“You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs”

– Joseph Chamberlain, 1897.

The Colombia Massacre (1864)

This campaign is more popularly known as Sherman’s March to the Sea. Sherman ordered his army of 62,000 men with 64 cannons to march from Atlanta 300 miles southeast to Savannah, Georgia and destroy absolutely everything in their path. 200 civilians north of Columbia, South Carolina were massacred a few months before the march commenced, so Sherman knew full well what his men would do. Sherman personally saw his men rape and murder unyielding slaves throughout the march and gave no order to stop this. All crops were either consumed or burned, as were all livestock slaughtered. It is surmised that 50,000 civilians were killed during the war, and that 1,000 of them died during this Campaign at the hands of Northern soldiers.

The Wounded Knee Massacre (1890)

Wounded Knee was a domestic massacre of several hundred Lakota Indians, almost half of whom were women and children, by soldiers of the United States Army. By the time the massacre was over, between 300 and 350 men, women, and children of the Lakota had been killed and 51 were wounded (4 men and 47 women and children, some of whom died later.)  It broke any organized resistance to reservation life and assimilation to white American culture. Twenty soldiers were awarded the Medal of Honor.

The Moro Crater Massacre (1906)

During the engagement, 750 US soldiers, under the command of Colonel J.W. Duncan, assaulted the volcanic crater of Bud Dajo, which was populated by 800 to 1,000 Tausug villagers. It was the bloodiest of any engagement of the Moro Rebellion, with only six of the Moro surviving the bloodshed. President Teddy Roosevelt had already declared the Spanish American War over when the Army detachment group attacked the villages.

The Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1945)

On August 6, 1945, an American B-29 bomber dropped the world’s first deployed atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The explosion wiped out 90 percent of the city and immediately killed 80,000 civilians; 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 civilians.