Why I Built the American War Dead Memorial Map

A new page is live on the site: American War Dead — A State-By-State Memorial. It is an interactive map. Choose an American war, and every state colors by the number of its people who died in that war’s service. It is sober by design, and every number on it carries a source.

This is a note on what the map is, the editorial choices behind it, and — as with every data tool on this site — what it cannot yet do.

What the map shows

The map covers six American wars: the Civil War, the First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Global War on Terror. For each, it places US military deaths by state — by state of enlistment or home of record, depending on what the records support.

The count is an all-cause count. It follows the definition the Defense Casualty Analysis System uses for its principal-wars table: combat deaths, deaths of wounds, deaths from disease, accidents, and other non-hostile deaths, across all branches of service. That choice matters. The all-cause definition counts, for instance, the roughly 32,000 American soldiers who died of influenza in stateside training camps in 1918, before they ever shipped to France. Combat-only tallies quietly drop them. This map does not.

A per-capita toggle re-expresses every state’s figure as deaths per 100,000 of its population in the census year nearest the war. A small state’s loss and a large state’s loss become comparable.

The editorial choices

Three choices are worth naming plainly.

The Civil War is Union-only. The map counts United States military dead. Confederate-state cells render as no-data on the Civil War view. This was decided at the project’s outset and held throughout — the same editorial position the site’s Hoosier Union History series takes.

Six wars, not eleven. An earlier plan covered every major American war from the Revolution forward. Five were cut — the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, and the Persian Gulf War — because verifiable per-state casualty figures for them do not exist in a form the map could stand behind. Rather than show five maps that were blank or guessed, the map shows six that are sourced cell by cell. The national totals for the five that were cut are still recorded, in the methodology card, so they are not lost from the account.

Every cell carries a provenance tier. Some figures are primary-source counts from federal casualty files. Some are derived by scaling a credible per-state share to a national total. Some, where no primary per-state data exists, are the best available reconstruction from secondary sources. The map labels which is which, on every cell, rather than presenting all of them as equally solid.

What it cannot yet do

The honesty about limits is part of the tool, not an apology for it.

The Second World War figures are derived from Army records scaled to an all-services total, which under-counts the coastal states that sent disproportionate numbers of men to the Navy and Marine Corps; every WWII cell is flagged for this. The Civil War cells are reconstructions — nine of them are cross-checked against William F. Fox’s 1889 canonical tallies, and the rest are queued for that cross-check, stated openly on the page rather than papered over. Territories — Puerto Rico, Guam, and the others — are not in this fifty-states-plus-DC version; their dead are no less American, and a later build should include them.

This is the same posture every data tool on this site carries: show the work, name the gaps, and let the reader judge.

Why it exists

The map is the companion capstone to this site’s Memorial Day 2026 series. The series wrote, across ten posts, about what Memorial Day is for. The map does one specific thing the prose could not: it puts the cost on a map of the country, state by state, and lets a reader find their own.

That is the whole intent. The map is built; the gaps in it are named; the data is reproducible from cited sources. It will stay on the site after Memorial Day, the way the rest of the series will — a memorial does not stop being one on May 26.

Sources

• American War Dead — A State-By-State Memorial: patrickneilbradley.com/memorials/american-war-dead.html. The map’s own methodology card carries the full per-war sourcing.
• U.S. Department of Defense, Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS) — Principal Wars casualty definitions and per-state extracts.
• William F. Fox, Regimental Losses in the American Civil War, 1861–1865 (1889) — Chapter XIII canonical aggregates.