Top 8 Single Deadliest Days In The World History

Rosemary October 21, 2022 | 09:23

The world witnessed deadliest days with hundreds of thousands of deaths. What days are the deadliest in the world history?

Top 9 Single Deadliest Days In The World History. Photo KnowInsiders

Throughout the history, we have seen worst days that shook the whole world and created major changes. These deadliest days will be remembered forever, in history books and in memory of everyone.

Top 8 Single Deadliest Days In The World History

1. January 23, 1556: Shaanxi earthquake in China

Top 9 Single Deadliest Days In The World History

Photo Twitter

On January 23, 1556, a massive earthquake and aftershocks rocked the prosperity of Shaanxi and Shanxi provinces, as reported by History. In the aftermath of the seismic catastrophe, a chain of events including fires, ground fissures, landslides, and mudslides contributed to an unfathomable death toll. For those who survived the event, they experienced one living nightmare after another, representing a perfect storm of destruction.

While estimating casualty figures from so long ago proves notoriously difficult, most scholars agree that roughly 830,000 people perished, making it an event of unprecedented carnage and "the deadliest of all time." To provide some context for this number, consider the death toll attributed to the American Civil War, by far the bloodiest conflict the nation has ever fought. Recently revised figures put the final casualty count at 750,000 over four years (via the BBC). Now add 80,000 to the figure and shrink the time frame majorly, and you start to grasp the magnitude of the tragic events in Shaanxi and Shanxi.

2. September 8, 1900: Galveston Hurricane

Photo History Channel

About 8,000 people were killed that day in a Category 4 hurricane with maximum sustained wind of 145mph. In a city of 38,000 people, more than 10,000 were left homeless.

This hurricane remains the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history, as well as the worst hurricane in U.S. history. More than 8,000 people were killed. The hurricane decimated Galveston, which at the time was one of the most advanced cities in Texas. The hurricane had an estimated tidal surge of 15 feet (4.5 meters), while the barrier island of Galveston was only 5 feet (1.5 meters) above sea level.

3. April 15, 1912: Titanic sinking

Photo All That's Interesting

At 2:20 a.m. on April 15, 1912, the British ocean liner Titanic sinks into the North Atlantic Ocean about 400 miles south of Newfoundland, Canada. The massive ship, which carried 2,200 passengers and crew, had struck an iceberg two and half hours before.

Titanic in numbers

The Passengers

3,547 – the maximum number of people the Titanic could carry.

2,223 – the number of people aboard (passengers and crew).

13 – the number of honeymooning couples on the voyage.

The Sinking

6 – the number of warnings of icebergs the Titanic received before the collision.

160 – the minutes it took the Titanic to sink after hitting the iceberg (2 hours and 40 minutes).

-2°C – the temperature of the sea water in the area where Titanic sank.

The Survivors

31.6% – the total percentage of passengers and crew who survived.

53.4% – the percentage who could have survived, given the number of spaces available on the Titanic lifeboats.

2 – the number of dogs who survived (lapdogs taken aboard lifeboats by their owners).

Top 13 Single Deadliest Days In US History

What are the deadliest single days in the US? How many casualties recorded on those days? From Pearl Harbor, 9/11 to COVID-19, we have picked ...

4. August 22, 1914: The bloodiest day in French military history

With 27,000 French soldiers cut down by German machine-gun fire, August 22, 1914 was by far the bloodiest day in France s military history and quite likely the most deadly single day in the "war to end all wars".

After a battle that was brutal beyond imagination, extending over 400 kilometres (250 miles) of the front line, the top German general asked his staff if they could possibly have won, given they themselves lost around 10,000 men.

During five days of unprecedented bloodshed, between August 20 and 25, an estimated total of 40,000 French soldiers fell, shredded by machine-gun fire in the new mechanised form of warfare.

5. September 1, 1923: Tokyo-Yokohama Earthquake

An earthquake with a magnitude of 7.9 struck the Tokyo-Yokohama metropolitan area about noon on September 1, 1923. The death toll from the temblor was estimated to have exceeded 140,000. Most of those deaths were caused by subsequent widespread fires. Many hundreds of thousands of houses were either shaken down or burned, and the shock generated a tsunami that reached a height of 39.5 feet (12 metres) at the city of Atami, on the Sagami Gulf. The earthquake and its aftermath destroyed the largest commercial center of Japan and traumatized the nation for decades.

6. December 7, 1941: Pearl Harbor attack

Photo Pearl Harbor tours

On the morning of 7 December 1941, at 7.48am local time, 177 aircraft of the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked the United States Naval base at Pearl Harbor on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. Their intention was to destroy and damage as much of the US Pacific Fleet as possible, before it could respond to Japanese operations taking place on the same day against British, Dutch and US territories in southeast Asia.

This first attack wave began bombing the hangars and parked aircraft of the island’s airfields while at the same time launching torpedoes against the US warships moored in the harbour. In the first five minutes of the attack, four battleships were hit, including the USS Oklahoma and the USS Arizona. Minutes later, the Arizona exploded after a bomb hit its gunpowder stores, sinking the ship and killing 1,177 of its crew.

THE ATTACK ON PEARL HARBOR LED TO US ENTERING WORLD WAR II

On December 8, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Congress approved Roosevelt’s declaration of war. The US declared war on Japan.

Three days later, Japanese allies Germany and Italy declared war against the United States. More than two years after the start of the conflict, the United States had finally entered World War II.

7. August 6, 1945: Atomic bomb in Hiroshima

Photo History Channel

On August 6, 1945, during World War II (1939-45), an American B-29 bomber dropped the world’s first deployed atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The explosion immediately killed an estimated 80,000 people; tens of thousands more would later die of radiation exposure. Three days later, a second B-29 dropped another A-bomb on Nagasaki, killing an estimated 40,000 people. Japan’s Emperor Hirohito announced his country’s unconditional surrender in World War II in a radio address on August 15, citing the devastating power of “a new and most cruel bomb.”

8. September 11, 2001: 9/11 attacks

Photo history

On September 11, 2001, nearly 3,000 people were killed, 400 were police officers and firefighters, in the terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center in NYC, at the Pentagon building in Washington, D.C., and in a plane crash near Shanksville, PA. The moment shocked the nation. Two planes, hijacked by Islamic jihadists vowing death to all Americans, plowed into both towers at the World Trade Center in New York. Another plane was flown into the Pentagon in Washington, DC. A fourth plane, presumably headed for the White House or the U.S. Capitol, was heroically diverted by passengers and ended up crashing in an empty field in Pennsylvania. After reports of the first plane hitting the North Tower, millions watched the second plane hit the South Tower on live television.

9/11 was not the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. A bombing in February of 1993 killed six people.

After the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center, the rescue and recovery clean-up of the 1.8 million tons of wreckage from the WTC site took 9 months.