Twentieth Century Atlas - Death Tolls (original) (raw)

Mid-Range Wars and Atrocities of the Twentieth Century

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These cost more lives than the American losses in Vietnam (58,135), but not as many lives as five years of murder in America (119,700 killed 1990-94). Or another way of looking at it, each atrocity on this page killed roughly the same number of people as a single year of medical mistakes in the USA (44,000 to 98,000).

  1. Dutch East Indies, Aceh War (1873-1914): 70 000
    • Clodfelter
      * Dutch: 2,317 KIA + ten times that to disease
      * Atjeh people lost 11,187 (1904-1907)
    • Hans Bakker [http://www.uoguelph.ca/\~vincent/hbakker/war.htm\]
      * Dutch: 7,700 officers and soldiers died in battle or disease
      * Schulten estimates 2,267
      * Zentgraaf est. 7,707
      * Acehnese guerilla fighters: 30,000-100,000, died of battle or diseases
  2. Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901): 115 000
    • Rummel:
      * War: 10,000
      * Democide: 105,000
      * TOTAL: 115,000
    • Hammond: In North China, 32,000 Chinese Christians killed, plus 200 missionaries.
    • Small & Singer, battle deaths:
      * China: 2000
      * Japan: 622
      * Russia: 302
      * UK: 34
      * France: 24
      * USA: 21
      * TOTAL: 3,003
    • Eckhardt: 13,000 civ. + 3,000 mil. = 16,000
  3. Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902): 75 000
    • Pakenham, Thomas, The Boer War (1979):
      * British killed in battle: 5,774 k
      * British died of disease or wounds: 16,168
      * Black auxilaries killed: 2,000
      * Boers killed: 7,000
      * White civilians died in camps: 18-28,000
      * Blacks dead in camps: 12,000
      * [TOTAL: 66,000 ± 5,000]
    • Gilbert: 28,000 whites and "more than" 50,000 blacks died in the camps.
    • Encarta
      * British: 28,000
      * Boers: 4,000
      * Civilians died in camps: 20,000
      * [TOTAL: 52,000]
    • Steve Attridge, Nationalism, Imperialism and Identity in Late Victorian Culture: Civil and Military Worlds (2003):
      * British killed in battle: 7,792 kia
      * British died of disease: 13,250
      * Boers killed: 6,000
      * White women and children in camps: 26,370 died
      * Blacks dead in camps: 14,154 "official figure ... now known to be wrong"; actually >20,000
      * [TOTAL: >73,412]
    • Trager, People's Chronology: 20,000 Boer women & children d. in camps.
    • Singer: 22,000 UK
    • Eckhardt: 13,000 civ. + 22,000 mil. = 35,000
    • COWP: 22,000 UK; 35,000 total
    • AWM: 606 Australian deaths
  4. Colombia (1899-1902): 100 000
    • War of a Thousand Days:
      * Britannica: 60-130,000
      * Encarta: 60-130,000
      * Small & Singer: 100,000
      * Dict.Wars: 100,000
      * Eckhardt: 75,000 civ. + 75,000 mil. = 150,000
  5. Somalia, Mohammed Abdulla Hasan (1899-1920):100 000
    • Mad Mullah Jihad
      * According to the Library of Congress [http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/sotoc.html\], this war caused the deaths of about one third of the northern Somali population. The 1911 Britannica estimates 300,000 people in British Somaliland, so the death toll might have been something like 100-150,000. (depending on whether the 300000 was estimated before or after the one-third had died)
      * By summing the battle casualties in the campaigns that are descibed in the OnWar.com essay for the 1899-1905 phase of the war, I determined that the dervishes suffered some 11,700 casualties (K+W) fighting the British, which would come to around 3,000 KIA, plus another 1,000 killed in battle with the Abyssinians. The British lost something over 200 KIA.
