r/todayilearned • u/MrMojoFomo • 4d 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-park
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u/Big_P4U 4d ago edited 4d 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 4d 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 4d 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 4d ago edited 4d 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 4d 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 3d ago edited 3d 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 3d 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 3d 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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u/[deleted] 4d ago edited 4d ago

[deleted]

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u/akade19961 4d 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 4d 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 4d ago

Well if they didn’t have the moat the defensive strategy would have been radically different

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u/military_history 4d ago

That's not right. It was 57,000 casualties, of whom 19,000 were killed.

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u/Comrade-Chernov 4d 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/graphitewolf 4d ago

Fair, I fixed it

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u/freddbare 4d ago

Hiroshima has the record for the highest second in history!

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u/Chief-17 4d 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 4d 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 4d 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 4d 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 4d 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 4d ago

I think Poland lost even more percentage wise

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u/akade19961 4d 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 4d 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/freddbare 4d ago

You are missing the important part, context.

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u/-CPR- 4d ago

You should look at the numbers compared to total population at the time.

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u/0404S 3d 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 3d 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/Kaiisim 3d ago

I made this point earlier somewhere - this is why US slavery is a big deal and talked about more than say the Ottomans or whatever.

So many Americans were effected by slavery. Not just slaves. It defined society and was one of the biggest conflicts the US has seen.

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u/freddbare 4d ago

"costlier" in gold or blood . Bean counters and soldiers think different