War you would have wanted to be in

[Kraxis]

Considering the English Civil War was several wars, it might be an unfair comparison.

However, those wars aren't likely to top the 600,000+ deaths in the ACW.

[Derfasciti]

However, those wars aren't likely to top the 600,000+ deaths in the ACW.

I don't remember where or from what but for some reason I remember reading or hearing that the English Civil War(s?) cost about 800,000 casualties.

[Don Corleone]

I guess choosing to be in a war, you'd have to pick a cause that you truly believe in and where you think additional manpower might have actually made a difference. To that end, I would have wanted to be in the British army, navy or RAF in 1940. Truly at no point in history was there so clearly a case of white hats/black hats and was it so important, yet so tenuous, that the white hats were able to hang on. If the UK had fallen, history would have turned out very, very differently. I was tempted to say Poland in 1939, but the techonolgy gap was just too great... there wasn't much more bodies fighting for the Poles could have done, except add to an even higher casualty rate.

[Mithradates]

I think it would have been quite interesting to be one of the first fighter aces in WWI those guys had honour and you would be doing stuff which people in the previous generation could only have dreamed of.

[Geoffrey S]

Preferably none, of course. Otherwise, Don Corleone's description of Britain in WW2 appeals somewhat, but my actual choice would be a Greek hoplite in the times before the Peloponnesian war.

[Kraxis]

I think it would have been quite interesting to be one of the first fighter aces in WWI those guys had honour and you would be doing stuff which people in the previous generation could only have dreamed of.

Hmm... Yes that is one I could have lived with. Or rather died with I guess.
However, late in the war it was a turkeyshoot on the green pilots on both sides, and being shot down was rather more fatal than in later wars.

I don't remember where or from what but for some reason I remember reading or hearing that the English Civil War(s?) cost about 800,000 casualties.

Casualties... The key word is casualties here. I believe the 600,000+ in the ACW was actually kills. Then there were all the other casualties. And I believe this doesn't include the civilian casualties, which the ECW must have included in that number (when armies seldomly had more than 30,000 in them).

[Stig]

I wouldn't mind being in the Home Guard
"There are Germans in the church, don't panic, don't panic!!!"
"Hey, put that light out, put that bloody light out!!!"

[KrooK]

I want polish-russian war 1609-1619. I would visit Kremal :)

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Hmm... Yes that is one I could have lived with. Or rather died with I guess.
However, late in the war it was a turkeyshoot on the green pilots on both sides, and being shot down was rather more fatal than in later wars.

Me too. I'd probably have gotten myself dead trying to push a Nieuport-17 past its structural profile. As you correctly note, getting shot down was not often followed by a gentle float to earth.

Casualties... The key word is casualties here. I believe the 600,000+ in the ACW was actually kills. Then there were all the other casualties. And I believe this doesn't include the civilian casualties, which the ECW must have included in that number (when armies seldomly had more than 30,000 in them).

Quite right Krax' as you can see:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

The Price in Blood!
Casualties in the Civil War

At least 618,000 Americans died in the Civil War, and some experts say the toll reached 700,000. The number that is most often quoted is 620,000. At any rate, these casualties exceed the nation's loss in all its other wars, from the Revolution through Vietnam.
The Union armies had from 2,500,000 to 2,750,000 men. Their losses, by the best estimates:

Battle deaths: 110,070
Disease, etc.: 250,152
Total 360,222

The Confederate strength, known less accurately because of missing records, was from 750,000 to 1,250,000. Its estimated losses:

Battle deaths: 94,000
Disease, etc.: 164,000
Total 258,000

The leading authority on casualties of the war, Thomas L. Livermore, admitting the handicap of poor records in some cases, studied 48 of the war's battles and concluded:
Of every 1,000 Federals in battle, 112 were wounded.
Of every 1,000 Confederates, 150 were hit.
Mortality was greater among Confederate wounded, because of inferior medical service. The great battles, in terms of their toll in dead, wounded, and missing is listed on this site:

The Ten Costliest Battles of the Civil War.

