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Remembered Today:

Dead Reckoning


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Statistics are neither readily available, nor probably would they be understood if they were. Getting hard data on WW1 is , I know, difficult and time consuming

 

My own view is that "the man on the Clapham omnibus" is bound to over-estimate deaths because he has "seen" the information on the Somme, men against machine guns and so on, and is bound to think that the chances of survival were low.

 

"Everybody knows" that a Subaltern only had a life expectancy of 6 weeks.

 

Peoples perceptions are always coloured by bias of one sort or another. There is an old story about the Emperor of China. The government wanted to know his height, but because of his imperial position, he could not be actually measured. So they asked 1 million Chinese to estimate his height. The answer came in at 7 feet, whereas he actually was 4ft 6". People thought he must be tall because he was important

 

I could ask members here a similar question on something outside their field of expertise. I suspect that most would in this case underestimate the correct answer. How many people "disappeared" in Ireland during the famines in the 1840s. Nobody knows how many died or how many emigrated, but the answer is that the population of Ireland in 1841 Census was 6.5 million and that fell to 5.1 million in 1851 census. Some 1.4 million people gone who know where . That is 21% of the population

 

The genocide in Rwanda and Burundi were deaths on, to us , an unknown scale.

 

The deaths of so many in Russia, likewise

 

If you have not studied a subject in depth, then you form an opinion based on , shall I call it, "cut and paste" news. It is not actually "fake news", but information that has a certain spin to it

 

As Martin says in his OP, the focus is on those who died, not those who survived. If one considers that 10 or 11 in 100 who served, died. A statistic that I uncovered in the ADRIC , was that 2 in 100 committed suicide. Nobody has really looked at the cost of surviving.

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When we talk of wars being “ bloody “ , we ought to differentiate between high mortality and actual bloodshed.

 

British soldiers who served in the Napoleonic and Crimean wars suffered higher mortality rates than their counterparts in the Great War ; but the warfare of 1914-18 was bloodier  by far.

 

The impact of disease made the difference.

 

Well over twenty per cent of the British troops in the Crimea perished, but no more than five per cent were killed in battle.

 

In the Great War, while the death rate was only two thirds that  of the Crimea, the toll of battle was more than twice as high, with commensurate bloodshed through surviving wounded to be accounted for as well.

 

Fortunately for the British soldiers of 1914 -18, exponential increase in battlefield slaughter was countered by huge improvements in medicine and hygiene.

 

Phil

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11 hours ago, corisande said:

I could ask members here a similar question on something outside their field of expertise. I suspect that most would in this case underestimate the correct answer. How many people "disappeared" in Ireland during the famines in the 1840s. Nobody knows how many died or how many emigrated, but the answer is that the population of Ireland in 1841 Census was 6.5 million and that fell to 5.1 million in 1851 census. Some 1.4 million people gone who know where . That is 21% of the population

 

 

I suspect it would be closer to 30%... Under normal circumstances the Irish populations would have been growing. The Census only measures the net difference. One needs to add back an estimate for normal population growth that also emigrated or died between the dates. England and Wales grew by +13.2% during the period.  As you say, no-one actually knows but we can trace a large proportion who emigrated. 

 

Edit. Cecil Woodham Smith in "The Great Hunger" page 411 has some detailed analysis. Incidentally the figures are all very different from those above and those on most websites and having checked them against the original they are correct. I suspect modern data online is generally the counties that form Eire rather than all of Ireland as it was in 1841 and 1851 i.e they understate the figures for All Ireland. Interestingly it states that the Census made an estimate of what the population should have been in 1851 under normal conditions - implicitly organic population growth. Here are the stats (checked against original 1841 and 1851 Censuses)

 

1841 Census.... 8,175,124

1851 Census.....9,016,799 estimated normalised

1851 Census.....6,552,285 recorded

 

the drop from normalised 9 million odd to 6.5 million was a decline of -27.3%. Woodham-Smith states nearly one million migrated which implies 1.5 million deaths; Something in excess of twice the number of fatalities of the British Army during the Great War. On an annualised basis the 1840s was as deadly for Ireland as the Great War was for the UK. Something I find quite sobering. 

 

Martin

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9 hours ago, phil andrade said:

 

 

Fortunately for the British soldiers of 1914 -18, exponential increase in battlefield slaughter was countered by huge improvements in medicine and hygiene.

