Top 10 Worst Wars in History
Worst is doing a lot of work in this list. The criteria here are total deaths, civilian impact, geographic scale, and how long the consequences lasted. The Second World War sits at the top of any honest version of this list, with conservative estimates of seventy to eighty-five million dead, the Holocaust, the Pacific theatre, the largest displacement in modern history, and a postwar order whose Cold War shape lasted forty-five years. World War One comes second on direct comparable metrics, with sixteen to twenty million dead, the redrawing of European borders, the collapse of four empires, and the conditions that produced its sequel. The Napoleonic Wars belong in the top group for their continental scale and for the casualty totals that, adjusted for population, were comparable to the world wars in some theatres. The Vietnam War earns its slot through duration, the use of chemical defoliants whose effects continue, and a civilian death toll that is still debated upward as records become available. The Syrian War is the modern entry, with over half a million dead, the largest refugee movement of the twenty-first century, and a regional spillover that has destabilised half a dozen neighbours. The list does not rank suffering on a clean ladder; that is not really possible. Vote based on which conflicts you think still get under-covered relative to their actual scale.
📊 35 items
🗳️ 0 votes
🔀 0 remixes
#1
0
World War II
#2
0
World War I
#3
0
Napoleonic Wars
#4
0
Vietnam War
#5
0
American Civil War
#6
0
Thirty Years' War
#7
0
Russian Civil War
#8
0
Chinese Civil War
#9
0
Hundred Years' War
#10
0
Iran-Iraq War
#11
0
English Civil War
#12
0
War in Afghanistan
#13
0
Trojan War
#14
0
American Revolutionary War
#15
0
Spanish Civil War
#16
0
Korean War
#17
0
First Chechen War
#18
0
Irish Rebellion of 1798
#19
0
Three Kingdoms War (China)
#20
0
Syrian Civil War
#21
0
Pig War
#22
0
Iraq War
#23
0
Croatian War of Independence
#24
0
Bosnian War of Independence
#25
0
War of 1812
#26
0
Russia-Ukraine War
#27
0
Kosovo War
#28
0
French and Indian War
#29
0
Great Northern War
#30
0
Gulf War
#31
0
Philippine-American War
#32
0
Kargil War
#33
0
Mongol Conquests
#34
0
Mexican-American War
#35
0
Seven Years' War
📋 Embed this ranking on your site
+ Suggest an Item
Think something's missing? Add it to the list.
Think something's missing? Add it to the list.