Some of the great blood baths of the war came as Grant drove on Richmond in the spring of 1864- Confederate casualties are missing for this campaign, but were enormous. The Federal toll:

The Wilderness, May 5-7: 17,666
Spotsylvania, May 10 and 12: 10,920
Drewry's Bluff, May 12-16 4,160
Cold Harbor, June 1-3: 12,000
Petersburg, June 15-30 16,569

These total 61,315, with rolls of the missing incomplete.
The Appomattox campaign, about ten days of running battles ending April 9, 1865, cost the Union about 11,000 casualties, and ended in the surrender of Lee's remnant of 26,765. Confederate dead and wounded in the meantime were about 6,500.
Lesser battles are famous for their casualties. At Franklin, Tennessee, November 30, 1864, General Hood's Confederates lost over 6,000 of 21,000 effectives -most of them in about two hours. Six Confederate generals died there.
Hood lost about 8,ooo men in his assault before Atlanta, July 22, 1864; Sherman's Union forces lost about 3,800.
The small battle of Wilson's Creek, Missouri, August 10, 1861, was typical of the savagery of much of the war's fighting. The Union force Of 5,400 men lost over 1,200; the Confederates, over 11,000 strong, lost about the same number.
The first battle of Manassas/Bull Run, though famous as the first large engagement, was relatively light in cost: 2,708 for the Union, 1,981 for the Confederates.
The casualty rolls struck home to families and regiments.
The Confederate General, John B. Gordon, cited the case of the Christian family, of Christiansburg, Virginia, which suffered eighteen dead in the war.
The 1st Maine Heavy Artillery, in a charge at Petersburg, Virginia, 18 June, 1864, sustained a "record" loss of the war-635 of its 9oo men within seven minutes.
Another challenger is the 26th North Carolina, which lost 714, of its 800 men at Gettysburg-in numbers and percentage the war's greatest losses. On the first day this regiment lost 584 dead and wounded, and when roll was called the next morning for G Company, one man answered, and he had been knocked unconscious by a shell burst the day before. This roll was called by a sergeant who lay on a stretcher with a severe leg wound.
The 24th Michigan, a gallant Federal regiment which was in front of the North Carolinians on the first day, lost 362 of its 496 men.
More than 3,000 horses were killed at Gettysburg, and one artillery battalion, the 9th Massachusetts, lost 80 of its 88 animals in the Trostle farmyard.
A brigade from Vermont lost 1,645 Of its 2,100 men during a week of fighting in the Wilderness.
The Irish Brigade, Union, had a total muster Of 7,000 during the war, and returned to New York in '65 with 1,000. One company was down to seven men. The 69th New York of this brigade lost 16 of 19 officers, and had 75 per cent casualties among enlisted men.
In the Irish Brigade, Confederate, from Louisiana, Company A dwindled from 90 men to 3 men and an officer in March, '65. Company B went from 100 men to 2.
Experts have pointed out that the famed Light Brigade at Balaklava lost only 36.7 per cent of its men, and that at least 63 Union regiments lost as much as 50 per cent in single battles. At Gettysburg 23 Federal regiments suffered losses of more than half their strength, including the well-known Iron Brigade (886 of 1,538 engaged).
Many terrible casualty tolls were incurred in single engagements, like that of the Polish Regiment of Louisiana at Frayser's Farm during the Seven Days, where the outfit was cut to pieces and had to be consolidated with the 20th Louisiana. In this action one company of the Poles lost 33 of 42 men.
One authority reports that Of 3,530 Indians who fought for the Union, 1,018 were killed, a phenomenally high rate. Of 178,975 Negro Union troops, this expert says, over 36,000 died.
Some regimental losses in battle:

