So if you follow World War I history, or honestly,
even if you just kind of vaguely remember your
high school history classes, you have probably
heard this massive overarching casualty figure,
like a thousand times. Right, the 40 million.
Exactly, 40 million. It's the number that gets
printed in the textbooks. It's cited in all the
documentaries. But welcome back to another deep
dive, because today we are going to actually
look at the data. that makes up that colossal
number. Yeah, we have this massive, incredibly
detailed repository of historical casualty data
in front of us today. We do. We're pulling from
demographic studies, official government reports,
and historical databases that have all been compiled
into this rather staggering overview. And our
mission for you today is to go way beyond that
incomprehensible macro number. Because 40 million
is just, it's too big to visualize. It really
is. We want to pull out the casualties that usually
get left out of the standard trench warfare narrative,
things like neutral nations and colonial laborers.
We really want to look at how the dawn of industrialized
warfare fundamentally changed human history.
It absolutely did. To set the stage, the sheer
scale we are talking about in these sources is
an estimated 15 to 22 million deaths and roughly
23 million wounded. It's a scale that defies
human imagination, really. And that difficulty
in comprehending the numbers is exactly why digging
into this data matters so much today. Because
if we want to understand the modern world, you
have to understand the specific conflict. Right.
It shifted the entire paradigm of human loss.
Before 1914, wars were generally fought by professional
armies. They took place on relatively contained
battlefields. Usually. But the staggering figures
you just mentioned, they represent the exact
moment in history when the machinery of the Industrial
Revolution was fully applied to human destruction.
It was the moment warfare stopped being a contained
event and instead enveloped entire global societies.
Which is reflected immediately in the data when
you look at how people actually died. Yeah. I
was really struck by this massive shift. because
in 19th century conflicts, the vast majority
of soldiers didn't actually die from bullets
or cannons. No, they didn't. They died from disease.
You would have an army march out, set up camp
somewhere, and dysentery or cholera would do
far more damage than the enemy ever could. But
in World War I, about two -thirds of military
deaths were actually in battle. What's fascinating
here is that this two thirds figure is a direct
mathematical reflection of industrialized warfare.
We are talking about the mass production of machine
guns, heavy artillery that could fire from miles
away, poison gap. Just a completely different
scale of violence. Exactly. And a style of trench
warfare that turned battlefields into static
meat grinders. The technology of killing had
vastly outpaced the military tactics of survival.
But while we look at that two thirds, I do have
to caution you not to forget the remaining one
third. Right, the disease factor didn't just
vanish. No, it was still millions of human beings.
Millions of soldiers died far away from the front
lines. They died in prisoner of war camps from
exposure and malnutrition. And crucially, they
died from diseases like the 1918 Spanish flu
pandemic. Which was just brutal. It swept through
the trenches and the staging camps with just
devastating speed. The breakdown by Alliance
really drives the sheer volume of that lost home,
too. The sources show that Triple Entente, the
Allies, lost about six million military personnel.
Staggering. Meanwhile, the Central Powers lost
about four million. And when you look at individual
nations, the numbers are just jaw -dropping.
Germany alone saw over 2 million military dead.
France saw over 1 .3 million. Over a million
young men. Right. Just imagine the demographic
hole that leaves for you as a society. Imagine
wiping out the entire population of a major modern
city exclusively comprised of young men in just
four years. It alters the trajectory of a nation
for generations. You have millions of empty chairs
at dinner tables, missing workers in the economy,
and entire communities in mourning. And that
brings up the complex reality of how we even
know these numbers to begin with. You mentioned
earlier that the total deaths range from 15 to
22 million. Yeah, that's a huge gap. It's a 7
million person variance. That massive gap exists
because the methodology used by each nation to
record and classify their casualties was completely
ununiform. OK, let's untag this. variance for
a second, because how does a modern military
operation just lose track of 7 million people?
Why do the estimates range so wildly in the official
records? Well, let's look at the Russian example
from the sources, because it perfectly illustrates
the chaos of the era. Russian casualties are
incredibly hard to kin down. During their massive
military retreats on the Eastern Front, a huge
portion of field reports were simply lost. Just
gone. Just gone. They were burned, destroyed
by artillery, or just abandoned in the mud. You
had commanders who couldn't accurately report
their losses because their units were in total
disarray or the commanders themselves were killed.
