The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (112 page)

32.
Erickson,
Barbarossa, table 12.4.

33.
Wilmott,
Second World War in the Far East.

34.
Wallechinsky,
David Wallechinsky's Twentieth Century, pp. 742–745.

35.
Gilbert,
History of the Twentieth Century, vol. 2, pp. 646–647; Manchester,
American Caesar, p. 483.

36.
Keegan,
Second World War, pp. 561–573; Toland,
Rising Sun, pp. 804–820; Gilbert,
History of the Twentieth Century, vol. 2, pp. 692–694.

37.
Technically, I mean "non-battle trauma" rather than "accidental" because that's how the U.S. Army categorizes its statistics. Non-battle trauma includes accidents, drowning, sunstroke, frostbite, murder, and suicide, but not disease. The number of Army personnel who died of non-battle trauma in 1942–45 was 60,054 (Edgar L. Cook and John E. Gordon, "Accidental Trauma," in John Boyd Coates Jr.,
Preventative Medicine in World War II,
http://history.amedd.army.mil/booksdocs/wwii/PrsnlHlthMsrs/chapter7.htm
, p. 247), compared to 234,874 Army personnel killed in battle during World War II, a ratio of 3.9 battle deaths per non-battle trauma death. In the Civil War, U.S. Army personnel suffered 10,282 deaths by accident, drowning, sunstroke, murder, and suicide, compared to 110,070 battle deaths, a ratio of 10.7 battle deaths per non-battle trauma death. William F. Fox,
Regimental Losses in the American Civil War, 1861–1865 (1889), available at
http://www.civilwarhome.com/foxs.htm
(accessed March 14, 2011).

38.
Staff of Strategy & Tactics Magazine,
War in the East, pp. 165–167.

39.
Gilbert,
History of the Twentieth Century, vol. 2, p. 304.

40.
Ibid., p. 366.

41.
Overy,
Russia's War, pp. 165–166.

42.
Gilbert,
History of the Twentieth Century, vol. 2, pp. 514–516.

43.
Tokyo: Estimates go as high as 130,000, but variations of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey's lower estimate of 83,793 are the most commonly repeated numbers. You can find this death toll on both ends of the political spectrum. For examples, Johnson,
Modern Times, p. 424; Zinn,
People's History of the United States, p. 422.

44.
Hiroshima: Estimates of the dead in the atomic blasts vary according to how many subsequent cancer deaths in the area are attributed to radiation poisoning. For example, CBS News reported on August 6, 2004, that there were 237,062 dead listed on Hiroshima's memorial cenotaph, including 5,142 who had "died from cancer and other long-term ailments over the past year." This means that they're counting people who lived another fifty-nine years after the bombing, even though most people worldwide don't even live fifty-nine years. In any case, the city government's 1946 report of 118,661 dead and 3,677 missing (
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, June 1986, p. 37) is as reliable an estimate of immediate deaths in Hiroshima as we're likely to get, and all estimates of long-term radiation deaths are speculative.

45.
Gilbert,
History of the Twentieth Century, vol. 2, p. 703.

46.
Mazower,
Dark Continent, pp. 231–232.

47.
Keegan,
Second World War, p. 590.

48.
The United States Strategic Bombing Survey (New York: Garland, 1976), vol. 10, p. 95.

49.
Dominic Lieven et al., in the
Cambridge History of Russia (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 226, estimated that 7.4 million Soviets were "killed in hot or cold blood," 2.2 million were "taken to Germany and worked to death," and 4.1 million "died of overwork, hunger and disease." To this total of 13.7 million excessive civilian deaths under German occupation should be added the deaths of 3.3 million POWs.

50.
Rummel,
Death by Government, p. 148 (3,949,000).

51.
Rough guess. The two major war crimes blamed on the Nationalist Chinese are the Yellow River flood and the overall brutality with which they rounded up and abused conscripts. I'm estimating a few hundred thousand apiece.

52.
According to a 1947 government report, 6,028,000 civilians from inside the pre-war borders of Poland died in the war, only 521,000 of them as a direct result of military operations. Urlanis,
Wars and Population, p. 290.

53.
Median of eleven published estimates. See
http://www.necrometrics.com/20c5m.htm#Holocaust
.

54.
Arendt,
Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 192.

55.
UN postwar estimate: repeated by Robert B. Edgerton,
Warriors of the Rising Sun (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), p. 272; Werner Gruhl,
Imperial Japan's World War Two (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2010), p. 111; Thomas G. Paterson,
On Every Front (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), p. 11; Sterling Seagrave,
Gold Warriors: America's Secret Recovery of Yamashita's Gold (New York: Verso, 2003), p. 54.