Regiment Battle Strength Per Cent
1st Texas, CSA Antietam 226 82.3
1st Minnesota, US Gettysburg 262 82
21st Georgia, CSA Manassas 242 76
141st Pennsylvania, US Gettysburg 198 75.7
101st New York, US Manassas 168 73.8
6th Mississippi, CSA Shiloh 425 70.5
25th Massachusetts, US Cold Harbor 310 70
36th Wisconsin, US Bethesda Church 240 69
20th Massachusetts, US Fredericksburg 238 68.4
8th Tennessee, CSA Stone's River 444 68.7
10th Tennessee, CSA Chickamauga 328 68
8th Vermont, US Cedar Creek 156 67.9
Palmetto Sharpshooters, CSA Frayser's Farm 215 67.7
81st Pennsylvania, US Fredericksburg 261 67.4

Scores of other regiments on both sides registered losses in single engagements of above 50 per cent.
Confederate losses by states, in dead and wounded only, and with many records missing (especially those of Alabama):


North Carolina 20,602
Virginia 6,947
Mississippi 6,807
South Carolina 4,760
Arkansas 3,782
Georgia 3,702
Tennessee 3,425
Louisiana 3,059
Texas 1,260
Florida 1,047
Alabama 724

(Statisticians recognize these as fragmentary, from a report of 1866; they serve as a rough guide to relative losses by states).

In addition to its dead and wounded from battle and disease, the Union listed:

Deaths in Prison 24,866
Drowning 4,944
Accidental deaths 4,144
Murdered 520
Suicides 391
Sunstroke 313
Military executions 267
Killed after capture 104
Executed by enemy 64
Unclassified 14,155

Source: "The Civil War, Strange and Fascinating Facts," by Burke Davis

Most of the 618-700k casualties were not combat deaths, but the casualty figures list only the military cost. The private citizens killed at Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Atlanta, Franklin, and a few score other towns were not included in the figures. Both sides were reasonably good about not hitting the civvies, but innocents on both sides caught lead. Moreover, the effects of starvation resulting from foraging efforts, from diminished transportation of foodstuffs, and disease exposure spreading outward from the military are virtually incalcuable. Best guestimate is somewhere near 1M.

[Kraxis]

Another challenger is the 26th North Carolina, which lost 714, of its 800 men at Gettysburg-in numbers and percentage the war's greatest losses. On the first day this regiment lost 584 dead and wounded, and when roll was called the next morning for G Company, one man answered, and he had been knocked unconscious by a shell burst the day before. This roll was called by a sergeant who lay on a stretcher with a severe leg wound.
The 24th Michigan, a gallant Federal regiment which was in front of the North Carolinians on the first day, lost 362 of its 496 men.

What a battle those two units had! They fought each other to the point of disbandment.

And even thought this is horrific I found this when roll was called the next morning for G Company, one man answered, and he had been knocked unconscious by a shell burst the day before. This roll was called by a sergeant who lay on a stretcher with a severe leg wound, to be almost comic. It is so far out that it can only happen in novels and comics, yet it happened.

However I believe that a lot of the Disease category would also include wounded who died from infections and/or bloodloss, and of course those who died on the table. So the direct combat related deaths must have been pretty heavy still.

Also, the bombardment of Richmond and other CSA cities must have produced considerable civilian casualties. Shells don't destinguish between military and civilian.

But in all, those losses were horrific. Damn! So many units suffered so many losses. And in all 15% lossrate among the CSA. That is downright nasty, I don't think we have had many wars that can top that.
I guess that is what happenes when you pit lines of men against industrial style warfare.

[Kagemusha]

I hope i dont have to go to any war just like many others sayed. But if i would have to choose it definately would have been the Winter War.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

And even thought this is horrific I found this when roll was called the next morning for G Company, one man answered, and he had been knocked unconscious by a shell burst the day before. This roll was called by a sergeant who lay on a stretcher with a severe leg wound, to be almost comic. It is so far out that it can only happen in novels and comics, yet it happened.
....
But in all, those losses were horrific. Damn! So many units suffered so many losses. And in all 15% lossrate among the CSA. That is downright nasty, I don't think we have had many wars that can top that.
I guess that is what happenes when you pit lines of men against industrial style warfare.