Wow. So Soviet demographers decades later had
to retroactively estimate the true totals. By
looking at pre -war census data, post -war population
data, and whatever surviving records they could
find, they estimated that the actual Russian
military dead could be up to 2 .2 million. That
was vastly higher than the initial chaotic wartime
counts. But wait, if the field reports were burned
or lost in a massive retreat, aren't those demographers
decades later basically just guessing? How can
we trust a number calculated so long after the
fact? That is exactly the friction that historians
deal with. It is an educated estimation based
on demographic modeling rather than a direct
head count. This raises an important question
about who gets counted and who falls through
the cracks of history. When you don't have a
body or a dog tag or a ledger entry, you become
a statistical ghost. And those cracks were literally
shifting beneath their feet because the borders
of the world completely changed after the armistice.
Yes they did. The sources highlight this incredible
difference between counting casualties by the
borders of 1914 versus the borders of 1924. Exactly.
You have to remember that this war destroyed
massive multi -ethnic empires. The Austro -Hungarian
Empire, the Russian Empire and the Ottoman Empire
were all dismantled. So if you count casualties
by the borders of 1924, after those empires broke
apart into new countries, you reveal the hidden
tolls of these newly formed nations. Right, like
the Czechoslovakia. The sources note that 185
,000 Czechoslovaks died in the war. But Czechoslovakia
did not even exist as an independent state in
1914. Not at all. They were drafted into the
Austro -Hungarian army or they defected and fought
in Allied legions and they died for a nation
that was still quite literally being born. It
really makes you think about how retroactive
counting shapes modern national identity. And
what I really love about this source material
is seeing how modern organizations are actively
revising history right now, today, to fix these
historical blind spots. Yes, the initial counts
in the 1920s often prioritized the combat soldier
specifically, the European man holding the rifle
in the trench. But wars are fought with logistics.
They are fought by laborers, porters, and massive
transport networks. People carrying the ammunition.
Precisely. For decades, the colonial laborers
recruited from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia
who provided that vital logistical support were
largely left off the official roles of British
war dead. This happened even though domestic
British laborers working in similar capacities
were counted. Which is just a glaring double
standard. It was. But the Commonwealth War Graves
Commission, or CINWGC, has been actively rectifying
that in recent years. And that fundamentally
changes how we view the global footprint of the
war. Here's where it gets really interesting,
because it reminds you that this was literally
a world war. It is so easy to get stuck in that
standard European trench warfare narrative, mud,
barbed wire in the Western Front. But the sources
point out these fascinating nuggets that completely
defy that image. For instance, the UK employed
around 300 ,000 laborers from all over the globe
just to keep their war machine running. A prime
example of this from the text is the Chinese
Labor Corps. The British and French recruited
heavily from China to manage their logistics.
The CWGC reports that nearly 2 ,000 workers from
the Chinese Labor Corps died during the war.
That's a huge loss. And they are buried right
alongside British war dead in France. And what
is striking is that many of them didn't die from
artillery shells. They succumbed to the 1918
flu epidemic while performing incredibly difficult
back -breaking tasks like clearing battlefields,
moving supplies, and digging trenches in a foreign
country. Imagine that physical reality for a
second. You are recruited from China, shipped
across the world to northern France, and your
job is to clear unexploded ordnance out of the
freezing mud. And then you don't even die from
combat. You're taken out by a global flu pandemic.
It's a tragic reality of the logistics of war.
And it wasn't just labor from around the world.
It was combat too. I was amazed by the numbers
here. You have the 200 ,000 Nepalese Gurkha volunteers
who served the British Empire. They fought on
all fronts, France, Turkey, Palestine, Mesopotamia,
suffering some 20 ,000 casualties. And we also
have to look at the massive inclusion of colonial
troops fighting directly for the European powers.
You had regiments from French Algeria and Vietnam.
You had troops from British India, which alone
suffered roughly 74 ,000 dead. You have men from
Senegal and Madagascar traveling thousands of
miles to fight and die in the mud of Europe.