 

 

 

On reflection, I’m wondering whether I should turn that round.

 

It was Tommy Atkins’s misfortune to have his unprecedented health and hygiene accompanied by his exposure to relentless killing on a scale never seen before or since.

 

Could it even be suggested that the very sanitation he enjoyed rendered him more vulnerable to  battlefield attrition than before ?

 

Phil

 

 

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12 hours ago, QGE said:

 

In theory all men on a medical pension would die whilst in receipt. 

 

 

This is not so - many men received pensions for a relatively short period until a medical board determined that their injury had healed. Researched a chap last week whose pension ended in 1919.

 

On the original question I did the comparison some time ago between the names on 'my' memorial and my guesstimate of the number who served and came up with 14% died. Perhaps I should increase my guesstimate accordingly!

 

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5 hours ago, Phil Wood said:

 

This is not so - many men received pensions for a relatively short period until a medical board determined that their injury had healed. Researched a chap last week whose pension ended in 1919.

 

On the original question I did the comparison some time ago between the names on 'my' memorial and my guesstimate of the number who served and came up with 14% died. Perhaps I should increase my guesstimate accordingly!

 

 

Any ideas of what proportion? One person is representative of how many? We know 1.3 m 1.664 medical pensions were handed out and at least 120,000 died by 1929 whilst in receipt of a medical pension. In the interests of accuracy, the theoretical increase I have imputed only account for the 120,000. Some may have died from causes other than their medical disability so it raises an interesting point.

 

Q. What proportion of the 1.664 m in receipt of a medical pension died as a direct consequence of their disability? 

 

10% would add 166,400 to the total war related fatalities 

20% would add 332,800 to the total war related fatalities ..etc.. 

These would really move the dial by a considerable margin. It illustrates just how difficult it is to establish exact figures for Great War related fatalities. 

 

CWGC WWI fatalities for the UK , Army shows 759,035 dead. If 20% of the men in receipt of a Medical Paension were added to this list, the total deaths would be over 1 million: 1,091,835 to be exact.... set against 5.7 million UK men who served in the army would push the fatality ratio to 18.4% for example.... or nearly 1 in 5.  If this could be proven to be anywhere close, the great tradegy is really that so  many died after the war in relative obscurity and presumably not acknowledged by CWGC whose cut off date would exclude them (i think).... 

 

If your memorial had more proportionally more infantrymen it might make a difference. The point is that your memorial is not showing 35% or 50%.

 

Separately it would be interesting to know if the claim that "25% of all Scotsmen who died in the War" has contaminated public perceptions. The Scotsman newspaper and Niall Ferguson on BBC  during the centenary were ardent propagandists of this myth. 

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27 minutes ago, QGE said:

 

Any ideas of what proportion? One person is representative of how many? We know 1.3 m 1.664 medical pensions were handed out and at least 120,000 died by 1929 whilst in receipt of a medical pension. In the interests of accuracy, the theoretical increase I have imputed only account for the 120,000. Some may have died from causes other than their medical disability so it raises an interesting point.

 

Q. What proportion of the 1.664 m in receipt of a medical pension died as a direct consequence of their disability? 

 

10% would add 166,400 to the total war related fatalities 

20% would add 332,800 to the total war related fatalities ..etc.. 

These would really move the dial by a considerable margin. 

 

If your memorial had more proportionally more infantrymen it might make a difference. The point is that your memorial is not showing 35% or 50%.

 

Separately it would be interesting to know if the claim that "25% of all Scotsmen who died in the War" has contaminated public perceptions. The Scotsman newspaper and Niall Ferguson on BBC  during the centenary were ardent propagandists of this myth. 

 

I cannot give total figures, but I have come across a few in my research. However, as the main thrust of my research is into those who died I have researched relatively few survivors (mainly fathers or brothers of the dead). The surviving pension records are, I suspect, a drop in the ocean but one could take a random sample and get some idea of how many pensions ended before death. I would suspect that there would be quite a number in the years immediately after the war as their wounds healed or their sickness abated.

 

My memorial, like most memorials, has a lot of infantrymen (inevitably) - but it's not the proportion on the memorial that counts, it's the proportion of those who served. 