The personal vignettes of that war are surprisingly moving. The loss rates were horrific -- and they didn't even employ the gatling guns they might have. It was the height of early industrial "rifle" wars and there was a basic disconnect between the tactics available and the lethality of the tools. In some ways so advanced as to be then unique, in others so primitive that they'd changed little since Marathon. I suspect that Von Moltke was the only one who really took the lessons of that war to heart -- much to Europe's sorrow. Even the USA put too many of those lessons in a drawer and forget them prior to the first global.

Side note about casualties:

I've always been chilled by the footnote that Tuchman included in the wrap-up of Guns of August. Apparently, until its destruction in WW2, the chapel at St. Cyr listed, by year, the names of its graduates who had died in the service of France. One entry was shorter then most; it read, simply, The Class of 1914.

[Justiciar]

However, those wars aren't likely to top the 600,000+ deaths in the ACW.

It's unlikely. The only figure I can find after a brief search states that between 10-15% of Britain and Ireland's population died during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Given that I don't know what the population of the Isles was at that time, I can't give a definate answer. But aye, I'd imagine the American Civil War had more casualties, though I haven't the foggiest how big the ol' margin would be.

[Kraxis]

I've always been chilled by the footnote that Tuchman included in the wrap-up of Guns of August. Apparently, until its destruction in WW2, the chapel at St. Cyr listed, by year, the names of its graduates who had died in the service of France. One entry was shorter then most; it read, simply, The Class of 1914.

That's a loss to be felt.

[Orb]

If I had to choose, it would probably be the Yom Kippur or Six Day war on the Israeli side. Or maybe the Falklands. I'm far too cowardly to fight anyone without some form of automatic weapon.

[Mount Suribachi]

The Israelis came awful close to losing the Yom Kippur war. Losses were very high - take the fighter pilots for example. The IDF/AF lost so many F-4s to SAMs whilst attacking the Egyptian bridgehead over the Suez canal that in the end the ground troops asked them to stop the attacks because they couldn't bear to see them continually shot out the sky. Luckily for Israel, Egypt went back on their word to Syria and refused to advance out of their SAM umbrella, allowing Israel to shift troops north.

As for the Falklands, you wouldn't have been very safe on the Atlantic Conveyor, Sheffield, Coventry......and the land battles were a series of short, but very intense firefights. I forget which particular hill it was, but one company had something like only 30 men left standing by the time they took the summit.

[yesdachi]

I would want to be an Æsir battling the forces of chaos in the great war of Ragnarök. A great bloody ax in my hands and a mountain of defeated evil beneath my feet! Accepting a legendary death at the claws of the Fenrir just before the All Father tears the beast asunder from the inside!

Non-mythological answer: A mounted Samurai defending against the Mongols back in the late 1200’s.

[Derfasciti]

I've always been chilled by the footnote that Tuchman included in the wrap-up of Guns of August. Apparently, until its destruction in WW2, the chapel at St. Cyr listed, by year, the names of its graduates who had died in the service of France. One entry was shorter then most; it read, simply, The Class of 1914.

Man when I read that I got like a chill. That's so...horrible.

[ajaxfetish]

The War of the Sexes.

Ajax

[Kralizec]

80 years war, if I had to pick a war.

[The Stranger]

world war 2

and i would liked to fight along side hannibal at cannae, with the spartans at thermopylae and on the medieval battlefield. Oh and as ab hussar in the napoleontic army :D

[The Stranger]

I guess choosing to be in a war, you'd have to pick a cause that you truly believe in and where you think additional manpower might have actually made a difference. To that end, I would have wanted to be in the British army, navy or RAF in 1940. Truly at no point in history was there so clearly a case of white hats/black hats and was it so important, yet so tenuous, that the white hats were able to hang on. If the UK had fallen, history would have turned out very, very differently. I was tempted to say Poland in 1939, but the techonolgy gap was just too great... there wasn't much more bodies fighting for the Poles could have done, except add to an even higher casualty rate.

