ITT: Historical facts that are difficult to realize

I start: 30,000 German soldiers died during the 1 month long Battle of France in 1940
That's almost as many dead as America sustained over two decades in Vietnam

They also had
>18,384 missing

So... did they find those guys once they took over France?

Missing probably means blown to bits and buried under 6 feet of mud and carnage.

That or deserters

Why not just count them as dead then?

30,000 soldiers in a month isn't too bad. The battle of the Somme in WW1 was like 5 months and claimed 1.1 million lives.

legally, no body = potentially still alive

but a lot of people generally consider MIA and KIA to be essentially the same thing since they usually find corpses

Better yet, the Battle for Berlin was just over two weeks (April 16th - May 2nd) and that's slated for 1.3 million casualties.

casualties!=KIA

On the same topic
Americans lost less soldiers in their entire history, civil war included, than the french in ww1

He didnt say he was

Yeah but the battle of France is usually seen as a walk in the park for Germans
People never think about the 30,000 of them who died in it

>and claimed 1.1 million lives

That total casualties and for both sides
OP figure is killed only and for one side

>Germans had casualties too
Truly a shocking fact

Previously they lost 20,000 men in Poland

If I recall correctly, the Germans had 170,000 killed at the Somme (out of their 400,000 total casualties)

30,000 x 5 = 150,000
So the Somme was just slightly more deadly for the Germans than the 1940 invasion of France relatively speaking

In Poland they lost 16,000 killed for duration roughtly equal to the French campaign

and another few thousand missing

They also had heavy aerial losses, IIRC it was more than 300 aircraft

Just looked it up, they lost 258 aircraft

The German wiki says 10,572 dead for the invasion of Poland and between 27,074 and 49,000 dead for the invasion of France

The germans lost more planes in France
1300 planes- and 1200 tanks.

20k brits died in the first day of the Somme, it’s not very incredible.

>more soldiers were killed in the Battle of Stalingrad, than American soldiers killed in every war we've fought in

Is Amurica the biggest meme?

>30,000 of the 40,000 men in the U-Boat fleet died in the Battle of the Atlantic
>1 in 4 chance of survival

Dang

Still number one