h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I am glad that someone has posted this chart. I was looking for something similar to this, but ended up frustrated that so many sites on the web focus solely on the dead of their own country without placing the number of loses into a comparative perspective. It serves as a welcome reminder to Western Europeans that the loses on the Eastern Front in both wars were dramatically higher than in the west.

I was wondering, however, why you found it saluary that Bulgaria suffered more deaths than the USA? What errors do these statistics correct? It would also be interesting to know why you chose to use the figures from the one website with the lowest statistics for the United States, when all of the other sites you referred to had significantly higher figures for American casualties (e.g. 58,000 vs 126,000 soldiers killed).

It is actually a very flawed entry, and more useful for the links it provides than for the statistics themselves. The objective of the entry, as much as anything, is to prompt people to be sceptical about statistics.

I simply nicked the numbers from the first set of tables I found when searching the web, so there was no planning on which statistics I chose. I found the other links several months after doing the first set of searches.

However, I should 'fess up to the fact that the reason I was searching the web for war-dead stats was because I was in the middle of an argument with an American who was trotting out the tired old falsehood that the US made a considerable sacrifice during the first world war, and that they changed the final outcome.

The entry grew out of my irritation with that mis-representation of history, and to a great extent it shows. There was however no deliberate attempt on my part to select or groom the statistics in any way. The reason I did not then re-do it with more consistent versions of the stats is that doing tables by in GML is boring. As I said, it is a flawed entry, and the links are the most useful part of it.

Sorry to have taken so long to reply. Part of my sloppiness around this entry included a failure to subscribe to it.

Hope this answers your questions.

B