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by rat87
3751 days ago
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> Some 9 to 10 million combatants on both sides are estimated to have died during World War I, along with an estimated 6.6 million civilians.[citation needed] The civilian casualty ratio in World War I is therefore approximately 2:3 or 40%. Most of the civilian fatalities were due to famine or Spanish flu rather than military action. The relatively low ratio of civilian casualties in this war is due to the fact that the front lines on the main battlefront, the Western Front, were static for most of the war, so that civilians were able to avoid the combat zones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio#World_... > According to most sources, World War II was the most lethal war in world history, with some 70 million killed in six years. The civilian to combatant fatality ratio in World War II lies somewhere between 3:2 and 2:1, or from 60% to 67%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio#World_... |
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From wikipedia:
"To maintain morale, wartime censors minimized early reports of illness and mortality in Germany, Britain, France, and the United States;[9][10] but papers were free to report the epidemic's effects in neutral Spain (such as the grave illness of King Alfonso XIII),[11] creating a false impression of Spain as especially hard hit[12]—thus the pandemic's nickname Spanish flu."
and
Investigative work by a British team led by virologist John Oxford[15] of St Bartholomew's Hospital and the Royal London Hospital identified a major troop staging and hospital camp in Étaples, France, as almost certainly being the center of the 1918 flu pandemic. A significant precursor virus, harbored in birds, mutated to pigs that were kept near the front.[16]