Fiercest Battle in History

contrary to popular belief, D-Day waasnt really a fierce battle. yes, it had its moments, especially on Omaha beach, but the rest (from all accounts i have seen) were walkovers. Utah, barely a shot fired according to accounts from the people who were there. same story for most of the others.
 
ghost457 said:
yeah, as Rabs said, none of these are the fiercest, but theyr up there, but Guadalcanal, Saipan, Tinian, Okinawa, Iwo Jima, any of those. the battle of the bulge, not the fiercest, but it should be mentioned.
Click to expand...

I agree with the WWII Pacific Theater battles you listed. Iwo Jima and Okinawa are the top two in my opinion. Okinawa was a fierce land, air, and sea battle, which would probably put it at number one for me. Iwo Jima was probably the most intense ground fighting of the war.
 
Ok, just one in the WWII Pacific Theater:
TARAWA...

tarawa1.jpg
 
the one where the husband wants the remote so he can change channel, but his wife won't give if to him!

:lol:
 
Here are the top ten of the US Civil War. I think that the artillery had a lot to do with high casualty rates. # 5 was the bloodiest single day battle of Antietam.

http://americanhistory.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.civilwarhome.com/Battles.htm

#1
Battle of Gettysburg
Date: July 1-3, 1863

Location: Pennsylvania
Confederate Commander: Robert E. Lee
Union Commander: George G. Meade
Confederate Forces Engaged: 75,000
Union Forces Engaged: 82,289
Winner: Union
Casualties: 51,112 (23,049 Union and 28,063 Confederate)


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

#2
Battle of Chickamauga
Date: September 19-20, 1863

Location: Georgia
Confederate Commander: Braxton Bragg
Union Commander: William Rosecrans
Confederate Forces Engaged: 66,326
Union Forces Engaged: 58,222
Winner: Confederacy
Casualties: 34,624 (16,170 Union and 18,454 Confederate)


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

#3
Battle of Chancellorsville
Date: May 1-4, 1863

Location: Virginia
Confederate Commander: Robert E. Lee
Union Commander: Joseph Hooker
Confederate Forces Engaged: 60,892
Union Forces Engaged: 133,868
Winner: Confederacy
Casualties: 30,099 (17,278 Union and 12,821 Confederate)


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

#4
Battle of Spotsylvania
Date: May 8-19, 1864

Location: Virginia
Confederate Commander: Robert E. Lee
Union Commander: Ulysses S. Grant
Confederate Forces Engaged: 50,000
Union Forces Engaged: 83,000
Winner: Confederacy
Casualties: 27,399 (18,399 Union and 9)000 Confederate)


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

#5
Battle of Antietam
Date: September 17, 1862

Location: Maryland
Confederate Commander: Robert E. Lee
Union Commander: George B. McClellan
Confederate Forces Engaged: 51,844
Union Forces Engaged: 75,316
Winner: Union
Casualties: 26,134 (12,410 Union and 13,724 Confederate)


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

#6
Battle of The Wilderness
Date: May 5-7, 1864

Location: Virginia
Confederate Commander: Robert E. Lee
Union Commander: Ulysses S. Grant
Confederate Forces Engaged: 61,025
Union Forces Engaged: 101,895
Winner: Inconclusive
Casualties: 25,416 (17,666 Union and 7,750 Confederate)


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

#7
Battle of Second Manassas
Date: August 29-30, 1862

Location: Virginia
Confederate Commander: Robert E. Lee
Union Commander: John Pope
Confederate Forces Engaged: 48,527
Union Forces Engaged: 75,696
Winner: Confederacy
Casualties: 25,251 (16,054 Union and 9,197 Confederate)


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

#8
Battle of Stone's River
Date: December 31, 1862

Location: Tennessee
Confederate Commander: Braxton Bragg
Union Commander: William S. Rosecrans
Confederate Forces Engaged: 37,739
Union Forces Engaged: 41,400
Winner: Union
Casualties: 24,645 (12,906 Union and 11,739 Confederate)


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

#9
Battle of Shiloh
Date: April 6-7, 1862

Location: Tennessee
Confederate Commander: Albert Sidney Johnston/ P. G. T. Beauregard
Union Commander: Ulysses S. Grant
Confederate Forces Engaged: 40,335
Union Forces Engaged: 62,682
Winner: Union
Casualties: 23,741 (13,047 Union and 10,694 Confederate)


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

#10
Battle of Fort Donelson
Date: February 13-16, 1862

Location: Tennessee
Confederate Commander: John B. Floyd/Simon B. Buckner
Union Commander: Ulysses S. Grant
Confederate Forces Engaged: 21,000
Union Forces Engaged: 27,000
Winner: Union
Casualties: 19,455 (2,832 Union and 16,623 Confederate)


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
Locke said:
the one where the husband wants the remote so he can change channel, but his wife won't give if to him!

:lol:
Click to expand...


Pfft buy a second TV jeez, and then to keep in the good books use the smaller one yourself.

Anyway on to the topic, we seem to be defining "fiercest" as the battle with the highest casualties, I am sure there are a lot of battles especially in more ancient times that had lower casualty rates but much higher levels of ferocity for example Canae, Trasimeno or maybe Varus's campaign into the Teutoburg forest.
 
how do you measure "fiercest"?
is it the amount of sweat produced over the course of the battle? the quantity of bloody spilled? the number of bullets fired? the amount of destruction (to property,landscape/cover) or is it the number of deaths?
 