 

 

 

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3 hours ago, Phil Wood said:

 

I cannot give total figures, but I have come across a few in my research. However, as the main thrust of my research is into those who died I have researched relatively few survivors (mainly fathers or brothers of the dead). The surviving pension records are, I suspect, a drop in the ocean but one could take a random sample and get some idea of how many pensions ended before death. I would suspect that there would be quite a number in the years immediately after the war as their wounds healed or their sickness abated.

 

My memorial, like most memorials, has a lot of infantrymen (inevitably) - but it's not the proportion on the memorial that counts, it's the proportion of those who served. 

 

 

Interesting. My perceptions (which may well be wrong) are that Medical Pensions were incredibly difficult to obtain due to the penny pinching, involved rigorous medical boards and were only handed out in the case of perceived 'permanent' disability. If a man was discharged and still recovering from wounds he would be treated by the authorities until they could do no more; he would have recovered or still be medically disabled. The medical boards attempted to establish a % disability for each case.  If the patient was still medically disabled he would then be assessed by a medical board for a medical pension.

 

Your single example at least illustrates if a man made a subsequent recovery, a pension could be taken away. The Medstats tables consistently show 735,487 Disability Pensions at March 1929.  yet  it also records 1,664,000 'pensions and gratuities' had been awarded . Perhaps the difference is "Gratuities" (a one-off payment rather than an annual pension?)..... either way we can be fairly confident that the Medical Pensions awarded were roughly equal to the number of men who were killed. 735,000 medical pensions v 759,000 deaths... a mere 3% difference.... 

 

By March 1929 there were 621,000 'Stabilized Award' and another 113,000 "Unstabilized Awards" where final compensation could not be assessed. The total numbers discharged from Hospital between 1919 and 1929 who still had a disability was 1.331 million. suggesting 45% recovered and 55% received a Medical Pension.

 

I will settle on 735,000 permanent disabilities and 120,000 deaths while in receipt of a Medical Pension. As mentioned a few posts ago this would take total war related deaths to 759,000 plus 120,000 = 879,000 and a war related fatality ratio of 14.8%. Given men who died while in receipt of Medical Pension may have died of other causes, I would put 15.4% this towards the higher end of the War related deaths. 

MG

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Quote

Your single example at least illustrates if a man made a subsequent recovery, a pension could be taken away. The Medstats tables consistently show 735,487 Disability Pensions at March 1929.  yet  it also records 1,664,000 'pensions and gratuities' had been awarded (a one-off payment? rather than an annual pension?). Perhaps the difference is "Gratuities"..... either way we can be fairly confident that the Pensions awarded were roughly equal in number to the number of men who were killed. 735,000 medical pensions v 759,000 deaths... a 3% difference.... 


The 1,664,000 I believe was those who were given dependents and widows pensions as well as payments made for children.

Excluding any officers - In 1919 there were 875,678 men drawing a pension, gratuity or allowance.

At the same time there were 216,890 widows and 279,440 dependents drawing a pension, gratuity or allowance.*. There was also 968,064 children included in claims - approx 1.45 million claims in total - it does appear that there is some 'double counting' to get the overall total was it appears children were individually counted. Perhaps if the figures are read as 'individuals' it makes more sense.

Interestingly in 1926
image.png.02e7191dfce0e86166e9d02c4f3eeb3a.png


* which suggests a large number of deceased soldiers pensions had either been settled completely or had not yet been calculated (even allowing for young,single men with no dependents).
 

Craig

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1 hour ago, ss002d6252 said:


The 1,664,000 I believe was those who were given dependents and widows pensions as well as payments made for children.
Craig

 

 

I am not sure this is right. MedStats page 315 notes 2,414,000 awards for State Compensation - roughly speaking 1,664,000 plus 750,000 related to deaths. This larger figure will therefore include the Widows and Orphans' awards. The 1,644,000 is specifically for Medical Pensions and Gratuities (according to Medstats). The 735,000 permanent (Stabilized and Unstabilized) medical Pensions is a fairly 'hard' figure as the tables provide detailed breakdown by disability (some 55 sub categories).  MG

 

Medstats link: CLICK

Page 315 is a good starting point....

 

 

Med Pensions Medstats.JPG

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Recent American research into the demographic consequences of the American Civil War has resulted in a suggestion that the commonly cited figure of 620,000 ( 360,000+ confirmed Northern and c.260,000 estimated Southern) deaths needs some drastic revision upwards in order to account for premature deaths of men as a result of wounds and invalidity in the post war years. Twenty per cent has been cited as a minimum adjustment.

