Talk:World War II casualties/Archives/2018/May
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Casualties definition (or lack thereof)
A casualty may mean:
- A person who becomes unavailable for duty by any cause (military definition).
- A person who is killed, wounded or incapacitated (civilian definition).
- A person who is killed; that is, a fatality.
The problem is that, in wartime, most military statistics are for definition 1, unavailable for duty. The brass needs to know how many able-bodied men are available to storm a beach or to occupy a town. In this article (including the title), we use casualties to mean any of the three definitions. In many cases, we just don't know: The source says "casualties" and doesn't give an explanation. In a few cases, "casualties" means something slightly different than any of the three definitions above.
I would like to insert a paragraph in the front of the "Classification of casualties" section. Something like:
- A casualty may mean:
- A person who becomes unavailable for duty by any cause, including death or injury (the military definition).
- A person who is killed, wounded or incapacitated.
- A person who is killed; that is, a fatality.
- In this article, "casualties" may refer to any of these definitions.
What say you? --RoyGoldsmith (talk) 14:21, 6 May 2018 (UTC)
The first sentence of the article has a Wiki-link to Casualty (person). However the definition of casualties will vary because each nation counts its losses differently. We can only report what the sources tell us, not what we say.--Woogie10w (talk) 14:30, 6 May 2018 (UTC)