Shadowing Practice: The Deadliest Wars in History - Learn English Speaking with Video

World War II killed 85 million people.

That's the deadliest war in human history.

Or at least, that's what most people think.

Because if you go back far enough, you're gonna find wars that make World War II look small.

Wars that wiped out entire countries, killed tens of millions of people, and may have even cooled the planet itself.

So let's go find the worst war ever fought, starting in the jungles of Vietnam.

The year is 1965.

The Beatles are everywhere, color TVs are showing up in homes across America, and the US has just landed its first combat troops in a small country called Vietnam.

The war had actually been going on since 1955, but now America was in it.

The crazy thing is, America had the most powerful military on Earth.

North Vietnam had a fraction of the manpower and old Soviet weapons.

This should have been a quick win.

It wasn't.

The war dragged on for 20 years.

So America did what big militaries do when they're losing, they escalated.

The US dropped 8 million tons of bombs on Vietnam.

That's more than every bomb dropped in all of World War II combined.

They also sprayed 18 million gallons of a chemical called Agent Orange over the forests.

The idea was to kill the trees so the enemy had nowhere to hide.

It It also poisoned hundreds of thousands of civilians.

500,000 Vietnamese babies have been born with birth defects from it, and kids are still being born sick today, 50 years after the war ended.

Then there was napalm.

It's a sticky, burning jelly that clings to skin and can't be put out.

The US dropped 388,000 tons of it.

There's a famous photo of a 9-year-old girl named Kim Puk running down a road with her clothes burned off, screaming in pain.

That photo helped turn the world against the war.

But the Vietnamese fighters had their own style.

They lived underground in a 150 mile network of tunnels with kitchens, hospitals, weapons stores, and meeting rooms hidden beneath the jungle.

American soldiers called tunnel rats were sent into these pitch black holes to clear them out.

Most came back up changed forever if they came back at all.

Most of the dead never even picked up a weapon.

In 1968, US soldiers walked into a village called Mai Lai and gunned down more than 500 unarmed villagers in one morning.

Mostly women and children.

About a third of the 3 million Vietnamese killed in the war were civilians like that.

Soldiers on both sides got broken by it.

About 58,000 Americans died in combat.

After they came home, more US veterans died by suicide than were killed in the actual fighting.

The war ended 50 years ago, but 300,000 tons of unexploded American bombs are still buried in the Vietnamese countryside.

They still go up.

They still kill farmers and kids every year.

Three million dead is still small compared to the next one.

Rewind 50 years to a war fought in trenches no wider than a hallway,

where soldiers got torn apart by machine guns and poison gas.

The year 1914.

Empires are still rare, most people have never seen a movie, Europe has been mostly peaceful for a hundred years, and almost nobody alive remembers a major war.

Then a Serbian student shoots an Austrian prince in the head.

Nobody really cared about either of them, but because of a tangle of military alliances, that one bullet pulled every major country in Europe into war.

Within a month, four empires were fighting each other.

Everyone expected it would be over by Christmas.

Four years later, 20 million people were dead.

Here's why World War I was so much worse than anyone expected.

The generals were old.

They were trained back in the 1800s when wars were fought with cavalry charges and brave speeches.

But the technology had changed.

The machine gun could fire 600 bullets a minute.

So when generals sent 10,000 soldiers running across an open field at the enemy, they got mowed down in seconds.

The soldiers stopped charging.

They started digging.

Both sides carved out 25,000 miles of trenches across Europe, enough to wrap around the planet.

And then, they sat in those trenches for four years, getting shell, gassed, drowned in mud, and buried alive.

The trenches were a special kind of hell.

They were full of mud, dead bodies, lice, and rats the size of cats.

When it rained, soldiers drowned in flooded ditches.

When it didn't rain, they got trench foot, which is when your feet literally rot off because they've been wet for too long.

Body lice spread trench fever, which infected over a million soldiers.

Russia had a typhus outbreak that killed 2.5 million civilians on its own.

Men went insane in the trenches.

They gave it a name, Shellshock.

It was PTSD before they had a word for PTSD.

Then there was the gas.

Chlorine gas would burn out your lungs from the inside.

Mustard gas would blister your skin and blind you.

Soldiers described seeing a green cloud roll toward them and knowing they had 20 seconds to find their mask or die.

And for what?

Some battles were fought over a few hundred yards of mud.

The Battle of the Somme stretched on for five months and killed a million men.

By the end of it, the British had advanced six miles.

Verdun was somehow worse.

