Question by Brandon N: How many causalities were there in WW1 total and also the year 1914?
How many causalities were there (total) in 1914 and in the entire war?
Best answer:
Answer by fallenaway
Start with the big picture--the whole war. There is no certain, definite answer even for military casualties. That sounds improbable, but its true despite generations of effort by scholars and soldiers to sort things out.
Military death came from many sources: combat death is most commonly meant, but death also came by accident, illness, starvation, deprivation, etc.To make things more confused, civilian deaths are also enormous, estimated to be in size about 40% of military deaths, but those figures are usually omitted. There is no agreed number, just ranges of probabilities. Just for one example, there are huge numbers of "missing, presumed dead" among troops. Many were blown to bits, some were killed and buried or buried and then died, some may have just deserted (a figure not kept)--its all a mystery beyond the fact that the men enlisted, marched away, and never came back and no one knew why, or what, or even where.
All armies kept count of casualties by different measures, and the figures and definations aren't comparable either. A casualty for the British Army might never have been noted or recorded by the Germans, for example, due to differences in record-keeping, definitions of degrees of injury, length of injury, etc.
Here's what Wiki records:
Estimates of casualty numbers for World War I vary to a great extent; estimates of total deaths range from 9 million to over 16.5 million [1] Military casualty statistics listed here include 6.8 million[2] combat related deaths as well as 2 million military deaths caused by accidents, disease and deaths while prisoners of war. When scholarly sources differ on the number of deaths in a country, a range of war losses is given, in order to inform readers that the death toll is uncertain. The table lists total deaths; the footnotes give a breakdown between combat and non-combat losses. The figures listed below include about 6 million civilian deaths due to war related famine and disease, these civilian losses are often omitted from other compilations of World War I casualties. The war disrupted trade resulting in acute shortages of food which resulted in famine in Europe, the Ottoman Empire and Africa. Civilian deaths include the Armenian Genocide, and it is debated if this event should be included with war losses. Civilian deaths due to the Spanish flu have been excluded from these figures, whenever possible. Furthermore, the figures do not include deaths during the Turkish War of Independence and the Russian Civil War. The data listed here is from official sources, whenever available. These sources are cited below.
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