  6. Russia (1900-17): 95 000
    • Romanov Regime:
      * Rummel blames Tsar Nikolai for 1,070,000 democides; however, his evidence is (by his own admission) not as solid as he would like, so take this number with a grain of salt. Also, 975,000 of these would be included among the dead from the First World War (many -- 400T -- being mistreated POWs, along with 75T Turks/Kurds massacred, 83T German deportees dead, etc.) so we only have some 95,000 democides which occurred independently of WW1. Some 2,000 of these were killed in Jewish pogroms.
      * Eckhardt, civil conflicts in 1905-06:
      * Pogrom, Russians vs Jews: 2,000
      * Peasants & Workers vs Govt: 1,000
      * James Trager, The People's Chronology (1992): Pogroms in Russia kill some 50,000 Jews by 1909 ("1905")
      * OnWar.com: Pogroms in Russia (1903) k. 50,000 Jews
      * NOTE: I can't find supporting evidence for these high numbers killed in the pogroms. Most individual events seem to have killed dozens, and very occasionally hundreds.
      * "In the famous pogrom of Kishinev in 1903, there were 49 Jewish deaths out of a Jewish population of about 50,000; in Bialystok in 1906, 70 deaths out of about 48,000 Jews." (http://www.west.net/\~jazz/felshtin/redcross.html)
      * "During 1903 and 1904, 45 pogroms occurred, 95 Jews and 13 non-Jews were killed, and 4,200 people were severely injured." (http://www.factsofisrael.com/blog/archives/000418.html)
  7. Herero War, German Southwest Africa (1904-07): 75 000 [make link]
    • 1911 Britannica: 5,000 Germans, 20-30,000 Herero k
    • Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa, p.615: The Nama population was reduced from 20,000 to 9,800 [-10,200], the Herero from 80,000 to 15,000 [-65,000].
    • Mark Cocker, Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold (1998): 75,000 Africans
    • Eckhardt: 80,000 civilians
    • Robert Edgerton, The Fall of the Asante Empire: 1,400 Germans KIA
  8. Russo-Polish War (1918-1920): 100 000
    • Singer
      * USSR: 60,000
      * Poland: 40,000
      * TOTAL: 100,000
    • Eckhardt: 100,000
    • Urlanis calculates 37,000 Poles KIA, and cites...
      * Polish official commission:
      * killed: 17,278 (Urlanis: "underestimation")
      * dead: 30,337
      * missing: 51,374
  9. Morocco (1921-26)68 000
    • War in the Rif
      * Eckhardt: 11,000 civ. + 29,000 mil. = 40,000
      * Small & Singer,partial
      * Spain: 4,000
      * France: 25,000
      * Moroccans: unknown
      * Stanley Payne, Politics and the Military in Modern Spain (1967):
      * KIA from 1916 to 1927: 17,082 Spanish + 2,394 Regulares (Moors serving Spain, partial count)
      * Clodfelter
      * French: 10,000 d. all causes
      * Spain: 50,000 d. all causes
      * Rif rebels: 30,000 killed and wounded
      * [TOTAL: ca. 67,500]
      * OnWar.com
      * Berbers: 5,000
      * France: 16,000
      * Spain: 15,000
      * TOTAL: 36,000
  10. Manchuria (1931-33): 60 000
  1. Chaco War (1932-35): 100 000 [make link]
  1. Israel (1948 et seq.): 65 000 [make link]
  1. East Germany (1949-89): 100 000
  1. Congo Crisis (1960-64): 100 000
  1. Iraq (1960s)
  1. Angola (1961-75): 80 000
  1. Mozambique, Anti-colonial war (1961-75)
  1. North Yemen (1962-70): 100 000
  1. Nicaragua (1972-91): 60 000
  1. Philippines (1972- )
  1. Colombia (1970s, 1980s, 90s): 45 000
  1. El Salvador (1979-92): 75 000
  1. Sierra Leone (1991-2002): 75 000
  1. Algeria (1992-2002): 100 000
  1. Eritrea-Ethiopia War (1998-2000)70 000

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Last updated Oct. 2010

Copyright © 1999-2010 Matthew White