 

If this is plausible, then we might well assume that something similar appertains to the men of 1914-18.

 

Phil

 

 

 

 

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On 30/01/2018 at 13:35, Gardenerbill said:

Well I will stick my head above the parapet. On reading Martin's first post without recourse to Google, I thought 10 million in the field approx 1 million dead so 10%.

Oops it seems I was wrong, where did I get that figure of 10 Million from? Just shows even those of us who think we know a bit, should check the facts before committing ourselves. Adds another dimension to Martin's original post.

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1 hour ago, Gardenerbill said:

Oops it seems I was wrong, where did I get that figure of 10 Million from? Just shows even those of us who think we know a bit, should check the facts before committing ourselves. Adds another dimension to Martin's original post.

 

You’re  not far from the mark if you allude to the British Empire as a whole, which mobilised pretty close to ten million men by land, air and sea, of whom about one million died.

 

Phil

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Thanks Phil, that may be where that number came from, I am sure I have read the comment "We would not be able to put an army of 10 million into the field today" somewhere?

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Here’s something to pitch into the pot : most people will conjure up images of the Western Front when they think of the Great War.

 

With this in mind, let me cite the figures for that front, with the caveat that this is for the British Empire forces : UK, Dominions and India.

 

Total served : 5,399,563

 

Total died : 709,613.  

 

That equates to 13.14%.

 

A remarkable feature is that only 32,098  (4.5% ) of these deaths were from non battle causes : disease or accident etc.  

 

As a testimony to intense, deadly and unremitting battle, we could state with confidence that one in eight of all British Empire soldiers who entered France and Belgium were killed in action or died from wounds ; of those who had served in the dreaded Crimea sixty years earlier , only one in twenty met death in battle.

 

We’re right to challenge the sensationalised and distorted perceptions of the Great War : that   Death of a Generation is a discredited term....but neither must we subscribe to the view that it conformed to battlefield norms for high intensity warfare. It did transcend and its horrific reputation is all too justified.

 

Phil

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3 hours ago, phil andrade said:

Here’s something to pitch into the pot : most people will conjure up images of the Western Front when they think of the Great War.

 

With this in mind, let me cite the figures for that front, with the caveat that this is for the British Empire forces : UK, Dominions and India.

 

Total served : 5,399,563

 

Total died : 709,613.  

 

That equates to 13.14%.

 

A remarkable feature is that only 32,098  (4.5% ) of these deaths were from non battle causes : disease or accident etc.  

 

As a testimony to intense, deadly and unremitting battle, we could state with confidence that one in eight of all British Empire soldiers who entered France and Belgium were killed in action or died from wounds ; of those who had served in the dreaded Crimea sixty years earlier , only one in twenty met death in battle.

 

We’re right to challenge the sensationalised and distorted perceptions of the Great War : that   Death of a Generation is a discredited term....but neither must we subscribe to the view that it conformed to battlefield norms for high intensity warfare. It did transcend and its horrific reputation is all too justified.

 

Phil

 

Probably a can of worms but the "Total Served" and "Total Died" are slightly subjective measures. I use 5,919,867* and 759,035** giving 12.8%.  Given we are probably all agreed a subjective number needs to be added or the post-war deaths (I use 120,000 from the Pension Data) which generates 14.8% ... in my view anything between 13% and 15% could be taken as a reasonable figure.

 

What the figures don't do is adjust for normal rates of civilian mortality. If those 5.9 million men had not gone to war, what % would have died of other causes. The only work I have seen that addresses this is J M Winter's "The Great War and the British People" One needs a qualification in Actuarial Science to stand a chance of following the numbers which are based on sets of adjusted Life Insurance data. 

 

Another adjustment would be for those who enlisted but never made it to any theatre of War, ...which is why I think 15% has to be towards the very top end of the likely true or meaningful figure. 

 

 

 

*

Armed Forces of the Crown  
British Army 1914 (Reg & TF)       733,514
British Army Reserves 1914       215,451
England: recruits    4,006,158
Wales: recruits       272,924
Scotland: recruits       557,618
Ireland: recruits       134,202

 

**CWGC data filtered by WWI, UK and Army

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Martin,

 

What I allude to - and this is significant - is the Western Front only.

