The history of the world is full of misery and tragedy.
Be it from natural disasters, human atrocities, or the results of conflicts and wars between
nations, there are literally hundreds of stories that line the pages of our history books,
and no doubt there will be more to come.
Which are the most tragic stories of them all?
That’s what we’ll be exploring today!
Welcome to this episode of The Infographics Show, the worst days in the history of the
world
Okay, so we’re going to cover 10 events that are considered some of the worst days
in the history of the world.
During our research we found that there were many to choose from, so the list is not in
any particular order.
All the stories could be considered the worst in their own right.
And we haven’t covered every single war there’s ever been, as that would be a whole
other list.
Instead, we’ve tried to dig out stories that cover the centuries and many that go
back even further and some that have been forgotten over time.
Let’s jump straight in and see what we discovered.
10.
Pol Pot – Pol Pot was a Cambodian communist revolutionary and politician who served as
the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea from 1963 to 1981.
He led the Khmer Rouge, a name given to the followers of communism, from 1963 until 1997.
Why does his name come up when we look at the worst days in history?
Well, from 1975 to 1979, what was known as the Cambodian genocide was carried out by
the Khmer Rouge regime under the leadership of Pol Pot.
Exact numbers of deaths are hard to calculate because many were unrecorded, but somewhere
between 1.5 to 3 million Cambodian people were killed during this time.
That is a staggering amount of people.
Many were left at sites known as The Cambodian Killing Fields.
An analysis of 20,000 mass grave sites by the DC-Cam Mapping Program and Yale University
indicate at least 1,386,734 victims were executed and abandoned in these areas.
9.
Irish Potato Famine – From 1845 to 1849, the people of Ireland suffered through a four-year
period known as The Great Famine.
It was a time of mass starvation, disease, and emigration in the country.
The cause of famine was potato blight, a disease that ravaged potato crops throughout Europe
during the 1840s.
However, the impact was severely worsened by the actions and inactions of the government.
Altogether about a million people in Ireland are reliably estimated to have died of starvation
and epidemic disease during the four-year famine.
The Irish famine killed nearly one-eighth of the entire population and so was proportionally
much more destructive than the vast majority of famines in modern times.
8.
Nanking Massacre - 1937 was the year of the Nanking Massacre.
For six weeks, the Imperial Japanese Army brutally murdered hundreds of thousands of
people, including both soldiers and civilians, in the Chinese city of Nanking.
At that time, Nanking was the capital of Nationalist China.
It took decades for the city and its citizens to recover from the savage attacks.
There are no official numbers for the death toll in the Nanking Massacre, though estimates
range from 200,000 to 300,000 people.
And it is also known as the Nanking Massacre or the Rape of Nanking because between 20,000
and 80,000 women were sexually assaulted.
Soon after the end of the war, General Matsui and his lieutenant Tani Hisao, were convicted
for war crimes by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East.
They were executed.
7.
Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – World War Two lasted for 6 years from 1939 to 1945.
It was the deadliest conflict in human history with 15 million military deaths, 45 million
civilian deaths, and 25 million wounded.
But it’s what ended that war, which will go down as causing some of the darkest days
in history.
On August 6, 1945, an American B-29 bomber dropped the world’s first atomic bomb over
the Japanese city of Hiroshima.
The huge explosion wiped out 90% of the city, killing an estimated 90,000 to 146,000 people.
Tens of thousands more later died of radiation exposure.
Three days later, a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, killing an estimated
40,000 - 80,000 people.
This tragic example of wartime destruction also led to the end of World War Two, as Japan’s
Emperor Hirohito announced his country’s unconditional surrender, citing the devastating
power of “a new and most cruel bomb.”
So the only good that can be taken from these events is that by the war ending at least
further casualties were avoided.
6.
2004 Asian Tsunami – Anyone who was around in 2004 will remember the tragic news on Boxing
Day (December 26) when one of the biggest tsunamis ever was created from an earthquake
deep in the Indian Ocean.
We were just talking about Hiroshima.
Well, the energy from this earthquake is thought to have had the energy of 23,000 Hiroshima-type
atomic bombs.
The rupture was more than 600 miles (965.6 km) long, displacing the seafloor by 10 yards
(9.1 m) horizontally and several yards vertically.
That sent a tidal wave that caused catastrophic damage in 14 countries, including India, Indonesia,
Malaysia, the Maldives, Myanmar, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Bangladesh, South Africa,
Madagascar, Kenya, Tanzania and the Seychelles.
