The First World War lasted four
years and claimed the lives of some 10 million soldiers. But what
was the deadliest single day of the Great War? The answer might come as
a surprise – and a useful reminder. From 1914 to 1918, in Europe, Africa, Asia and on
the high seas, the Great War claimed the lives of around 10 million soldiers from dozens of nations.
That’s about 6700 lives lost every single day for more than 1500 days. But of course not every
day was the same – in any given 24 hour period a section of the front might be very quiet,
or the fighting might rage so fiercely that tens of thousands were killed in just a few hours.
Some infamous dates stand out in popular history books and for history buffs: the first day of
the battle of the Somme in 1916, the peak of the fighting in the battle of the Frontiers
in 1914, or the start of the German Spring Offensive in 1918. But do we know what was the
single bloodiest day of the war, or can we know? The best answers we have lie in the casualty
records left in the archives by the armies from each belligerent state. After a battle, each unit
would report on how many soldiers were killed, wounded, or missing, and these reports would
then be tabulated by staff officers to keep track of overall losses and fighting power. But
often these records are incomplete, inaccurate, or combine several days losses together. And
since each country’s army kept its own records, and sometimes these records are not easy to
compare or have since been lost like when the German archives were destroyed in 1945 or
when many Russian records were lost after the revolution. The data we have doesn’t let us say
which day was bloodiest for all armies combined, but what we can do is focus on
which day was the deadliest for one single country – and it turns out recent
findings have upended conventional wisdom. So let’s start with one of the most infamous
days of the Great War – July 1, 1916. Britain had a small army when
the war began, but by 1916, it was ready to launch its first major
offensive at the Battle of the Somme. The British army suffered some costly days
in the Great War – like at Passchendaele, Ypres, or in the German offensive of 1918. But
worst of all was July 1, 1916. By mid-1916, Britain’s new volunteer armies had been
trained and sent to the front lines in France and Belgium. It had taken time
to build up British military strength, and the French had been doing the bulk of the
fighting since 1914. Now was Britain’s moment to take its share of the load and contribute to
an offensive on either side of the Somme river alongside the French army. But not everything
went according to plan – the German offensive at Verdun put the French under such pressure that
the British had to take on a larger role in the attack. The British hoped that they could rely on
artillery to win – if their unprecedented weight of artillery fire could smash the German trenches
and dugouts before the infantry went over the top, victory would be assured. British troops trained
to advance at a steady pace across No Man’s Land, since it was expected most German defences would
already be destroyed. For a week the British guns pounded German positions and turned the landscape
into a mass of shellholes and broken trenches. On July 1, 1916, Britain’s New Army went over
the top. But the German defences were mostly intact – many of the British shells had been
duds, and German bunkers had protected many of their men from the shelling. As the
British advanced across No Man’s Land, the Germans were able to come up into their
trenches and put their machine guns to work, with deadly results. Some British units were broken
up and stopped before even reaching the German trenches. Other British units managed to penetrate
into the German lines but were then stuck in exposed positions and couldn’t communicate
with their commanders on the British side. A Scottish soldier remembered
the hours after a failed advance: “We began to work [our way] towards the
communication trench, but owing to the lie of the ground we were badly exposed and I at length
found myself the only living occupant of that corner. [...] I found my platoon officer, Lieut.
MacBrayne, lying shot through the head. Of the others of my platoon I could get no news, except
those I saw lying dead or wounded.” (Arthur 45) The British did make some limited gains that day,
but not as much as the French did on their part of the battlefield, and at much higher cost.
