What single day in World History has seen the most deaths? See added details for clarification...?

Question

When I initially started thinking about it, I was primarily only considering days when the United States was at war with another country; August 6th or August 9th (1945) due to how many casualties that we inflicted on Japan and factoring any other battlefront deaths. Obviously as a percentage of total population, it would be nothing compared with warfare from thousands of years ago so my question is only sticking to shear numbers....A lot of things to consider, mass extinctions (holocaust, other attempted extinctions or complete extinctions, Darfur, Japan marching through China at the beginning of WWII). I don't care about who the casualties were, as long as they can be verified through conventional sources. The only reason I posed this question relative to wartime is because it is much easier to research wartime casualties. Of course, the ultimate goal is to define the day in which more people (regardless of race, creed, or color) were slaughtered than on any other day.

Answer 1

January 23,1556 Earthquake kills about 830,000 in China.
Tsunami of 2004 in Indonesia is considered second with about 230,000.
Each single day totals.

Yellow River Floods of 1887 & 1931 in China killed millions each, but aren't considered single day totals.

Answer 2

Most Deaths In One Day

Answer 3

Good question, but very hard to answer.

Short answer: for easily and officially verified, 26 December 2004 would possibly be it. An estimated 187,000 people died in Asia from the Indian Ocean tsunami.

Battle related deaths are nothing compared to natural disaster. An estimate 70,000 died from the atom bomb strikes, that many or possibly more died from the bombing of Dresden (15 Feb '45), but there are many natural catastrophes that are higher. In American history alone, about 4,000 people died at the Battle of Antietam and on 9-11 (the two bloodiest single-day acts of war on North American soil) while at least twice and probably three times that many died in the Galveston Hurricane of (8 September) 1900 alone.

An estimated 250,000 died in the Tangshan Earthquake in 1976, but the figures- compiled by the Chinese government- may not be reliable. There are reports of far deadlier earthquakes from the Middle Ages but medieval reports are notoriously unreliable.

The exact day, however, would probably be in 1918. In one year somewhere between 20 and 60 million people died worldwide of Spanish Influenza; 851 died in NYC alone on one day in October of 1918. That's a worldwide average of between 55,000 and 165,000 deaths per day worldwide, BUT there would have been far more than that on days when the plague was at its strongest (Oct-Nov-Dec 1918) so the worldwide death total could easily have topped 500,000 for a day. Unfortunately I don't know what that day is, but a book on the pandemic (and there are several) would probably have some info.

Answer 4

Couldn't give an exact day but it has to be in 1348 when the Black Death (not the Bubonic plague as this is different although some symptoms are similar) swept through Europe killing 50% of the population.

Answer 5

Well, I don't know. I don't think it's fair to count Hiroshima or Nagasaki because the weapon used was outside the realm of anything available at any other times, so not really comparable. Also, as many people were killed in Dresden during the fire bombing as died in these cities. Nor do I think Japan going through China or the Holocaust met your qualification of "one day", because those lasted many days, months, years.

As I said, I don't know, but I bet Borodino would be close, 75 to 85 thousand dead, in one day, using single shot guns, cannons, and swords.

Note: Saunders is probably right. I didn't consider natural disasters. Another that killed many was the Krakatoa eruption more than a century ago.

Answer 6

I don't know about the single day, but the most casualties in one year was from 1918-1919, when the influenza (H1N1) pandemic killed somewhere between 40-100 million people worldwide. So I would assume that the single-day-most-casualty would be sometime during 1918-1919.

Answer 7

It is probable that the deadliest day was the tsunami in Asia a couple of years ago. There is no way to tell exactly how many died, but it was far more than died at Hiroshima or in any other war action. Estimates of the fatalities run to over a quarter million.

Answer 8

Most causulties in a battle was the Battle of Salsu with reports of around 312,000 dead.

Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki only killed around 140,000.

Answer 9

The day the Ice Age began

Answer 10

The great flood of Noah's ark