According to British news paper The Telegraph, 230,000 people lost their lives, and 1.7 million
people were left homeless after the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami.
5.
The Rwandan Genocide – 1994 marked the year of The Rwandan Genocide, a mass slaughter
that took place over a 100-day period from April 7 to mid-July 1994.
Members of the Hutu ethnic majority in the east central African nation of Rwanda murdered
as many as 800,000 people, mostly of the Tutsi minority, so it was also known as the genocide
against the Tutsi.
Among the first victims of the genocide were the Hutu Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana
and her 10 Belgian bodyguards.
This created a political vacuum that an interim government of extremist Hutu Power leaders
from the military high command filled on April 9.
Following the genocide, more than 2 million people fled Rwanda, crowding into refugee
camps in the Congo and other neighboring countries.
4.
The Black Death – Stepping back a bit further in time now, we look at the Black Death and
without doubt some of the bleakest days in the world’s history.
The Black Death spread across Europe in the years 1346 to 1353.
The frightening name most likely came from a mistranslation of the Latin word atra meaning
both “terrible” and “black.”
There were varying symptoms to this fatal disease.
Some would get an infection of the lungs, leading to breathing difficulties that left
people dead within two days.
Another form consisted of boils erupting under the armpits and swollen lymph nodes in the
groin area.
It is estimated that the Black Death killed 75 to 200 million people 1347.
Up to 60% of Europe's total population was wiped out.
In total, the plague may have reduced the world population from an estimated 450 million
down to 350 to 375 million in the 14th century.
It took 200 years for the world population to recover to its previous level.
3.
9/11 – 9/11, which occurred on September 11, 2001, is the worst terror attack to take
place on American soil and is still etched in the memories of many people.
19 militants associated with the Islamic extremist group al-Qaeda hijacked four Boeing airplanes
and carried out suicide attacks against targets in the United States.
Two of the planes were flown into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York
City, a third plane hit the Pentagon just outside of Washington, D.C., and the fourth
plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania.
On that day, almost 3,000 people were killed.
The incident led to extensive bombing of Afghanistan as troops hunted down the leader of al-Qaeda,
Osama bin Laden, and it also eventually led to a second war in Iraq.
2.
The Vietnam War – When talking about the worst days in history, it’s hard not to
mention the Vietnam War.
It officially ran from August 5, 1964 to May 7, 1975, so it was not just a few days but
many years.
An estimated 9,087,000 military personnel served on active duty during that time.
Just how bad were the days of that war?
Let’s look at some statistics put together by retired Sergeant First Class (SFC) David
Hack, who volunteered for service in Vietnam in 1968, joining the 1st Infantry Division:
A total of 58,148 military personnel were killed in Vietnam, 75,000 were severely disabled,
23,214 were 100% disabled, 5,283 lost limbs, and 1,081 sustained multiple amputations.
The first man to die in Vietnam was James Davis in 1961.
Five men killed in Vietnam were only 16 years old, while the oldest man killed was 62 years
old.
Of those killed, 61% were younger than 21 years old, and 11,465 of those killed were
younger than 20 years old.
Of those killed, 17,539 were married, and the average age of the men killed was 23.1
years.
1.
Cretaceous–Tertiary (K–T) extinction - For number one, we’re stepping as far back in
time as we can.
To be precise, we will be going back 66 million years ago to an event known as The Cretaceous–Paleogene
extinction event, which is also known as the Cretaceous–Tertiary or K–T extinction.
This was one grey day folks when all of a sudden there was a mass extinction of 80%
of the plant and animal species on Earth.
Okay, so what happened?
It is generally thought that the K–T extinction was caused by the impact of a massive comet
or asteroid 6.2 to 9.3 miles (10 to 15 km) wide.
It’s hard for this theory to be inconclusively proven, but there is a good amount of evidence
to support it.
A huge crater 112 miles (180 km) in diameter was discovered buried beneath sediments of
the Yucatán Peninsula near Chicxulub, Mexico, and has been dated to the right period.
And a second smaller crater, which predates the one at Chicxulub by about 2,000 to 5,000
years, was discovered at Boltysh in Ukraine in 2002.
Whatever exactly happened, it was certainly one of the worst days in the history
of the world.
So, what other bad days has the world had that we didn’t mention?
Let us know in the comments . Also, be sure to watch our other video called – Worst
Punishments In The History of Mankind.
Thanks for watching, and as always, don't forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time!