July 1, 1916 was Britain’s deadliest day not just in the First World War, but in all of British
military history: 19,240 men were killed and about 38,000 wounded. The battle of the Somme went
on for more than four months, but no day was as costly as the first. That’s part of the
reason why the Somme and July 1916 have had such an important influence on British memory
of the war – there have been countless books, films, and television series, and thousands of
Britons still visit the battlefield every year. That said, July 1 on the Somme was not the
bloodiest day of the war for a single army. For the British Dominions, by the way,
Newfoundland had its worst day of the war on July 1, 1916 as well, losing 85% of its men killed
or wounded. The Australians suffered their most intense losses on July 19, 1916 at Fromelles with
2000 dead from a single division. For Canada, it was the 2400 dead at Vimy Ridge on April 9, 1917
– the first day of Canada’s most famous victory. Germany’s worst day of the war, in terms
of dead, was probably the first day of the Spring Offensive, the Kaiser’s Battle – the final
German offensive to win the war in March 1918. The Germans had transferred fresh troops from the
East after Russia had signed a peace treaty, and struck the British near where the British
and French sections of the front met. The German plan was to split the Allies apart and crush the
BEF, and to do it they used Stormtrooper tactics: groups of well-trained infantry who entered
British lines and penetrated as far as they could, bypassing strongpoints for the regular infantry
to mop up. On March 21, the very first day, the Germans lost about 11,000 men killed in
action – most of them well-trained infantry who could not be replaced. German officer
Ernst Junger remembered a close call: “The attacking waves of infantry bobbed
up and down in ghostly lines in the white rolling smoke. Against all expectation
a machine-gun rattled at us from the [British] second line. I and the men with me
jumped for a shell-hole. A second later there was a frightful crack. [A comrade] had
a hole through his arm, and assured us, groaning, that he had a bullet in his back.
We pulled off his uniform and bound him up. The churned-up earth showed us that a shrapnel
shell had burst at the level of our faces on the edge of the shell-hole. It was a wonder
we were still alive.” (Junger, 142-143) Even though at first the Germans made huge
gains and created a crisis in Allied command, in the end the offensive failed
and was called off two weeks later. For some of the other states, the totals are
harder to estimate due to poor record-keeping or lost archives. For Italy, one contender
for bloodiest day might be the first day of the Battle of Caporetto on October
24, 1917, when Austro-Hungarian and German troops smashed through the Italian
army. Or it might have been June 29, 1916, when the Austro-Hungarians launched a phosgene gas
attack on Monte San Michele and killed nearly 3000 Italians while poisoning 4000 others, along with
some of the Austro-Hungarians themselves. In the end, that attack did not significantly
change the front lines in the area. Austria-Hungary’s bloodiest single day of the war
is hard to pin down given the chaos of some of their early battles. It might have been in August
1914, when the Habsburg armies rushed into Galicia to attack the Russians, only to stopped and suffer
a crushing defeat by the more numerous and better coordinated Russian armies. Another possibility
is February 27, 1915, when the already weakened Austro-Hungarians launched an offensive against
Russian positions in the Carpathian mountains in the dead of winter. On that day alone, the
Austro-Hungarian 2nd and 3rd armies reported 40,000 missing, many of whom had been killed
in the fighting or died of hypothermia in the snow. A third possibility would be June 4,
1916, when the Russians began the Brusilov Offensive, which ultimately broke the
fighting power of the Austrian army. Russian casualty records are also in a state that
makes it hard to reconstruct accurate figures. It is possible though, that the Russian army suffered
its worst day during the 1915 Gorlice-Tarnow Offensive, when the combined armies of the
Central Powers pushed the Russian army out of Poland and inflicted hundreds of thousands of
losses. Or maybe it was a day during the intense opening phase of the Brusilov Offensive
in 1916 – but we will never know for sure. France suffered proportionally
greater military losses than other Great Power during the First
World War, so it’s no surprise that the French army is usually mentioned
in discussions of the costliest day. The war began in 1914 with a frightful two months
for the French army. Faced with the full might of the Germans and with limited British
support due to the small size of the BEF, the French had to bear the brunt
of the fighting and dying. Their plan was to attack the Germans along
the border, but these assaults did not go as planned in what became known as the
Battle of the Frontiers from August 20-23. French troops attacked the Germans from Belgium
to Alsace, but the larger German armies threw them back as part of their move to encircle
Paris according to the Schlieffen Plan. French soldier Georges Veaux, described how his division
advanced into devastating German artillery fire: “The shooting began to be heard with
fury, then faded away. The Germans, who had advanced into the Fosse plain, ran awai
y from our troops. […] Once they reached the road to Ham, they deployed in long lines of
skirmishers and disappeared behind a fold in the terrain. But then the heights on the other
side of the Sambre were crowned with lightning; the German artillery attacked; shrapnel shells
burst everywhere on the plain.” (Veaux 54) The French offensive failed at great cost, because
the Germans were able to bring to bear superior firepower, and because the French lacked the
artillery ammunition and tactics to overcome the Germans’ effective use of their own heavy guns.
