8 million, from Italy, 5.6 million. Turkey
furnished 2.9 million, Bulgaria 1.2 million; 4.4 million came from the
United States; 0.8 million from Japan. Lesser numbers came from other
countries.
Except for Spain, the largest contributions of war conscripts came from
the countries with the largest populations. With the exception of Spain,
all of the great powers of Europe provided the "cannon fodder"; the
human beings which Europe's "great powers" assembled to take part in
this profligate orgy of mass murder which went on for more than four
years, from July 1914 until November 1918.
Body count reports and "estimates" give the total number of human beings
murdered in the four year period as 8,538,315. (The legal definition of
"murder" is killing, not accidentally but with the intention of taking
life.)
This figure of 8.5 million murdered human adults, most of them in the
prime of life, refers to the murdered bodies that were recovered and
disposed of. In addition there were "prisoners" and "missing."
As the 1914-18 war proceeded it became less a series of combats between
human beings; more and more it was a war of machines such as
battleships, tanks, big guns and by war's end, of airplanes. Human
beings drew up the plans, made the blueprints, shifted the gears, pushed
the buttons. Their efforts were supplemented and multiplied by the
killing power of physics, chemistry and mechanics brought to the task of
wholesale murder, which produced 8.
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