The Most Devastating Battles in Human History

The Siege of Leningrad took place in the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1944 in what is now called Saint Petersburg. This prolonged military siege lasted for 872 days and was one of the darkest periods of the Second World War. The Nazi Wehrmacht, aided by its Finnish allies, invaded – then blockaded and bombarded – this industrial center for months which led to hundreds of thousands of Leningraders dying from starvation, brutal winter weather, and disease, and some of the most desperate resorted to cannibalism.

The Battle of the Somme occurred in 1916 in France and is one of three World War I battles listed here. It was a British-French operation intended to defeat the Germans on the Western Front, but it turned into a brutal fight of attrition for which there was no clear winner. The British suffered more than 57,000 casualties (of which 19,240 were soldiers) on the first day of fighting alone in the battle that raged for more than four months.

The Battle of Stalingrad occurred during World War II in the Soviet Union. It took place from 1942-1943 and involved the Red Army against Nazi Germany, where Hitler was determined to take Stalingrad (now called Volgograd) on the Nazi drive to smash Russian forces and seize oilfields in the Caucuses. But Stalin was equally determined to hold the city at all costs and launched Operation Uranus, which successfully forced Axis powers in the city to surrender. But Russian troops paid dearly for the victory after months of urban warfare among the ruins and rubble of the bombed city.

Operation Ichi-Go took place in 1944 in China and was the largest and bloodiest military operation in Japanese history. It involved three major military clashes between the Imperial Japanese Army and the National Revolutionary Army of China (with air support from U.S. forces) that took place over eight months in three Chinese provinces.

“Ichi-Go” is part of a Japanese idiom that means “one time,” showing the Japanese viewed these fights as a one-time opportunity to seize Allied airfields and open up land routes to reduce dependence on maritime military assets. The Chinese refer to it as the Battles of Henan-Hunan-Guangxi.

Hitler’s refusal to surrender, perhaps fueled by his drug use as some historians claim, meant the Allies had to pound their way into the heart of Germany. Nazi forces pushed back at almost every opportunity. By the spring of 1945, the Red Army had Belin in its sights after losing millions of soldiers and civilians throughout World War II.

The Red Army’s brutality on its march to Berlin (revenge for Nazi barbarism) meant many Nazi troops and civilians believed they would be executed if they surrendered to the Russians. This led to a prolonged fight to the death in any encounter with Russian troops.

The surprise Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union began on June 22, 1941, and involved more than 10 million combatants over several months, a staggeringly high number by any standard of warfare. Some 5.5 million Russians faced off against 3.5 million Germans and 700,000 German-allied troops, mainly from Finland, Romania, Hungary, Italy and Slovakia.

After the Russian resistance collapsed in 1917, the Germans pivoted westward in an attempt to end the war before U.S. military power could be fully deployed to Western Europe. The German Spring Offensive took place in France and Belgium and after nearly four months of barbaric trench warfare, the Germans failed in their effort to win the war before the U.S. arrived to help its European allies defeat the German Empire.

The Battle of Dnieper (named after a major River in Eastern Europe) is yet another battle that took place in the Soviet Union in 1943 when the Nazis attempted to build an “East Wall” along the western shore of the Dnieper to block Russian advances. For four months, 4 million soldiers on both sides engaged in fierce fighting. Though the Red Army took more casualties, the Russians managed to punch through the German wall, making the Nazi withdrawal from the USSR inevitable.

The Brusilov Offensive occurred over a 300-mile section of the Eastern Front in what is now Western Ukraine, Poland, and East Prussia in 1916. Named after the Russian general who spearheaded the military victory, one of the most successful in World War I, the summertime offensive sparked the demise of the Habsburg Empire. Germany sent military reserves to support the Empire, which weakened them on the Western Front.

The 13th-century sacking of Baghdad in the Abbasid Caliphate (modern-day Iraq), is incomparable. This region was once one of the world’s great intellectual and scientific centers, but this battle in January 1258 was a short 12-day siege. Although not as long as others listed here, the brutality during the sacking was swift and horrendous to the civilian population. After a siege of less than two weeks, the tribal horde entered the city and indiscriminately killed almost anyone they could find.