The single worst day for the French, or for any power, was August 22, 1914, when about 27,000 men
were killed – or so it was thought for many years. As part of the 100th anniversary commemorations
of the war in 2014, the French government put the death cards of the 1.4 million French soldiers
killed in the war in an online database called Memoire des hommes. It was this digitization
project that paved the way for a re-assessment of the fallen on each day, and thanks in part to
the efforts of the online French military history community, we estimate that the number of dead
on August 22, 1914 was probably closer to 21,000. Still a terrible number, but much
lower than previously believed. So if it wasn’t the British on July 1, 1916, and
it wasn’t the French on August 22, 1914, what was the deadliest day – and why did so many soldiers
from one country die on that particular day? One stat that has been clear is that 1915 was the
deadliest year of the war for the French army. The British army was growing but until mid-1916
the French were responsible for all the major operations in the west. At the same time, Russia
suffered a major defeat in 1915, the Italians made little progress against the Austrians, and the
Anglo-French assault on Gallipoli failed. Allied factories were still gearing up production which
meant that artillery and especially shells were in short supply. This meant the French army’s
task on the western front was going to be tough. In May, the French attacked in the northern
Artois region, and Moroccan troops briefly seized the crest of Vimy Ridge before
losing it again. Throughout the summer, the French launched smaller attacks
according to General Joseph Joffre’s idea of “nibbling away” at the enemy. But
the major push would come in the fall. Many Frenchmen had high hopes for the
great offensive of September 1915, as did General Joffre in
his message to the troops: “Soldiers of the Republic, […] the hour has
struck for us to launch an offensive to defeat the [enemy...]. Your élan will be irresistible.
It will carry you forward in one initial effort right through the fortified lines which oppose
you and up to the enemy battery positions. You will permit them neither rest nor repose
until victory has been won.” (Sheldon 469-470) The French plan was to break through German
lines on either side of the Noyon salient, throw the Germans out of their trenches
and force them to fight in the open. If no breakthrough happened, the French wanted to
continue “nibbling” and wear down the Germans. After three days of bombardments
against the German lines in Champagne, half a million French troops went over the
top on September 25, 1915 – the beginning of the 2nd Battle of Champagne. In some areas,
French guns had pulverized German defences, and groups of French infantrymen broke into
the lines. Sous-Lieutenant Jean Duclos was in charge of a machine gun platoon
and recalled the start of the attack: “The heart tightens at the moment of getting out
of the trench. Forced voices shout "forward"; a burst of energy and here I
am running in the yellow grass, my revolver in my hand... The
bayonets are shining all around me... some German machine-guns are cracking, their
bullets are raising small flakes of dust, hitting the ground under our steps; and
we are still running...” (Duclos 175-176) German Corporal Oswald Eichler experienced
the battle from the opposite perpsective: “It was soon obvious that gas
shells were exploding around us, and we had to react at once. Ignoring the
heavy small arms fire, we dashed across to the soldiers’ dugout and grabbed for our
gas masks […] I decided to take five men and investigate along the communications trench. We
did not get far. Men in blue helmets had closed right up to the dugout and were attacking
with hand grenades.” (Sheldon 472-473). The French managed to break through along a
12-km sector of the front and took thousands of Germans prisoner. Some French units utilized
new tactics of fire coordination with artillery, gas, enhanced reserves to exploit a breakthrough,
and a liberal use of grenades among the assaulting infantry. Others relied on more dated forms
of warfare to achieve a breakthrough – the 5th French Hussars received a mistaken
report that the infantry in their sector had cleared the German trenches, and
charged the German line at the gallop: “Immediately, […] the entire column came under
heavy machine-gun fire, while groups of Germans, looking terrified, came out of the trench with
their arms raised. The Hussars jumped to the ground and rushed into the Trench. Everything that
resisted was shot or knocked out. The two machine guns that stopped the progress of the Infantry
were silenced.” (Historique du 5e Hussards) Despite the relative success of the first
days, the going was difficult and losses were heavy. The 5th Hussars lost 140 horses
in that charge; the 2nd Zouaves regiment lost 24 officers and 1100 men killed or wounded
crossing the 200 meter-wide No Man’s Land. At the same time the French
went over the top in Champagne, they were also attacking again in Artois. The northern arm of the French offensive
in fall 1915 included an attack in the Artois region starting on September 25, the 3rd
Battle of Artois. This time, the British played a supporting role with an attack at Loos.