It was an entirely globalized mobilization. So
what does this all mean for the people left behind?
You mentioned the mobilization of entire empires.
But when you pull all those resources, the food,
the trains, the labor toward the front lines,
what happens to the civilians? That is where
the numbers get truly dark. The sources show
a staggering toll that I don't think gets enough
attention. They estimate between 6 to 13 million
civilian deaths. How do 13 million civilians
die in a war that was supposedly contained to
military fronts? They died largely because starvation
was explicitly weaponized. This wasn't just a
war of armies shooting at each other. It was
economic warfare on a continental scale. The
Allied blockade of Germany, for example, was
designed to completely cut off food, fertilizer,
and essential supplies to the civilian population.
The goal was to crush morale and force a surrender
by making daily life unlivable. According to
the German Board of Public Health, they estimated
that 763 ,000 German civilians died from malnutrition
and disease specifically due to that blockade.
Because it's not just a matter of soldiers fighting
anymore. It's about systematically dismantling
the enemy's ability to survive at a basic human
level. Precisely. And the devastation of these
economic strategies was even worse in colonial
territories, where local populations had zero
say in the conflict. In East Africa, the campaign
between the British and the Germans was incredibly
harsh. In what way? Well, the military logistics
meant that both sides relied heavily on stripping
local resources. They requisitioned crops and
livestock, leading to severe food shortages for
the people who actually lived there. Combined
with epidemic diseases that always follow moving
armies, this resource stripping killed an estimated
750 ,000 African civilians. And you didn't even
have to be a participant in the war to suffer
these consequences. This is one of the most surprising
facts from the sources to me, the fate of Qajar
Persia, which is modern day Iran. Yes, the Persian
famine. They were completely neutral. They wanted
absolutely no part in this European conflict.
Yet because of their strategic location and their
oil, British and Russian troops occupied parts
of the country anyway. They requisitioned local
food supplies to feed their armies and blocked
traditional distribution networks. This culminated
in a devastating famine. Up to two million Iranians
died. Two million people. That was roughly 19
% of their entire population. Nearly one in five
people wiped out in a war they were officially
neutral in. It perfectly illustrates how industrialized
warfare respects no borders and recognizes no
neutrality. The logistical calories required
to feed an occupying army will strip a local
population bare, regardless of their political
stance. And Persia wasn't the only neutral nation
to bleed for a war they didn't start. You have
Norway, which was known at the time as the neutral
ally. They lost over 1100 people. Right. And
those were mostly merchant sailors, just guys
trying to do their jobs, moving cargo and trading
in what had suddenly become war zones and getting
their ships torpedoed by submarines. It really
shifts your perspective on the reach of the violence.
It reaches everywhere. We talk a lot about the
major empires losing millions of men, but I was
looking at the breakdown of proportional losses
in the text, and there was one nation that absolutely
stopped me in my tracks. What happened in Serbia?
Serbia is the most glaring example in our sources
of how smaller nations suffered losses that were
essentially existential threats to their future.
When an empire loses a million men, it is a tragedy.
When a small nation loses that same number, it
is a demographic collapse. Serbia lost an estimated
16 .7 % to 27 .8 % of their entire pre -war population.
That is between 750 ,000 and 1 .25 million people.
Out of a population of just 4 .5 million, it
is just devastating. It is a level of societal
destruction that changes the cultural DNA of
a region. And we see similar catastrophic demographic
events in the Ottoman Empire, which the sources
note saw between 2 .8 and 3 .2 million total
deaths. That was up to 15 .4 % of its entire
population. And a significant portion of that
Ottoman civilian toll involves one of the darkest
chapters of the war, where the chaos of a global
conflict was used as a smokescreen. Yes. Based
strictly on the historical sources we are reviewing
today, those Ottoman civilian casualties include
the Armenian Genocide. The text notes that the
overwhelming majority of historians, as well
as academic institutions focused on Holocaust
and genocide studies, recognize the deaths of
1 .5 million Armenians alongside Assyrians and
Greeks as part of a targeted policy of extermination
by the Ottoman Empire. The source material also
explicitly notes the geopolitical reality that
successive regimes in Turkey have denied the
Armenian genocide from 1915 all the way up to
the present day. It is a stark reminder of how
the fog of war can mask violence against civilians.
