Quotes About Casualties

What made it so easy for Haig to demand high casualties was that he chose not to see them. He "felt that it was his duty to refrain from visiting the casualty clearing stations," wrote his son, "because these visits made him physically ill.

The total of British dead and wounded at Passchendaele, officially the Third Battle of Ypres, is in dispute, but a low estimate puts the number at 260,000; most reckonings are far higher.

When a final tally was made after the war, it would show that 27,927 Boers—almost all of them women and children—had died in the camps, more than twice the number of Boer soldiers killed in combat.)

both sides together suffered another half a million dead and wounded just during the war's final five weeks.

On this final half day of the war, after the peace was signed, 2,738 men from both sides were killed and more than 8,000 wounded.

The dinner became infamous. Later, in midsummer, Britain's Ambassador Phipps would observe in his diary that of the seven people who sat down to dine at the Regendanz mansion that night, four had been murdered, one had fled the country under threat of death, and another had been imprisoned in a concentration camp. Phipps wrote, "The list of casualties for one dinner party might make even a Borgia envious.

For every American who died, the Japanese lost 6 people, the Germans 11, and the Russians 92.

In the calendar year 1943, when 70,000 Western servicemen, including bomber crews, died fighting Germany, two million Russian soldiers were killed, nearly thirty times the number.

Although the Soviet Union suffered over 90 per cent of the casualties of the Big Three Powers, Churchill did not want the Americans to behave as if Stalin's totalitarian dictatorship had some sort of moral equivalency with the Western democracies. Truman nonetheless went ahead and met Stalin privately.

Ultimately over half a million Germans died from aerial bombardment during the war, to Britain's 58,000.

By 5 January, a thousand Russian prisoners had been taken, a further 700 soldiers had escaped back to the Russian lines, and over 27,000 had been killed, all for the loss of 900 Finns.

total, around 43,000 officers were killed or imprisoned, although 20,000 were later released.

War demands casualties. Peace, it turns out, does too.

You need to put drones under control; you need to lay out certain rules of engagement in order to prevent or minimize collateral casualties. It is extremely important.

What is and isn't justified by military necessity is, naturally, open to interpretation. One of the key concepts, though, is the law of proportionality. A military attack that results in civilian casualties - 'collateral damage' - is acceptable as long as the military benefits outweigh the price that is paid by humanity.

No daban tantas explicaciones sobre las bajas iraquíes. El 14 de febrero, Kelly dijo que pensaba que «la cifra es muy elevada por el bombardeo constante». El 28 de febrero, los saudíes hablaban de unos 100.000 muertos iraquíes, mientras que un antiguo analista militar francés, el coronel Jean-Louis Dufour, calculaba que los muertos iraquíes ascendían a 15.000.4 Schwarzkopf hablo sólo de «una cifra muy, muy alta».

8.000 soldados iraquíes habían sido enterrados vivos en sus trincheras por las excavadoras y arados montados sobre los tanques de la división de infantería motorizada estadounidense,6 el breve momento de compasión que esto generó seguramente tuvo más que ver con la conciencia culpable por la pasividad occidental para con los insurgentes iraquíes que con la enorme pérdida de vidas humanas que representaba.

the British infantry assault on the German positions north of the Somme began at 0730 hrs on 1 July 1916. A force of some 120,000 British soldiers of Fourth and Third Armies assaulted the German line between Maricourt and Gommecourt. Their attack was pressed home with great resolution - and at considerable cost. By the end of that day, 19,240 men had been killed outright and the total casualty figure, including the missing and those taken prisoner-of-war, amounted to 57,470 men.

Total casualties on the Somme, killed, wounded and missing, come to some 1,300,000 men, British, French and German. The British share in this total includes the losses incurred by the Empire and Commonwealth troops, from Australia, Canada, India, South Africa and New Zealand, and amounts to some 400,000 men. The French lost 200,000 men on the Somme, to add to the more serious losses of Verdun. German losses on the Somme came to more than 600,000 men, killed

As for Verdun, while the estimates vary, the most widely accepted figure is 377,231 French and 337,000 German - a total of more than 700,000 men.

The Somme began as an offensive; it ended as a battle of attrition.

During the Great War all armies lost men in quantity in the attack; the Germans at First and Second Ypres, the French in Champagne, on Vimy Ridge, in Artois and on the Chemin des Dames. Everywhere it was the same story: a failure to develop a breach in the enemy defences was common to all armies and, by the end of 1915, French and German losses far exceeded those of the British Empire.

And so the war was fought with new weapons and old ideas and the result was a slaughter exceeding that of any previous war. In just four years, about 9,300,000 soldiers died on the battlefields of the Great War; 3,600,000 from the nations comprising the Central Powers and 5,700,000 from the nations of the Entente.

The 72nd Division, which had opened the battle with 12,000 men, had lost nearly 10,000 men in three days; this is as many as all the Allied armies, navies and air forces lost on D-Day 1944 - and the French losses came from a single division.