A few hours after the British attack began, French troops advanced towards the German-held
strongpoint of Vimy Ridge in the pouring rain. Even though the British had distracted some
German reserves, the French shortage of artillery meant their attack did not have
the firepower to break the German lines. 2nd Lieutenant Robert Desaubliaux’s
unit advanced over a field covered in corpses from the fighting in the same
area in December 1914. He watched as the first wave began to return to French trenches
after failing to get into the enemy trenches: “In spite of the bombardment, mines and
trench mortars, there is still wire, that deadly obstacle that cannot be crossed under
fire. […] In front of me, [a sergeant] collapses, his hands clutching his stomach. […] I try to
bandage him: but his intestines hang from two wounds. He convulses and rolls in the mud,
but [his movements] soon slow. He cries like a little child. […] Other wounded men arrive and
contemplate the agony of their comrade. But his suffering does not move them. They think only of
themselves and how to escape.” (Desaubliaux, 175) French troops forced a few
breaches in the German lines, but did not come close to breaking through,
or even making it as far as they had in May. General Ferdinand Foch ordered limited French
attacks in Artois until mid-October. He did not want to give the British the impression
the French had given up in the sector, and he felt that scarce munitions had to be
conserved for successful operations in Champagne. But the offensive in Champagne did not gain much
ground after the penetrations of the first days. Ironically, these limited successes turned
into more French dead, since false rumours of a complete breakthrough caused French commanders
to feed more and more units into a meatgrinder. Sous-Lieutenant Duclos is
caught up in the slaughter and the confusion in a captured German position: “In front of me, invisible enemy machine
guns are waking up and we are flooded with bullets. It's like being surrounded by a
swarm of bees... I try to see from where these bullets come from, which kill
and wound several soldiers around me, I suddenly feel a violent blow to my
face, and my nose starts to bleed; it is a bullet which has just taken off
the tip of my nose […] (Duclos 178-179) Joffre finally called off the Champagne
offensive on October 14. The fall campaign had failed because the French army was not yet
able to solve the riddle of trench warfare: they could sometimes get into the German
trenches, but they couldn’t break through them. They lacked heavy artillery and
ammunition, struggled with command and control in the fog of war, and they had not yet
refined infantry tactics to minimize losses. The double offensives in Artois and Champagne
helped make 1915 the bloodiest year of the war for France. In those two campaigns, they lost
81,000 wounded and 63,000 killed or went missing, and most of the missing were dead. In Artois,
the French lost 2684 killed or wounded for every square kilometer of ground they gained –
an unsustainable hemorrhage. And the bloodiest day of all – for France or for any single state
in the First World War – was probably the first day of the double offensive on September
25, 1915. According to the French death cards database on the Memoire des hommes website,
about 23,000 French troops were killed that day, not including those mortally wounded who died
later. That’s more deaths than any other day, anywhere, as far as we can tell from the
evidence that we have access to today. The 3rd Battle of Artois and the 2nd Battle
of Champagne don’t play a prominent role in the public memory of the First World War,
internationally or in France. When we think of the symbolism of the lives lost, we
often think of the Somme or Verdun – but going beyond the symbols is a critical part
of understanding history. The fact that the bloodiest day of the war happened during
battles that many of us have never heard of, that don’t get made into movies, and that aren’t
the focus of armistice day commemorations should make us all reflect on how we remember the Great
War and the 10 million men whose lives it took. The casualty numbers of the first industrial war
of the 20th century were a shock to societies around the world. The Second World War would
topple these numbers and end with one of the deadliest inventions in human history when the
US dropped the newly developed atom bomb over Japan. The other world powers needed to keep up
with this development because they understood the strategic implications of such weapons of
mass destructions. In the Soviet Union Stalin accelerated the development of nuclear weapons
and also nuclear energy as a whole. If you are interested in the Soviet nuclear program, you
should check out the first episode of our new documentary series Red Atoms where we explore
the USSR nuclear story from its origins. In later episodes we will also explore the Chernobyl
disaster and much more. So, where can you watch Red Atoms? On Nebula, a streaming service we
are building together with other creators. Nebula is a great place where you can enjoy
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support. As usually you can find all our sources for this video in the video description below.
I am Jesse Alexander and this is a production of Real Time History – the only history
channel that knows that if the battle of Champagne happened somewhere else it would
be known as the battle of sparkling wine.
The sheer amount of casualties (dead, wounded and missing) is honestly mind boggling.
Like, Napoleon bragged to Metternich that he "spent 30.000 men a month" and then during WWI it's the number of casualties in a week.
Hey Flo!