The first American military death was Lieutenant William T. Fitzsimons , a twenty-eight-year-old medical officer serving in an American army hospital assigned to the British Expeditionary Forces who was killed on 4 September in a German air attack on Dannes-Camiers in Pas-de-Calais, France.
The first American combat deaths were Corporal James B. Gresham , and Privates Thomas F. Enright and Merle D. Hay , killed on 2 November in a nighttime raid on their First Division Company. Three nurses were wounded by enemy fire, but none were killed in action.
As Americans contemplated declaring war on Germany, officials were mindful of the great cost to the state of pensions for sick and disabled veterans of the American Civil War By virtually all Civil War veterans 93 percent were receiving a federal pension. Treasury, the War Department engaged in an unprecedented examination of 10 million recruits to screen out medical liabilities and build the strongest and most fit Army, Navy, and Marine Corps.
The medical toll was great nonetheless. American losses began before troops could even fight in France. As medical screening revealed men with serious problems requiring treatment, such as sexually transmitted diseases , malnourishment, respiratory diseases, or dental infections, trainees began to flood Army hospitals in the fall of Measles and mumps epidemics also appeared in several training camps, and some unfortunate men who developed lethal pneumonia from those diseases went home in caskets just weeks after enlistment.
The vast majority The American Medical Association helped recruit thousands of civilian physicians to serve, so that during the war almost 30 percent of American physicians were in the military. The Army Medical Department ultimately numbered 30, medical officers including African American physicians , 21, nurses but no black nurses until December , and , enlisted men.
The Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery had some 3, medical officers, 1, nurses, and 11, enlisted men. Both the home front and AEF systems included specialized hospitals for orthopedic injuries, shell shock, blinding injuries, gas victims, and soldiers who developed active tuberculosis. The injuries sustained by American troops therefore resulted in relatively few amputations — only 4, - with twenty-five double amputations and one triple amputation.
Chemical weapons and gas injuries generated 70, hospital admissions and 1, deaths for the AEF. Many patients lingered for weeks before dying, and thousands of victims sustained lifelong injuries. One study showed that 60 percent of the 3. Americans also benefitted from the lessons Europeans learned about the effects of trench warfare and the new horrors of chemical weapons, machine gun fire, and artillery barrages on the human psyche. British physicians first identified shell shock in as the result of the physical effects of explosions on the nervous system.
Within weeks of declaring war, the U. War Department ordered Major Thomas W. Salmon , a U. Public Health Service psychologist, to Britain and France to study the matter.
He found that war neuroses presented three medical military problems: the depletion of the fighting force through mental disabilities, the difficulty of distinguishing war neuroses from other neurological and mental illnesses, and the mystery of what caused war neuroses symptoms so they could be avoided in the future. These included delirium, confusion, hallucinations, terrifying dreams, mutism, involuntary muscular functions, such as paralysis or tics and tremors, and even blindness.
As the first major U. The goal was to identify patients within forty-eight hours of their traumatic incident to avoid reinforcing the trauma , begin treatment, and cure the soldier, returning him to the front lines or military support units. Evacuation back to the United States would be a last resort. Staff used work as a curative agent, and when the facility first opened, patients broke up stones for a macadam road to link the hospital to the French road.
The hospital also provided a workshop with weaving, sketching and printing to help retrain patients with paralyses, tremors, and other symptoms.
The caseload increased rather than decreased after the war, and by mental cases accounted for more than one-third of veterans hospitalized in the United States. The estimates I've seen were about 1 million plus that were directly due to military action.
This is military action impacting civilians. This was disproportionately felt on the side of the Entente, on the side of the allies. If you look at where, especially the western front was fought, it becomes clear and also much of where the eastern front was fought. The eastern front, a lot of it was fought on Russian land, or what was controlled by the Russian Empire at the time and on the western front, much of the, or most of the battle was in France and in Belgium and also in Italy, that was also where you had a significant amount of the battle actually going on.
So, this is why the allies, the Entente, felt a disproportionate number of the civilian that's directly due to military casualties. But then on top of that, the rest of the civilian count, this is what's, frankly, very hard to get an exact number on, this would be due to famine, starvation, disease.
We've talked before about the blockade of the central powers. You had definitely people not being able to kind of eat properly, you had the Spanish Flu. It was just an all around ugly situation and then to make matters worse, and this is what the history books often forget, you often had an explicit extermination of peoples' trying to happen during World War I. In fact, the, I guess, most notable, but often forgotten was the Armenian genocide.
There was actually an explicit campaign on the part of the Ottoman's and this actually started before World War I, but it kind of hit full pace during World War I where 1 to Civilian casualties.
Total number of dead. Great Britain and Ireland. Central Powers. Direct civilian casualties. Austro-Hungarian Empire. Slovenians and the First World War. Map of the Walk of Peace. During the Battle of Amiens in August there were 27, casualties, while the Gallipoli campaign saw nearly , casualties and Brusilov Offensive in resulted in more than two million casualties. There were around , casualties during the Battle of Passchendaele from July 31 to November 10, ES Money.
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