And sometimes that violence against non -combatants
was shockingly sudden. To ground these massive
sweeping numbers, the sources highlight some
highly specific memorable incidents that just
show how nowhere in the world was truly safe.
from the ripple effects of this war. The global
reach was unprecedented. Right. For instance,
think about being a civilian in North America,
an ocean away from the trenches. In 1917, a French
cargo ship laden with high explosives collided
with a Norwegian vessel in the harbor of Halifax,
Canada. The resulting explosion leveled the area
and killed 2 ,000 civilians in an instant. Then
you have the sinking of the ocean liner Lusitania,
killing 128 Americans, which happened before
the U .S. even officially entered the war. And
here's one that really stuck with me because
of how incredibly random it feels. 13 Portuguese
civilians were killed when a German submarine
just suddenly surfaced and bombarded Madera Island.
You were on an island in the Atlantic going about
your daily life and suddenly the war arrives
on your doorstep. If we connect this to the bigger
picture, all of these incidents from the massive
famine in Persia, to a submarine bombarding a
Portuguese island, to the accidental destruction
of a Canadian city, they show exactly why you,
the listener, should care about the minutiae
of these sources. Exactly. These casualty numbers
don't just represent a historical event that
happened over a century ago. They represent the
terrifying dawn of the modern era. This was a
time when entire populations, not just professional
armies, were mobilized, weaponized, and ultimately
targeted. The traditional line between combatant
and non -combatant was permanently erased. That
is the real aha. moment for me in reading through
all this data. We tend to think of globalization
as a relatively recent phenomenon, something
from the late 20th century, but this shows how
deeply interconnected the world already was in
1914. It was incredibly intertwined. You have
an assassination that triggers a regional war
in the Balkans and somehow through this web of
alliances and global empires that leads to Japan
mobilizing a force of 800 ,000 men. It leads
to 800 Finnish volunteers fighting in the Russian
army despite officially having an exemption.
It leads to laborers from Madagascar traveling
thousands of miles to die in a European winter.
And it forces us to think critically about how
we record history itself. We tend to think of
history as a book that has been published, something
firmly settled in the past. But this source material
shows that the ledger of the dead is still actively
being written. It really is an ongoing process.
Think about the physical reality of what historians
are doing right now. The fact that researchers
in 2025 are still updating databases like the
Italian Istore Eco Project, which is meticulously
trying to find the exact burial places of over
half a million soldiers or organizations. like
the CWGC finally etching the names of African
laborers into official memorials proves that
history is never truly finished. The past is
constantly being reevaluated based on who we
decide matters enough to count today. It really
is a heavy realization, but an incredibly important
one. We've gone through a lot of dense dark material
today, and we really want to thank you for taking
the time to explore these sources with us. It's
not easy to look directly at human destruction
on this scale. No, it's not. But I hope that
by unpacking the methodology and the hidden stories,
we've helped show that the 40 million number
isn't just a sterile statistic to memorize for
a test. It is made up of individual lives, soldiers,
laborers, and civilians from literally every
single corner of the globe. Absolutely. And I
want to leave you with a final thought to mull
over, building on the naval casualties we touched
on earlier. The text mentions 14 ,661 merchant
navy dead for the British Empire alone, alongside
hundreds of Danish and Norwegian fishermen killed
by U -boats. Just staggering numbers for non
-combatants. I want you to think about the invisible,
un -uniform supply chains that keep our nations
alive today. How does your food reach your local
grocery store? How does fuel reach your city?
In global conflicts, it is so often the people
simply trying to transport food and goods, the
merchant mariners, the civilian laborers, the
deckhands who become the silent, uncounted casualties
of economic warfare. When the world goes to war,
the very first targets are the fragile lifelines
that sustain us. Something to seriously think
about the next time you see a cargo ship out
on the horizon. Thank you again for joining us
for this deep dive. Remember to always keep questioning
what you read, look for the hidden mechanics
behind the massive statistics, and above all,
Stay curious. I'll catch you next time.