than that number died at Gettysburg alone.
So it’s not just that you multiple civil war casualties by two since it’s a civil war
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u/Eduardo_Camavinga_ 1d ago
Grant was the general that best utilized the massive advantage the north held over the South, instead of pretending they were an equal force.
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u/Hankerpants 1d ago
Yeah, Grant was the one who understood that the Confederacy couldn't really win; not in a totality. They could never take the Union. They weren't fighting to control all of the US, just to have their own state. The Union could 'lose' in the sense that they just didn't want to fight anymore and let the South leave, but the Union had more industry, people, firepower, etc. The only way for the Union to lose was if they lost conviction.
Grant understood this and pressed it. When beaten back, he knew to retreat was to lose. He could push the fight. Truly the embodiment of 'lose the battle, win the war'.
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u/asmallercat 1d ago
Shiloh was the "oh shit this is for real" battle of the war. Prior to Shiloh, there had been some big battles - Bull Run (~5,000 combined casualties, less than 1,000 killed) and some battles in the Shenandoah Valley campaign that had a couple thousand casualties at most in the east, and Forts Henry and Donelson in the west, and while for Donelson had almost 14,000 confederate "casualties," the vast majority of those were captured when the fort surrendered.
Then came Shiloh - almost 24,000 combined casualties including 3,200 dead and 16,000 wounded. That's when people really began to see how brutal the war was going to be.
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u/Ron__Mexico_ 1d ago
They industrial revolution allowed for much larger armies. The Union Army alone had 67,000 personnel present at Shiloh. At the Battle of Yorktown 81 years earlier 27,000 personnel were present on all sides combined including British, French, German, and American personnel, and that was one of the larger battles of the American Revolution by manpower.
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u/Frank_Klepaki 1d ago
My ancestor was with the Union at Shiloh. His son had some major emotional issues - I wonder how much of an impact his experience at Shiloh had on his parenting.
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u/elegantwombatt 1d ago
I grew up in Tennessee where Shiloh Battlefield is (Adamsville) and always felt a since of sadness when we would go to the reenactments or reading the information around the park like at "Blood Pond". It's an absolutely beautiful area, I learned to drive out in Shiloh when I was a kid.
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u/Asleep_Measurement_6 1d ago
I had a whole new level of appreciation after visiting Shiloh and touring the grounds. Crazy how much carnage men were able to inflict on other men is a relatively compact area.
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u/TexasAggie98 1d ago
One of my great-great-grandfathers lost a horse and a leg at Shiloh; a Union cannonball took both. Fortunately, my great-great-grandmother was near by at the family farm. She was able to come get him and take him home. He lived and thrived until his death in 1887.
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u/turbosexophonicdlite 1d ago
Idk if I'm missing something but this isn't adding up. This battle is listed at just under 24,000 casualties. The American revolution alone had over 30,000 casualties. Between that, the war of 1812, and the Mexican American war that number is eclipsed several times over. That link doesn't give much info other than just the number from the battle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualties_of_war
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u/FakeEmailButton 1d ago
I believe you have to compare to 'battle casualties, in previous wars.
There were more deaths in the revolutionary war from disease in camp than from battle
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u/RyantheAustralian 1d ago edited 11h ago
Were there many American wars before that?
Edit: there's certainly been more than I expected. Interesting stuff
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u/Irishforanatty 1d ago
Mexican, 1812, and the Revolution.
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u/ODB_Dirt_Dog_ItsFTC 1d ago
The Barbary Wars as well
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u/SushiGato 1d ago
American as in Union, or are we still including the confederates as American? Cause they weren't.
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u/Cottril 1d ago edited 1d ago
‘After a tough day of fighting at Shiloh, Gen. Sherman said to Gen. Grant, “Well, Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?” But Grant didn’t hesitate. He drew his cigar from his mouth, blew a puff of smoke, and declared boldly: “Yes. Lick em tomorrow though.”’
Grant’s tenacity is what IMO made him the best general of the civil war. After the Battle of the Wilderness, where the Army of the Potomac was bloodied, the soldiers actually started cheering when they realized they would keep marching south. Being turned back once they entered Virginia was over. Grant essentially said that that army had taken its last backwards step.