What percent of English males between the ages of seventeen and thirty-five died during World War I?

TabbyTom

I presume we’re talking about military casualties, and not the men and boys who died of disease and other natural causes in the ordinary course of life in the UK. The male population of the UK, according to the census, was 20.357,000 in 1911 and 21,033,000 in 1921. Hutchinson’s Encyclopaedia gives the total UK deaths in action as 658,700, indicating that the men dying in action were about 3.2 per cent of the total male population. I can’t easily find details of the age distribution of the population at that time. The population was still growing more rapidly than it is today, and the average life-span wasn’t anything like as long as it is now. So, compared with today, a greater percentage of the male population would have been below the age for military service, and a much smaller percentage would have been above it. I’d guess that, out of the men of military age, something like five per cent died in action. Jul 25 05, 2:51 PM

lanfranco

TT's analysis sounds reasonable to me, though some of the sites I examined gave the raw figure for U.K. war deaths as either 715,000 or 750,000 (others just said about 8% of the total population). These sites did not break down the deaths for English, Scots, and so forth, and did not consider age distribution issues. (Total British Empire deaths, including the Canadians, Australians, and Indians, seem to have been about 908,000.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_casualties Just as an aside, I found this rather interesting site on U.K. population history. It's animated, so I apologize if it doesn't work for everyone: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/society_culture/society/launch_ani_population.shtml">http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/society_culture/society/launch_ani_population.shtml Jul 25 05, 3:32 PM