300,000 dead over 10 months, all fighting over the same patch of dirt.

But the real horror of World War I was what came after.

The Spanish flu spread through the trenches and killed another 50 million people around the world.

Russia collapsed into a communist revolution, Germany got buried under impossible debt and starvation,

and the peace treaty was so unfair that another war was almost guaranteed.

The world would get it 20 years later.

and it would be much, much worse.

Go back another 700 years, long before machine guns and gunpowder.

The deadliest weapon on earth was a horse and a man with a bow, and one man used both to kill 40 million people.

When the Mongols took the city of Urgench in 1221, they handed each of their 20,000 soldiers a quota.

24 prisoners to personally execute by hand.

Do the math.

That's almost half a million people killed one at a time in a few days, and Urgench wasn't even one of their famous massacres.

By the way, we made a full video on the Mongol Empire.

If this is your thing, go check that one out after this video.

I'll link it in the description.

The Mongols ran a simple system.

Open your gates and live.

Close your gates, and they would kill every person inside, including the babies and the pets, then stack the skulls into pyramids outside the walls.

This was the Mongol Empire's marketing strategy.

And it worked because they could actually back it up.

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Genghis Khan was born around 1162 in Mongolia.

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His father got poisoned when he was nine, the tribe abandoned the family in the wilderness to starve.

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As a teenager he was kidnapped and enslaved, but he escaped.

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By his 40s he had united every nomadic tribe in Mongolia under his rule.

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Then he turned his eyes to the rest of the world.

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Mongols had a few advantages nobody else had.

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They lived on horseback from the age of three and could shoot a bow accurately while riding at a full galley.

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Their composite bows fired arrows 300 yards, twice the range of most European bows.

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They were also nomadic, so they didn't need supply lines.

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They just brought everything with them, including portable forges to fix weapons on the move.

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But the real weapon was psychological.

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The Mongols would send messengers ahead to a city with the same message every time.

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Open your gates and live.

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Close your gates and we'll erase you.

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Some cities ignored the message and learned the hard way.

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In 1221, the Mongols sacked the city of Merv and ordered every survivor to be killed.

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Soldiers were each assigned 300 to 400 prisoners to execute personally.

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The Chronicles say the killing took 13 days.

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Around 700,000 people died in that one city.

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Then, the Mongols left, came back a few days later, and killed the survivors who had been hiding under the bombs.

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This was the standard playbook.

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Persia's population dropped from 2.5 million to 250,000.

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That's 90% of the country just gone.

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In 1258, they sacked Baghdad, the most advanced city in the world at the time, full of libraries and universities.

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They threw so many books into the Tigris River that the water ran black with ink for weeks.

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The killing in Baghdad alone hit somewhere between 200,000 and a million people.

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Across the empire, the Mongols killed around 40 million people.

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That was about 10% of every human alive at the time.

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The destruction was so massive that scientists today can actually see it in the climate data.

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So many farms got abandoned

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that forests grew back across millions of acres pulling enough CO2 out of the atmosphere to slightly cool the planet.

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The Mongols also might have started the Black Death.

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In 1346, they were attacking a trading city on the Black Sea called Kappa.

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Plague broke out in their camp, so they catapulted the infected corpses over the city walls.

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Italian traders and Kappa caught the disease, sailed home, and accidentally launched a pandemic that killed a third of Europe.

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The Mongols took 150 years and half the planet to kill 40 million people.

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Now jump forward 400 years to Europe where one country lost an even bigger share of its population in just 30 years.

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All over two slightly different versions of the same religion.

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In May of 1618 a group of Protestant nobles in Prague got upset with their Catholic king.

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So they marched into the royal castle, grabbed three of the king's officials, and threw them out of a third floor window.

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Somehow the officials survived the 70-foot fall.

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The Catholics said angels had caught them.

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The Protestants said they landed on a pile of manure.

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Either way, that one stupid moment kicked off a 30-year war that killed 8 million people.

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This was the 30 Years War, and it might just be the most pointless mass slaughter in history.

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It started as a fight between Catholic and Protestant Christians in what is now Germany.

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Both sides thought God was on their team.

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Both sides were willing to burn the other side alive to prove it.

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Pretty soon, every major power in Europe jumped in to grab land while their neighbors were busy fighting.

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Sweden invaded, Spain invaded, France invaded, Denmark invaded.

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The war stopped being about religion and became about everyone trying to take a slice of Germany while it was bleeding out.

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Back then, countries didn't really have professional armies.

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They hired mercenaries.

