Deaths from Conventional Wars (1800–2011)

There are very large differences in how deadly different wars are: most death tolls are relatively small, a few are large, and very few are extremely large.

The chart shows this for all conventional wars between 1800 and 2011, relying on data from Project Mars. Even though most wars killed several thousand people, we can barely make them out in the chart.

This is because the big wars were much more deadly: wars like the Russian Civil War and the Korean War killed several hundred thousand people. And wars such as the Chinese Civil War and the Vietnam War killed between 1 and 2 million combatants.

But the deaths in the World Wars loom even over them: in World War I, more than 7 million soldiers died.

And in World War II alone, more than 21 million.