I have deep respect for the Poles. Their country was occupied for one of the longest periods, and yet so many managed to escape. Even more they returned to the european battlefields and fought in many countries but not in their own.

[Watchman]

I've always been chilled by the footnote that Tuchman included in the wrap-up of Guns of August. Apparently, until its destruction in WW2, the chapel at St. Cyr listed, by year, the names of its graduates who had died in the service of France. One entry was shorter then most; it read, simply, The Class of 1914.

I've read the French lost something like one-fifth to one-quarter of that entire generation of young men in the war or something similarly crazy - their relative casualties were the highest of all the participating countries, IIRC.

Small wonder they rather folded in the second round than go through that grinder again really, especially as Nazi ideology had no noticeably nasty designs for them so it was an actually viable option (unlike, for example, for the Soviets). That sort of bad shit is the kind that leaves lasting national traumas.

Anyway, as for the main topic I'd really prefer to not be in any war - I know enough of them to know they're best avoided altogether - but if I really had to choose it'd be something horribly one-sided and quickly resolved where one side comes off with barely noticeable casualties (naturally, I'd want to be on the totally overwhelming side). And even then I'd want to be in the support corps back home that don't even see the front - I'm too nice a person to have any desire to go around killing people.

[The Stranger]

would the 45-minutes war suffice?... thought that one had zero casualties

[Pannonian]

I've read the French lost something like one-fifth to one-quarter of that entire generation of young men in the war or something similarly crazy - their relative casualties were the highest of all the participating countries, IIRC.

I've read somewhere that the French lost a third of all males aged 18-30. The French population did not recover to pre-WW1 levels until the 1970s.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

I've read somewhere that the French lost a third of all males aged 18-30. The French population did not recover to pre-WW1 levels until the 1970s.

Per capita casualties:

France 1 in 28 (3.6%), roughly 1.75M killed
Germiny 1 in 32 (3.1%), roughly 1.75M killed
Britain 1 in 57 (1.8%)
Russia 1 in 107 (0.9%), roughly 1.75M killed

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

According to Richard Koenigsberg:

To convey a sense of the magnitude of the destructiveness of World War I, I provide the following statistics from a U. S. War Department table entitled "Casualties of All Belligerent in World War I." Data is provided for the Allied nations, which included Russia, France, the British Commonwealth, Italy and the United States, and for the Central Powers, namely Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey and Bulgaria. According to the U. S. War Department, there were a total of 65,038,315 forces—people that is—mobilized to fight in this war.

Of the forces mobilized (civilians excluded), 8,538,315 were killed or died, 21,219,452 were wounded, and 7,750,919 were taken prisoner or reported missing. Total casualties, in other words, were 37,508,686, or 57.9% of all forces mobilized. For some nations, the percentage of casualties reached astonishing proportions. For Austria-Hungary, for example, of 7,800,000 forces mobilized, 7,020,000 or 90% were casualties; for Russia, 76.3% of 12 million forces were casualties; for France, 73.3% of 8,410,000 forces were casualties.

The magnitude of the destruction is matched by the extraordinary manner in which many of the battles of the First World War were fought. On the Western front much of the fighting was done out of trenches, with one enemy line facing the other. "Attack" occurred when long rows of soldiers got out of a trench and advanced toward the enemy line, where there was a substantial probability that they would be hit by an artillery shell or mowed down by machine-gun fire. Here is the way historian Modris Eksteins describes the pattern:

The victimized crowd of attackers in no man's land has become one of the supreme images of this war. Attackers moved forward usually without seeking cover and were mowed down in rows, with the mechanical efficiency of a scythe, like so many blades of grass. "We were very surprised to see them walking," wrote a German machine gunner of his experience of a British attack at the Somme. "The officers went in front. I noticed one of them walking calmly, carrying a walking stick. When we started firing we just had to load and reload. They went down in the hundreds. You didn't have to aim, we just fired into them." A Frenchman described the effects of his machine gunners more laconically: "The Germans fell like cardboard soldiers." (1989, p. 100)
The following is an account of the British attack at Loos in September 1915 that appeared in the German 15th Reserve Regiment's diary:

