B.H. Liddell Hart once said “There is no excuse for any literate person to be less than three-thousand years old in his mind.” I agree. So it is time for one of my favorite hobbies; Military history; and a look back at some of the most dreadful Wars ever fought. The really bad thing about this list is you most likely have never heard of most of them. -SF
All wars are awful. Some wars are much, much more awful than others.
This is by no means a comprehensive list, nor does it comprise anything but a fraction of the overall deaths in wars in human history. Still, the five wars on this list may have collectively killed up to a quarter of a billion people.
These wars were big and upset the status quo. The Chinese Civil War turned more than half a billion people Red. World War II destroyed a totalitarian menace. Even the Mongol invasions echo in the present as an estimated 16 million people worldwide [4] carry the genes of Genghis Khan.
Chinese Civil War
The Chinese Civil War was fought between the forces of the Republic of China (ROC) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The war was fought on and off for more than 20 years, from 1927 to 1950, and resulted in the establishment of the People’s Republic of China on the mainland and the Republic of China on the island of Taiwan. Some eight million were killed in a conflict complicated by the presence of Japanese forces in China.
Like all civil wars in China’s history, social disruption was the main killer and affected civilians the most. Fighting generated refugees, leaving them vulnerable to disease and starvation. Reprisals by one side against cities, towns and villages thought to be sympathetic to the other killed more civilians.
Military casualties in the beginning of the civil war were relatively light, as the CCP primarily fought a guerrilla war. At the end of World War II the Soviet Army provided captured Japanese weapons to the CCP’s military forces, dramatically increasing their effectiveness in the field. Within five years the ROC had been swept from China into Taiwan and pockets of Southeast Asia.
An exacerbating factor in the civil war was the presence of Japanese forces engaged in a brutal campaign to pacify occupied China. The Japanese were usually more than a match for Chinese forces, but China had a seemingly inexhaustible amount of manpower. Both ROC and CCP forces fought the Japanese, even temporarily suspending fighting one another during the famous Second United Front [5].
Read the Remainder at The National Interest
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