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They were basically armed gangs who fought for whoever paid them.

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The problem was, nobody could afford to keep paying them for 30 years.

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So the mercenaries fed themselves the old-fashioned way.

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They robbed and burned their way through whatever village they were stationed in.

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Whatever they couldn't carry, they ate.

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A normal week for a German peasant might look like this.

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Monday, Catholic mercenaries take all your food.

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Wednesday, Protestant mercenaries burn your barn down for hiding food.

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Friday, a third group of mercenaries shows up just to be safe.

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Saturday, you're either eating tree bark or you're dead.

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By 1630, entire regions of Germany had been raided so many times that there was nothing left to take.

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So, the famine started.

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Then the plague started, because diseased mercenary armies don't really wash their hands.

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Combat itself only killed about 3% of civilian deaths.

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The other 97% died from disease, starvation, and dysentery brought by the soldiers.

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Wolves wandered into empty villages because there were no humans left.

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Starving peasants resorted to cannibalism, digging up bodies from cemeteries for food.

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By the time it ended in 1648, Germany had lost up to 40% of its entire population.

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Some regions lost two-thirds.

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Cities like Magdeburg, which had been one of the biggest in Germany, got burned to ash.

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Only a few hundred people survived out of 25,000.

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The country wouldn't fully recover for over 100 years.

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The craziest part is that nothing was really decided.

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The peace treaty basically said, let's all go home and agree to disagree about religion.

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After 8 million deaths and three decades of suffering, the official answer was, fine, you do your thing, we'll do ours.

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But the war that killed the biggest share of humanity in all of history happened centuries before this one, in China.

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And almost nobody in the West has ever heard of it.

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His name was Hong Xiuquan.

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In the 1840s, he was a Chinese guy trying to pass the Imperial Civil Service exam.

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This was the test he had to take to get any government job in China.

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It was famously difficult, with a pass rate of about 1%.

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Hong took it four times.

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He failed four times.

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After the fourth failure, Hong had a complete mental breakdown.

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He locked himself in his room for 40 days and started seeing visions.

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In one vision, an old man with a long beard appeared to him

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and told him he was actually God's second son and Jesus' younger brother.

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When Hong recovered, he believed it completely.

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And he wanted to bring God's kingdom to earth, starting with overthrowing the Chinese government.

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By 1850, Hong had built up a private army of around 30,000 farmers

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and miners who had also concluded that God's brother had finally come to save them.

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They called themselves the God Worshippers.

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They marched across southern China, swelling to over a million followers, and they were genuinely good at fighting.

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Hong also recruited 10,000 women into their own all-female battalions.

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They marched barefoot in trousers and fought right next to the men.

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For 19th century China, that was unheard of.

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In 1853, they captured Nanjing, which was one of the biggest cities in the world of the time.

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Hong renamed it the Heavenly Capital and declared the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.

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The rules were stripped.

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No opium, no alcohol, no tobacco, no gambling, no prostitution, no foot binding.

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Men and women had to live in separate camps, even if they were married.

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Sex was banned.

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Except of course for Hong himself.

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He had a palace with 88 concubines and rarely came out.

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The rules were for everyone else.

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Meanwhile, the actual war was devouring China.

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The Qing Dynasty was already weak from losing the Opium Wars with Griffin.

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Now they had a Christian death cult holding half their country.

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They had to hire Western mercenaries to help fight.

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One British officer, literally named Chinese Gordon, led a force called the Ever-Victorious Army against the Taiping rebels.

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The fighting was savage, but the famine was worse.

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Both armies took food wherever they went, crops failed and villages emptied out, people ate tree bark and boiled leather, and eventually they ate the dead.

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Some entire provinces had population drops of 70%.

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Travelers described walking for days through southern China without seeing a single living person.

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In 1864, after 14 years of war, Qing forces finally took back Nanjing.

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Hong had died a few months earlier, possibly by suicide, possibly by eating poisonous weeds in his palace garden because he refused to eat normal food.

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When the Qing soldiers broke through the walls, they killed over a hundred thousand people in the city in a single week.

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Then they dug up Hong's body, beheaded it, and blasted his ashes out of a cannon so he he would have no resting place anywhere on earth.

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By the time it was over, somewhere between 20 and 30 million people were dead, mostly civilians.

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Some estimates go as high as 70 million.

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Either way, that's more than every American killed in every war the country has ever fought, combined, multiplied by 20.

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But the most brutal war ever fought was only 80 years away.

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It happened in living memory.

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Some of the people who fought in it are still alive today.