Ten ranks of extended line could clearly be distinguished, each one estimated at more than a thousand men, and offering such a target as had never been seen before, or even thought possible. Never had the machine-gunners such straight-forward work to do nor done it so effectively. (Eksteins, 1989, p. 188)
The enormous number of troops killed and vast proportion of casualties was a logical consequence of the method of fighting. Eksteins describes the results of some of the early (1914) battles:

German and French casualties had been staggering. The Germans lost a million men in the first five months. France, in the "battle of the frontiers" of August, lost over 300,000 men in two weeks. Some regiments lost three-quarters of their men in the first month. Total French losses by the end of December were comparable with the German, roughly 300,000 killed and 600,000 wounded or missing. At Mons, Le Cateau, and then especially at Ypres most of the original British Expeditionary Force of 160,000 had been wiped out. As an example of the scale of casualties, the 11th Brigade of the British Expeditionary Force had, by December 20, only 18% of its original officers left and 28% of its men. (1989, p. 144)

Obviously, the aggregate casualty figure of 57.9% includes a significant number of people who were wounded (and thus a casualty) more than once, but even so the numbers are appalling.

If you consider a hypothetical French village of 1,000 people, 36 of them died. Moreover, since all those fighting were male aged 13 and up (mostly in the 13-40 age bracket, these 36 would not be spread evenly.

1000 - 500 femme = 500 homme, divide these 500 chaps further divide into brackets of 10 years (0-10 years, 11-20, 21-30, 31-40, 41-50, 51-60, 61+) and assume that each bracket is roughly even in numbers, yielding 71 per bracket. The 21-30s probably represent 25 of those 36 dead -- a full third plus of the age bracket. The others would be teens and 31-40's with maybe 1 or 2 above that.

Moreover, that is only the dead, the maimed also figure into this, sending the percentage closer to half in the prime casualty age group.

THEN, we can throw in the influenza that hit as the war ended, killing as many again (though more evenly spread this time).

....and we wonder why the 20's were a little whacked?

[Pannonian]

If you consider a hypothetical French village of 1,000 people, 36 of them died. Moreover, since all those fighting were male aged 13 and up (mostly in the 13-40 age bracket, these 36 would not be spread evenly.

1000 - 500 femme = 500 homme, divide these 500 chaps further divide into brackets of 10 years (0-10 years, 11-20, 21-30, 31-40, 41-50, 51-60, 61+) and assume that each bracket is roughly even in numbers, yielding 71 per bracket. The 21-30s probably represent 25 of those 36 dead -- a full third plus of the age bracket. The others would be teens and 31-40's with maybe 1 or 2 above that.

Moreover, that is only the dead, the maimed also figure into this, sending the percentage closer to half in the prime casualty age group.

THEN, we can throw in the influenza that hit as the war ended, killing as many again (though more evenly spread this time).

....and we wonder why the 20's were a little whacked?

The Spanish flu supposedly caused fatalities when the immune system overreacted to the virus. The fit and young had stronger immune systems, which ironically made them more prone to death by overreaction. The deaths may have been spread across the two sexes, but it was those of fighting age who copped it again, leaving only the very young and very old whose immune systems weren't strong enough to kill them.

The illness crossed from animals to humans thanks to the British doctrine of keeping the trenches fully manned, and keeping livestock near the front to provide fresh food. Presumably this meant the Germans were less exposed to the disease than the Allies.

[Samurai Waki]

Ugh. If there was any war that I could say I wouldn't have wanted to be a part of it would probably be WW1, Being an Infantry Soldier it would almost seem like Walking into a meat-grinder. One of the most Horrible and ignoble wars the has ever scarred our planet.

[Andres]

Anita War, a gorgeous woman with a D-cup

[IrishArmenian]

Virtual pat on the back to Andres.