 

The total who set foot in France and Belgium, from those first cohorts in mid August 1914 - whose fatalites you have chronicled with such painstaking research - until the Armistice , was 5.4 million.  That figure goes beyond UK army, and includes all Imperial and Dominion contingents.

 

One in eight of them was actually killed in battle ; thirty two thousand others succumbed to disease and accidental injuries.

 

It might be a unique record in terms of the preponderance of combat fatalites as opposed to non battle deaths.

 

I wonder how many of the 5.4 million served as infantrymen : three million at most ?

 

Allow for the other battle casualties , and attribute at least eighty per cent of them to those three million in the infantry, and the arithmetic suggests that  more than two thirds of all those who were deployed as infantrymen either bled or died in battle.

 

Let  Snow, Corrigan and  Terraine shoot down the myths ;  the reality needs to be properly countenanced as catastrophic .

 

Edit : reading this makes me uncomfortable : it suggests that I’ve had more than one glass of vino....but I thought it right to assess this in the light of fatality rates in the actual theatre of the most intense and prolonged fighting.

 

Phil

 

 

 

 

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9 hours ago, phil andrade said:

 

A remarkable feature is that only 32,098  (4.5% ) of these deaths were from non battle causes : disease or accident etc.  

 

 

That is remarkable - I would have thought the flu epidemic killed more than that.  Another misconception?

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5 hours ago, Phil Wood said:

 

That is remarkable - I would have thought the flu epidemic killed more than that.  Another misconception?

 

Yes, indeed.....I think that the flu cases entailed remarkably few fatalities among the  British soldiers in theatre.  Bear in mind, though, that the remit of these Medical Statistics that I use does not extend beyond the 1918 fighting ; there would have been thousands more deaths from flu after the Armistice when the strain became especially lethal. More importantly, many of the flu cases who died were troops stationed in the UK, and are not counted in the tables that I used.

 

It’s remarkable how much higher the mortality from the disease of the US troops was than that of their British counterparts.

 

Phil

 

 

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I have not been looking too closely at the statistics but from a  study of the war graves in a Portsmouth cemetery, it was evident that a very modest share of the deaths in the UK in what was a major naval base with many jobs dome by reservists could be attributed to enemy action. I made it just under 15% of about 350 could be attributed to died of wounds (army or navy), and quite a high number, I'll try to get back to it, were deaths after the end of hostilities, which fits with Phil's point about the impact of Spanish Flu.

Many of the older men serving in army and navy barracks as well as the dockyard itself during the war were recorded as "died" in SDGW, and,  as dying from disease or similar in naval records. Portsmouth did have military hospitals, but, by inference only it seems that they did not receive a great proportion of the more critically injured from the Western Front.

A substantial proportion of the deaths after the armistice were at the younger end of the spectrum and were men from units that didn't serve overseas, but their deaths can't be confidently attributed to a specific cause given the end most of Soldiers Died records, as well as the gaps in army service records.

 

Later in the year I hope to rework this to include the other Portsmouth cemeteries to get a larger sample and maybe to run a similar exercise on the casualties at Netley which I suspect will show a very different figure to that of a major base.

 

Keith.

Edited by keithmroberts
removing duplicate wording, general tidying up of a badly worded post
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The BMJ give a figure of 7,591 deaths of 'non-civilian' males in the UK in 1918 out of a total of 112,329 victims of the influenza epidemic.  I'm not sure what this adds to the thread, but someone might find it useful!

 

Like Keith I note a good proportion of local burials (CWGC) are death from non-combat related causes. However, a good number of them never served overseas either. 

 

I also have a number, around 2%, on the memorial who are not recognised by the CWGC as casualties of war - their families seem to have considered them such.  I suspect that, had their records survived the Arndale St fire or the weeding of the pension records I could convince the CWGC to recognise most of them. A few more (1%)  have been added to the CWGC roll owing to my research.  It's not a huge percentage, is from a small sample (339), and covers only the period up to the erection of the memorial (Oct 1922) but it is indicative of deaths post-service during and immediately after the war.

 

The guy whose pension stopped in 1919 began as 40% disabled (arthritis) on discharge, went down to 20% at a 1918 medical and then 0% in 1919. His pension was because the arthritis was 'aggravated by service', not 'caused by'. He died in 1923 - certainly not combat related.

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