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World War II killed between 70 and 85 million people.

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That's more than the entire population of the United Kingdom today.

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Wiped out in six years.

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And it gets worse from there.

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It started in 1939.

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Germany was a wreck after World War I.

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The economy was gone and the population was starving.

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A failed art school applicant named Adolf Hitler had taken power, promising to fix everything.

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He fixed it by invading Poland and starting the biggest war in history.

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But Germany was only one part of it.

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On the other side of the world, Japan had been at war for years already.

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They had invaded China in 1937, and they were doing things there that made the Mongols look professional.

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The Japanese army committed a six-week massacre in the city of Nanjing, killing somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 civilians.

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Soldiers held sword-killing contests with each other to see who could behead more prisons.

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Then there was Unit 731, a Japanese army facility where scientists ran experiments on living people.

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They infected prisoners with plague.

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They dissected them without anesthesia to see how their organs fit.

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of the victims were children.

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In Europe, Germany was building something even more systematic.

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The Nazis decided that certain groups of people, mainly Jews but also Roma,

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disabled people, gay people, and political prisoners should be eliminated entirely.

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So they built factories whose only job was killing people.

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Auschwitz alone murdered over a million human beings.

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The total death toll in what we now call the Holocaust was around 11 million.

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6 million of them were gibberish.

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While the genocide was happening, the actual military war was vaporizing entire countries.

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The Eastern Front, where Germany invaded the Soviet Union, was the largest and bloodiest theater of war in human history.

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About 30 million people died on that single front.

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And soldiers at the front line had a life expectancy of 24 hours.

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The Battle of Stalingrad alone killed close to 2 million people.

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The Siege of Leningrad lasted 872 days, with the city completely sealed off and starving.

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People ate wallpaper paste and boiled leather belts to make soup.

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Around 800,000 civilians died in that one city, most of them from starvation.

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The cities themselves were being erased sides started bombing each other's civilians on purpose, hoping to break morale.

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London got blitzed, Berlin got flattened, the British and Americans firebombed the German city of Dresden, killing 25,000 people in two nights.

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Tokyo was the worst of all.

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On March 9th, 1945, American bombers dropped jelly bombs on the wooden steel.

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The fire created its own weather, and 100,000 people died in just a few hours.

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It was one night.

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There were dozens more raids like it.

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Then came the atomic bombs.

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Hiroshima got hit on August 6th, 1945.

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Nagasaki, three days later.

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About 200,000 people died, half of them in the first few seconds.

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Survivors described seeing the shadows of vaporized people burn permanently into the walls.

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By the time it all ended in September 1945, almost 80 million people were dead.

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50 million of them were civilians.

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The Soviet Union alone lost 27 million people, 14% of its entire population.

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China lost 20 million more on top of it.

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Most of Europe and East Asia was in ruins.

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There were 17 million displaced people wandering across continents with no home run.

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That's why World War II is the most brutal war in human history.

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The death toll alone is bigger than any war before or since.

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And on top of that, World War II combined every kind of horror humans had ever invented, including death camps, atomic bombs,

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mass starvation, biological experiments, and the firebombing of civilian cities, into one war on six continents.

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And it ended with humanity inventing weapons that could end the world.

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That's why no major power has dared to start one like it in 80 years.

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Because everyone alive today knows exactly what would happen if we did.

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But there is one war that may have wiped out an even larger share of humanity.

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This war is called the An Lushan Rebellion.

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It may have killed one out of every six people alive on Earth at the time.

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And it started over a fat guy and a love triangle.

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To understand it, you have to know where China was at this point.

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In the year 755, China was the richest, most advanced country on earth.

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The Tang Dynasty was running a peaceful empire of around 50 million people.

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They had paper money, gunpowder, printed books, and skyscraper-sized pagodas.

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Europe was still mostly mud huts and plague.

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The Tang Emperor was a guy named Zhuangzong, and he was deeply in love with a younger concubine named Yang Guifeng.

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Like, obsessed level in love.

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He let her family run the government and stopped paying attention to ruling the empire.

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He just wanted to hang out with Yang.

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Yang had a favorite too, a general named An Lushan.

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An Lushan was 350 pounds and half Turkish.

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He was also known for being a hilarious entertainer.

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He would dance for the emperor by jumping up and down even though he was massive.

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The emperor thought he was the funniest man alive.

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Yang adopted An Lushan as her son, even though he was 30 years older than her.

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This is the part where everyone in the imperial court started asking questions.

