Some estimates place the total amount of deaths in World War Two at just over thousand and World War One at almost thousand. In terms of the number of deaths per day, the Civil War is still at the top, with an average of deaths per day, while the First and Second World Wars have averages of roughly and fatalities per day respectively.
Revised Civil War figures For more than a century, the total death toll of the American Civil War was generally accepted to be around ,, a number which was first proposed by Union historians William F. Fox and Thomas L. Livermore in This number was calculated by using enlistment figures, battle reports and census data, however many prominent historians since then have thought the number should be higher.
In , historian J. David Hacker conducted further investigations and claimed that the number was closer to , and possibly as high as , While many civil war historians agree that this is possible, and even likely, obtaining consistently accurate figures has proven to be impossible until now; both sides were poor at keeping detailed records throughout the war, and much of the Confederacy's records were lost by the war's end.
Many Confederate widows also did not register their husbands death with the authorities, as they would have then been ineligible for benefits. Loading statistic Show source. Download for free You need to log in to download this statistic Register for free Already a member? Log in. Show detailed source information? Register for free Already a member? More information. Supplementary notes. Other statistics on the topic.
Historical Data Black and slave population in the United States Historical Data Population of the United States in , by race and gender. Historical Data Number of casualties at the Siege of Vicksburg Aaron O'Neill. Research expert covering historical data.
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Please log in to access our additional functions. Yes, let me download! Exclusive Corporate feature. Corporate Account. Statista Accounts: Access All Statistics. Basic Account. Chemical weapons and gas injuries generated 70, hospital admissions and 1, deaths for the AEF. Many patients lingered for weeks before dying, and thousands of victims sustained lifelong injuries. One study showed that 60 percent of the 3.
Americans also benefitted from the lessons Europeans learned about the effects of trench warfare and the new horrors of chemical weapons, machine gun fire, and artillery barrages on the human psyche. British physicians first identified shell shock in as the result of the physical effects of explosions on the nervous system. Within weeks of declaring war, the U. War Department ordered Major Thomas W.
Salmon , a U. Public Health Service psychologist, to Britain and France to study the matter. He found that war neuroses presented three medical military problems: the depletion of the fighting force through mental disabilities, the difficulty of distinguishing war neuroses from other neurological and mental illnesses, and the mystery of what caused war neuroses symptoms so they could be avoided in the future.
These included delirium, confusion, hallucinations, terrifying dreams, mutism, involuntary muscular functions, such as paralysis or tics and tremors, and even blindness. As the first major U. The goal was to identify patients within forty-eight hours of their traumatic incident to avoid reinforcing the trauma , begin treatment, and cure the soldier, returning him to the front lines or military support units.
Evacuation back to the United States would be a last resort. Staff used work as a curative agent, and when the facility first opened, patients broke up stones for a macadam road to link the hospital to the French road.
The hospital also provided a workshop with weaving, sketching and printing to help retrain patients with paralyses, tremors, and other symptoms. The caseload increased rather than decreased after the war, and by mental cases accounted for more than one-third of veterans hospitalized in the United States.
A generation after the development of germ theory and modern bacteriology, the Army Medical Department was able to control several diseases that had historically plagued armies. It vanquished typhoid with a modern system of water testing and purification and a vaccine pioneered in , reducing rates to fewer than one case per 1, men, compared to thousands of cases and deaths during previous wars.
Anti-toxin tetanus injections for the wounded kept tetanus at bay, and the identification of the louse vector for typhus and rigorous disinfection programs held cases of this disease to only forty-two.
Other diseases were less tractable. Childhood infections such as measles and mumps and to a lesser extent diphtheria and scarlet fever ran through training camps. In the pre-antibiotic era, sexually transmitted diseases, primarily syphilis and gonorrhea, accounted for almost ,, or 10 percent of Army hospital admissions during the war. Such rates rendered thousands of troops non-effective. In response officials took stringent surveillance and disciplinary measures, such as mandating sex education lectures, closing down red-light districts near training camps, requiring harsh mercury treatments for soldiers who had had sexual intercourse, and even court martialing men who contracted syphilis or gonorrhea.
Sexually transmitted infections nonetheless ranked fourth among diseases behind tuberculosis, heart disease, and mental illness as a cause of permanent disability, requiring discharge from the service. One unlikely war disease, tuberculosis, was especially costly. The Medical Department identified more than 23, cases of tuberculosis during the war, about 18, from training camps in the United States and 3, from Europe.