In respect for the dead I believe that each and every single battle that a soldier dies in is the worst one in his/her life, or I should say death. We can sit here all day and talk about this, the trials and tribulations that men and women go through in battle. But for anyone and everyone who has not yet been in battle, who are we to sit here and decide this. But still, voices do cry out and we must here them.

Measuring a battle in death statistics is easy. World War 2, because in that war, over 47,210,000 people died fighting bravely for a cause that they believed in. In ancient battles, that amount would never have been possible to reach even if the entire world rose up and fought each other.

I really don’t believe that there is another way to measure a battle, you can not measure it by how much land one country took from another, or how long it took. It is simply a matter of how many lives were extinguished from Earth’s surface. Could wars like WWII be stopped, no, it is inevitable that humans fight each other. Like brothers fighting each other so will the world keep going, with people fighting and bickering amongst themselves over who is right, over oil, over money, over a single women, over gods.

World Wars have been fought many times, the Crusades, when Europe threw all of its might down to “save” Jerusalem from the Muslim invaders. When Rome began its conquest to control the world, they succeeded for a time, but thankfully Adolf Hitler did not. Alexander conquered the world, but he died to young to rule it. World Wars have been fought over many things, but to achieve total peace…well, there will never be total peace. Someone will always rise up, someone will always try to break free, such is our nature, to resist bondage, and love freedom.
 
My point is, "fiercest" is a totally subjective matter. I could list of many that I consider to be suitable candidates. Each had different numbers of casualties, or combatants or anything like that, but nobody can argue that soldiers fought any harder or less in any of the battles listed below.

In no particular order:
*Lone Pine
*The Nek
*Beersheeba
*Verdun
*Shrapnel Gully
*Anzac Cove
*The Somme
*Ypres
*Paschendale
*Monte Casino
*Tobruk
*El Alemain
*Normandy
*Stalingrad
*Berlin
*Battle Of The Bulge
*Kursk
*Greece
*Operation Market Garden
*Long Tan
*Kapyong
*Op Dewey Valley
*The Tet Offensive
*Coral/Balmoral
*Iwo Jima
*Kokoda
*Milne Bay
*Guadalcanal
*Bouganville
*Effogi
*Shaggy Ridge
*Balikpapan
*Borneo
*Okinawa

Anyway, you go and tell any veteran that the battle he was in was less fierce or didn't compare to another one, then see what reaction you get.
I believe all these battles were fierce as all hell. There are many I haven't listed, either because I forgot them, or because I'm taking liberties with time and space.
 
Battles on the eastern front during WW2 were insane in scale and the hatred for each other during these engagements. But only two come to mind when I think of the fiercest, and those are Stalingrad and Leningrad both were fights for survival by the participants in these battles. Russians trying to hold Leningrad and lift the seige around the city. And then germans trying to hold Stalingrad till Manstein could break the ring around the city. Which both cities were different in that Russians did lift the seige Leningrad and the germans could not do the same in Stalingrad.


1. Leningrad (900 day siege)

2. Stalingrad (destruction of German 6th army, and Germany's allies Romanian and Italian units.)
 
panzer said:
Battles on the eastern front during WW2 were insane in scale and the hatred for each other during these engagements. But only two come to mind when I think of the fiercest, and those are Stalingrad and Leningrad both were fights for survival by the participants in these battles. Russians trying to hold Leningrad and lift the seige around the city. And then germans trying to hold Stalingrad till Manstein could break the ring around the city. Which both cities were different in that Russians did lift the seige Leningrad and the germans could not do the same in Stalingrad.


1. Leningrad (900 day siege)

2. Stalingrad (destruction of German 6th army, and Germany's allies Romanian and Italian units.)
Click to expand...

I don't really think you can differentiate between any of the major battles of the Eastern Front. In some way all were as equally fierce as say Stalingrad. For example, during the the Battle of Kursk there was literally hand to hand fighting for much of the time as the Germans were trying to assault the most heavily defended area in history without the element of surprise. And even the Soviet soldiers trapped in the giant pockets at Minsk and Kiev in 1941 fought with a fierceness that bordered on savagery. Even when they had expended all their ammunition and were totally surrounded by the Germans they continued to fight using their boots and even their teeth.
 
I agree with Missileer nominating Gettysburg but would add as equal first that battle that two posts have already alluded to but did not have the main names / details correct: ie the battle between Queen Boudica and Suetonius in Briton around 60/61 AD.

If "fiercest" is the criteria, then the primary sources describing the brutality and slaughter at these two battles ranks among the worst in history I believe, with all due respect to the many worthy nominations cited in this forum.


http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/britannia/boudica/boudicanrevolt.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boudicca
 
Iwo Jima, Tarawa, Stalingrad, Gettyburg, Somme, and Okinawa in my opinion.

Most fiercest battle of all the time, in my opinion, is Stalingrad.
 
Yes I agree the definition of fierce is very subjective. Perhaps the following criteria could be considered: intensity rather than protracted, hand to hand combat, proportion killed or maimed, proportion killed or maimed in relation to the population of the country.

If defined in these terms, how about the battle of Cannae where the Roman infantry was surrounded. In all, perhaps more than 75,000 Romans of the original force of 87,000 were dead or captured. I believe that the slaughter on a single day was not surpassed until the Somme.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top