56.
The official death toll of the Bengal famine.

57.
The unofficial death toll of the Bengal famine.

58.
Famine deaths. Karnow,
Vietnam, p. 160.

59.
Martin Mennecke et al., "Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina," in Samuel Totten et al., eds.,
Century of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 422.

60.
The official estimate is that conventional bombing killed 260,000 in Japan. An unknown number died by atomic bombing, but most guesses are close to the 140,000 needed to bring the total to 400,000. Johnson,
Modern Times, pp. 424–426; Keegan,
Second World War, p. 576.

61.
Urlanis,
Wars and Population, p. 290: 350,000 civilians killed, only 60,000 by military action.

62.
This is the sum of the number of Axis POWs who died (580,000), Soviet soldiers who were executed (400,000), Gulag deaths (621,000; Service,
History of Twentieth-Century Russia, p. 278), Black Sea/Caucasus minorities who were killed (231,000), Baltic minorities who died (200,000), repatriated Soviets who were killed after the war (1,000,000 more or less), and German civilians who died during the Red Army advance (1,000,000; Keegan,
Second World War, p. 592). See the chapter on Stalin for details.

63.
Ben Macintyre, "Britain to Blame for Holocaust, Says Buchanan,"
Times (London), September 23, 1999; see also Michael Kelly, "Buchanan's Folly,"
Washington Post, September 22, 1999.

64.
Elisabeth Bumiller, "60 Years after the Fact, Debating Yalta All Over Again,"
New York Times, May 16, 2005, p. 18; David Greenberg, "Know Thy Allies,"
Slate, May 10, 2005,
http://www.slate.com/id/2118394/
.

65.
Overy,
Russia's War, pp. 195–196; Vecamer, "Germany-Soviet Military-Economic Comparison"; Dykman, "The Soviet Experience in World War Two."

Expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe

1.
Every account of this event seems to report a different death toll, but estimates fall into two clusters. Most historians claim that 2 to 2.8 million eastern Germans died or disappeared without a trace during the expulsions. A minority prefers tighter standards of proof, which produce estimates of 400,000 to 600,000 well-documented deaths. Regardless of whether it ranks Number 35 or 85, this event belongs somewhere on my list.

2.
Istvan S. Pogany,
Righting Wrongs in Eastern Europe (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 106.

3.
Hans-Ulrich Stoldt, "Revenge on Ethnic Germans: Czech Town Divided over How to Commemorate 1945 Massacre,"
Spiegel Online, September 4, 2009,
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,646757,00.html
.

4.
Dornberg, "Germany's Expellees and Border Changes"; Czech News Agency, "Transfer of Germans from Czechoslovakia."

5.
Winston Churchill, "Sinews of Peace," Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, March 5, 1946, http://www.winstonchurchill.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=429.

6.
Bell-Fialkoff, "Brief History of Ethnic Cleansing"; Krah, "Germans as Victims?"

7.
Czech News Agency, "Profile: Organised Sudeten Deportations Began 50 Year Ago."

8.
See Keegan,
Second World War, p. 593.

French Indochina War

1.
Karnow,
Vietnam, pp. 161–167.

2.
Ibid., pp. 171–172.

3.
Clodfelter,
Warfare and Armed Conflicts, vol. 2, p. 1123.

Partition of India

1.
The median of fourteen published estimates. See
http://www.necrometrics.com/20c300k.htm#India
.

2.
Spaeth, "The Price of Freedom."

3.
Collins and Lapierre,
Freedom at Midnight, pp. 97–98.

4.
Gilbert,
History of the Twentieth Century, vol. 2, p. 795.

5.
Collins and Lapierre,
Freedom at Midnight, pp. 314–316.

6.
Counted by the 1951 censuses taken by India and Pakistan, cited in Pradeep Sharma,
Human Geography: The People (New Delhi, India: Discovery Publishing House, 2008), p. 129.

7.
Collins and Lapierre,
Freedom at Midnight, pp. 355–360, 436–512.

Mao Zedong

1.
Meisner,
Mao's China and After, p. 69.

2.
Spence,
Search for Modern China, pp. 539–540.

3.
Chang and Halliday,
Mao, p. 325.

4.
Ibid., p. 324.

5.
Meisner,
Mao's China and After, pp. 162–180.

6.
Chang and Halliday,
Mao, p. 417.

7.
Chirot,
Modern Tyrants, p. 192.

8.
Chang and Halliday,
Mao, pp. 329–333.

9.
Nicholas Wade, "Method & Madness: Lust for Power," review of
The Private Life of Chairman Mao, by Dr. Li Zhisui,
New York Times, November 6, 1994; Chirot,
Modern Tyrants, p. 195.

10.
Spence,
Search for Modern China, p. 525.

11.
Meisner,
Mao's China and After, p. 70.

12.
Chang and Halliday,
Mao, pp. 431–432; Chirot,
Modern Tyrants, p. 196.