The Battle of
The deadliest one-day battle in all of history was fought on Russian soil at Borodino in the late summer of 1812. Just three months earlier, Napoleon had invaded Tsar Alexander I's empire with what was heralded at the time as the largest army ever assembled: 680,000 men.
Antietam Today. Congress established Antietam National Battlefield in 1890 to commemorate the conflict that took place on September 17, 1862, the bloodiest single-day battle in American history and a major turning point in the American Civil War.
The heaviest loss of life for a single day occurred on July 1, 1916, during the Battle of the Somme, when the British Army suffered 57,470 casualties.
The deadliest single-day battle in American history, if all engaged armies are considered, is the Battle of Antietam with 3,675 killed, including both United States and Confederate soldiers (total casualties for both sides was 22,717 dead, wounded, or missing Union and Confederate soldiers September 17, 1862).
World War II's Eastern Front was the most brutal war in human history. Historian Samuel Mitchum outlines this contrast vividly — towards the end of the war, when any rational Nazi soldier or officer knew they were going to lose, many would readily surrender to the Allied Forces on the Western Front.
Table ranking "History's Most Deadly Events": Influenza pandemic (1918-19) 20-40 million deaths; black death/plague (1348-50), 20-25 million deaths, AIDS pandemic (through 2000) 21.8 million deaths, World War II (1937-45), 15.9 million deaths, and World War I (1914-18) 9.2 million deaths.
The American Civil War is the conflict with the largest number of American military fatalities in history. In fact, the Civil War's death toll is comparable to all other major wars combined, the deadliest of which were the World Wars, which have a combined death toll of more than 520,000 American fatalities.
Though they existed more than eight centuries ago, Genghis Khan and the Mongols are still regarded as the most-feared military of all time. This is due to their reign over an incredible empire that they conquered in a short period of time.
The longest war in history is believed to be the Reconquista (Spanish for Reconquest), with a duration of 781 years.
Private First Class Charles Havlat (November 4, 1910 – May 7, 1945) is recognized as being the last United States Army soldier to be killed in combat in the European Theater of Operations during World War II.
110M people mobilized for combat during massive war, with 60 countries around world involved. World War II, beginning with the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany on Sept. 1, 1939, resulted in the death of nearly 80 million people, and is considered one of the greatest calamities in human history.
The 1980s: The Deadliest Decade.
With this context and timeframe in mind, the demographers estimate that 109 billion people have lived and died over the course of 192,000 years.
The First World War was the first time that the psychological trauma of warfare was formally recognised both by doctors and society at large. The condition became known as 'shell shock'.
The Anglo-Zanzibar War was fought between the United Kingdom and the Zanzibar Sultanate on Aug. 27, 1896. The conflict lasted around 40 minutes, and is the shortest war in history.
After World War II, crime rates increased in the United States, peaking from the 1970s to the early-1990s. Violent crime nearly quadrupled between 1960 and its peak in 1991.
The 20th century is often referred to as the bloodiest in human history. Towards the end of that century, the historians Eric Hobsbawm, Gabriel Kolko and Niall Ferguson published general narratives entitled, respectively, Age of Extremes, Century of War, and The War of the World.
It was a Thursday in January
The deadliest earthquake in human history is at the heart of the deadliest day in human history. On January 23, 1556, more people died than on any day by a wide margin.
Athenian tragedy—the oldest surviving form of tragedy—is a type of dance-drama that formed an important part of the theatrical culture of the city-state.
And he said he carries the burden of knowing he survived while so many U.S. troops did not return. Today, fewer than 389,000 of the 16 million Americans who fought during World War II remain.
Later in his book, Rantamaa credited Häyhä with a total of 542 kills. Some of Häyhä's figures are from a Finnish Army document, counted from the beginning of the war, 30 November 1939: 22 December 1939: 138 sniper kills in 22 days.