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Tensions built between Ahn Lushan and Yang's cousin, who was the prime minister.

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Eventually, Ahn Lushan got tired of court politics,

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so in 755, he gathered 150,000 troops from the northern border and marched on the capital.

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The Tang army was caught completely off guard.

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Ahn Lushan captured the city of Luoyang within months and declared himself Emperor of a new dynasty.

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The Emperor and Yang Guifei tried to flee, but on the road, the Emperor's own soldiers mutained.

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They demanded that Yang be executed because they blamed her for the entire mess.

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The Emperor was forced to watch his favorite person get strangled in front of him.

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He abdicated soon after, broken.

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But the war kept going long after the capital fell.

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It lasted eight years.

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An Lushan went blind from diabetes and was murdered by his own son in 757.

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The son was then murdered by a general, who was himself killed shortly after.

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The fighting just kept going.

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Both sides hired foreign mercenaries, mostly Uyghur horsemen who looted Chinese cities as payment.

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By the time the rebellion was crushed in 763, the death toll was huge.

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The official Chinese census went from 53 million people to 17 million people.

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36 million missing.

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Some of that was probably tax records breaking down.

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Even the conservative estimates put the death toll at 13 million.

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The higher estimates put it at around 36 million, which would mean the An Lushan Rebellion killed a bigger share of humanity than any other war before or since.

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The Tang Dynasty technically survived, but it never really recovered.

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The empire spent the next 150 years slowly falling apart from the inside.

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And hey, don't forget about that Mongol Empire video.

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We worked our asses off on that one.

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Trust me, you want to watch it.

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Click here!

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265 sentences

Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This B2 speaking lesson is built on the video “The Deadliest Wars in History”. This video has 331 sentences and 3816 words to shadow. The speech runs for 24:42. The speaker talks at a natural 154 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. Only 81% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.

Key vocabulary in this video

The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
trench noun	/ˈtɹɛnt͡ʃ/	A long, narrow ditch or hole in the ground; either manmade, or formed naturally through erosion or tectonic plate movement.
civilians noun	/sɪˈvɪl.jənz/	Synonym of civvies
mercenary noun	/ˈmɜː.sə.nə.ɹi/	One motivated by gain, especially monetary.
invade verb	/ɪnˈveɪd/	To move into.
starvation noun	/stɑɹˈveɪʃən/	A condition of severe suffering due to a lack of nutrition.
dynasty noun	/ˈdaɪnəsti/	A series of rulers or dynasts from one family.
plague noun	/plɛɡ/	The bubonic plague, the pestilent disease caused by the virulent bacterium Yersinia pestis.
prisoner noun	/ˈpɹɪzənə/	A person incarcerated in a prison, while on trial or serving a sentence.
infect verb	/ɪnˈfɛkt/	To bring (the body or part of it) into contact with a substance that causes illness (a pathogen), so that the pathogen begins to act on the body; (of a…
starve verb	/stɑɹv/	To die because of lack of food or of not eating.
bury verb	/ˈbɛɹi/	To outlive.
rebellion noun	/ɹɪˈbɛl.i.ən/	Armed resistance to an established government or ruler.
execute verb	/ˈɛksɪˌkjuːt/	To kill, especially as punishment for a capital crime.
survivor noun	/sɚˈvaɪvɚ/	One who survives, especially one who survives a traumatic experience.
wipe verb	/waɪp/	To move an object over, maintaining contact, with the intention of removing some substance from the surface. (Compare rub.)

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Meaning
go back verb	To return to a place or state after having been there at a previous time.
wipe out verb	To destroy (especially, a large number or complete set of people or things); to obliterate.
break down verb	To stop functioning.
break through verb	To gain popularity.
build up verb	To erect; to construct.
burn off verb	To dissipate as the result of heat.
burn out verb	To destroy by fire.
come back verb	To return to a place.

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	have been born · can't be put · were sent
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	has just landed · have been born · have never seen
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	foot, which is · Nanjing, which was · people who fought

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 19 contractions and reduced forms, such as didn't, you're, don't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “sh” and “zh” sounds: starvation /stɑɹˈveɪʃən/, crush /kɹʌʃ/
Long words — get the stress right: mercenary /ˈmɜː.sə.nə.ɹi/, rebellion /ɹɪˈbɛl.i.ən/, accurately /ˈæk.jə.ɹɪt.li/, permanently /ˈpɜː.mə.nənt.li/, technically /ˈtɛk.nɪˌkəl.i/

How to practise with this video

Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like trench, civilians, mercenary.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

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