Casualties of American Wars

In 2007 The United States celebrated its 231st year of existence. From the first this country has been under fire. If you include the War in Iraq we have now been involved in 11 major wars in our history. Some of them have been justified and no one doubts the need for ( World War 2 for example) but others have been a little harder to justify through the passage of time (Vietnam, The war in Iraq). The one consistant certainty about war is the human cost. Below is a list of all the major conflicts that the U.S. has been involved in and the number of war casualties we suffered in that particular conflict. Please note that the figures are estimates in some cases and more precise in others but even the most accurate figures cannot be exact. The amounts also only represent the war dead who immediately died in battle in that conflict. They do not represent for example soldiers who died weeks or months later from their wounds and they do not count soldiers who went missing or who were unaccounted for. The figures come from the Pentagon and are confirmed by other historical sources:

Revolutionary war --------------- 4400 dead
war of 1812 ---------------------- 2300
Mexican war --------------------- 1733
Civil War ----------------------192,000
Spanish American war ------------385
World War 1 --------------------53,500
World war 2 -------------------291,557
Korean war --------------------- 33,741
Vietnam ------------------------ 47,500
Gulf War ---------------------------147

P.S.-- Due to the scale of the conflict and the lack of complete records the figures for the Casualties during the Civil War are in dispute. The figure listed here is the best guess estimate at the number of combat casualties suffered by both sides during the conflict and exclude all other considerations. Estimates about the number of dead during the Civil War vary greatly. Some sources put the total figure as high as 700,000 and others as low as 500,000. More often the number listed is 620,000.