The Department calculated that during alone tuberculosis stood third in loss of days for officers 50, days and seventh for enlisted men 1,, days. Despite the unprecedented carnage of industrial warfare, the influenza epidemic dwarfed combat losses, killing perhaps 50 million people worldwide in just eighteen months.
Given the large number of mild cases that were never recorded, however, Navy Surgeon General William C. Braisted put the sickness rate closer to 40 percent. Originating in U. The virus moved through armies on both sides of the Western Front during the summer, and in late August exploded with a virulent strain that could induce deadly pneumonia. This swept the globe. Surgeon General Braisted pinpointed the arrival of the lethal flu virus in the United States to 27 August at Commonwealth Pier in Boston, when three cases of influenza appeared on the sick list.
Eight cases emerged the next day, and fifty-eight the next, fifteen of whom were so ill they were transferred to the U. Naval Hospital in Chelsea. The epidemic traveled west and south across the country, lasting about four weeks in individual camps and running its course in the Army in eight weeks, roughly from 15 September to 15 November The high-water mark for deaths in the United States came the week of 4 October; within the AEF the week of 11 October was the most deadly.
The influenza virus sickened and killed thousands of soldiers, depleted and demoralized military units, choked hospitals, and flooded the medical evacuation system, diverting military and political leaders from fighting the war to combating disease. According to one tally, , soldiers were hospitalized for battle wounds in , but half again as many AEF soldiers, ,, were hospitalized for influenza and pneumonia. Ironically, in a war fought in the name of democracy, increased hospital admissions due to disease epidemics enabled military hospitals to re-segregate wards by race as early as the fall of , a practice that had been impractical during peacetime due to small patient numbers.
In the training camps the October hospital admission rates for influenza were percent for whites and percent for blacks, while death rates were 9. In the AEF the same month, white and black admissions were virtually the same, 39 to 40 percent, but whites had a lower death rate than blacks, 3. These differential rates are best explained by racial discrimination in the segregated Army, which often afforded black personnel inferior living conditions and second-class health care. African American units in the training camps and in France were often the last to receive warm clothing and bedding, assigned the less desirable living quarters, and were even served rations with fewer calories than white troops.
African American personnel were also often reluctant to go to sick call or consult an all-white medical staff and therefore did not get the prompt and proper medical attention and nursing care required to stave off deadly influenzal pneumonia. The Armistice stopped the battlefield killing but hospitalizations continued as almost , soldiers returned home with debilitating physical and mental conditions.
Despite a precipitous American demobilization effort, the Army Medical Department retained personnel to care for this increasing patient load. Specialized hospitals or wards in general hospitals were designated for orthopedic and surgical patients, war neuroses patients, the blind, the tuberculous, and the hearing impaired, and thousands of these patients remained in government hospitals for months and years.
Congress also created the Federal Bureau of Vocational Education in to provide rehabilitation training and payments to disabled soldiers, and in subsequent amendments authorized up to four years of physical therapy and training. Approximately , veterans entered training, and by when the program ended , had successfully completed their training courses at a cost of about million dollars.
Indeed, from July to June , 37 percent of the 8, hospital admissions for Bureau of War Risk insurance beneficiaries were for tuberculosis and 22 percent for neuropsychiatric diseases. Although African American veterans had more access to medical care than many civilians, they often encountered unfair treatment in realizing the benefits for which they were eligible. The Army tuberculosis hospital in Oteen, New York, for example, ran segregated education and rehabilitation programs, instructing black patients in their segregated wards rather than proper classrooms to avoid racial integration.
Established in , over the next decade this hospital cared for 50 percent of hospitalized black veterans and employed all of the black physicians in the Veterans Bureau. Federal support for World War I veterans continued into the 21 st century when the last veteran, Frank W.
Buckles , died at the age of on 27 February and was buried in Arlington Cemetery. As the nation demanded military service from millions of young men, they and their families and advocates negotiated with the government for new agencies and benefits to care for and compensate them for their service and sacrifice.
This negotiation continued in the post-war years as veterans contended with disability and diseases stemming from their service, leaving a legacy of increased expectations regarding government support for future active duty personnel and veterans. Any analysis of war losses, therefore, given the continued disability and suffering as well as the public policy efforts to compensate that suffering, must extend beyond wartime to succeeding generations.
Section Editor: Edward G. Byerly, Carol R. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. DOI : Version 1. War Losses USA. By Carol R. Carol R. A Statistical Summary, Washington , p. New York Army during the World War, in: Military Surgeon , p. The American Soldier Experience, Lincoln , pp. Influenza Epidemic in the U.
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