Feature Articles - Military Casualties of World War One
The 'Great War', which
began on 28 July 1914 with Austria-Hungary's
declaration of war with Serbia, and which ended with the
German armistice
of 11
November 1918, produced a vast number of casualties and deaths - and
similarly vast numbers of missing soldiers.
The precise numbers remain shrouded in the passing of time compounded by the incompleteness of available records. In the heat of action accurate records were not always kept, and where they were, these were not uncommonly lost in subsequent actions, such were the conditions of trench warfare.
Thus the figures reproduced below cannot be regarded as definitive but are a fair reflection of the scale of losses country by country.
Note too that these statistics reflect military casualties only; no reliable figures are available for civilian casualties throughout the world. Attributing civilian casualties to the effects of war is a subjective process at best; the scale of the First World War certainly resulted in an absence of even the most approximate figures for affected nations.
Caveats aside - on to the figures:
| Country | Dead | Wounded | Missing | Total |
| Africa | 10,000 | - | - | 10,000 |
| Australia | 58,150 | 152,170 | - | 210,320 |
| Austria-Hungary | 922,000 | 3,600,000 | 855,283 | 5,377,283 |
| Belgium | 44,000 | 450,000 | - | 494,000 |
| Britain | 658,700 | 2,032,150 | 359,150 | 3,050,000 |
| Bulgaria | 87,500 | 152,390 | 27,029 | 266,919 |
| Canada | 56,500 | 149,700 | - | 206,200 |
| Caribbean | 1,000 | 3,000 | - | 4,000 |
| France | 1,359,000 | 4,200,000 | 361,650 | 5,920,650 |
| Germany | 1,600,000 | 4,065,000 | 103,000 | 5,768,000 |
| Greece | 5,000 | 21,000 | 1,000 | 27,000 |
| India | 43,200 | 65,175 | 5,875 | 114,250 |
| Italy | 689,000 | 959,100 | - | 1,424,660 |
| Japan | 300 | 907 | 3 | 1,210 |
| Montenegro | 3,000 | 10,000 | 7,000 | 20,000 |
| New Zealand | 16,130 | 40,750 | - | 56,880 |
| Portugal | 7,222 | 13,751 | 12,318 | 33,291 |
| Romania | 335,706 | 120,000 | 80,000 | 535,706 |
| Russia | 1,700,000 | 5,000,000 | - | 6,700,000 |
| Serbia | 45,000 | 133,148 | 152,958 | 331,106 |
| South Africa | 7,000 | 12,000 | - | 19,000 |
| Turkey | 250,000 | 400,000 | - | 650,000 |
| USA | 58,480 | 189,955 | 14,290 | 262,725 |
A "conchie" was slang used to refer to a conscientious objector.
- Did you know?
