Bloody one-day battles

Brothers in arms

Nov 11th 2008
From Economist.com

Some of the bloodiest one-day battles in history

THE first day of the Somme offensive was among the bloodiest days in the history of warfare. About 70,000 soldiers, most of them British, were killed, wounded, taken prisoner or went missing in the fighting on July 1st 1916. In terms of one-day battles only Borodino, the most brutal one-day encounter of the Napoleonic wars, bears comparison in modern times—though perhaps more casualties were sustained over a 24-hour period during prolonged fighting at Leipzig in 1813 and in the First Battle of the Marne in 1914. Huge casualty figures reported for ancient and medieval battles should be treated with caution; few are eye-witness reports and chroniclers were prone to exaggeration. Head-to-head combat pales in comparison with the deadliness of the nuclear bombings by America of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which claimed 140,000 and 85,000 lives.