Major Wars and Battles: How to Learn 81 Conflicts and Their Death Tolls

The Major Wars & Battles deck (code HH5335, 162 cards) on Flip It is not a narrative history deck. It is built as strict pairs: every conflict gets a "What was X?" card and a "How many died in X?" card. 162 cards means 81 conflicts, and half the deck is numbers. Learn it the way you would learn a table of figures, not the way you would read a chapter.

What one pair looks like

The 81 conflicts covered

Wars and campaigns (cards 1–132): World Wars I and II, the Taiping Rebellion, the Mongol conquests, the Three Kingdoms War, the An Lushan and Dungan revolts, the Chinese and Russian Civil Wars, the Napoleonic Wars, the Thirty Years' War, the Second Congo War, Vietnam, Korea, the French Wars of Religion, the Nigerian (Biafran) Civil War, the Reconquista, the Second Sudanese Civil War, the Mahdist War, Ethiopian-Eritrean conflicts, the Spanish conquests of the Aztec and Inca empires, the Tây Sơn Rebellion, Afghanistan 2001-2021, the Algerian War of Independence, the Spanish Civil War, the Bangladesh Liberation War, the Balkan Wars, the Seven Years' War, the American Civil War, the Mexican Revolution, the Rwandan Genocide, the Angolan, Somali and Burundian Civil Wars, the Second and Third Punic Wars, the Iraq War, the Gulf War, the Wars of the Spanish and Austrian Succession, Qin's wars of unification, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Caesar's Gallic Wars, the First Jewish-Roman War, Alexander's conquests, the Imjin War, the Deluge, the Mughal conquest of North India, the Delhi Sultanate campaigns, Maratha expansion, the Circassian genocide, the War of the Triple Alliance, the Crimean War, the Hundred Years' War, the Crusades, the Wars of the Roses, the Northern Expedition, the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Boer Wars, the Russo-Japanese War, the Winter War, the Greek War of Independence, the Boxer Rebellion and the Opium Wars.

Battles and sieges (cards 133–162): Cannae, Waterloo, Gettysburg, the Somme, Stalingrad, Verdun, the Siege of Leningrad, D-Day, Kursk, Berlin, the Siege of Jerusalem (70 AD), Hastings, Tours, Thermopylae, Gaugamela and Marathon.

Two tips that will save you marks

1. The battle block asks for deaths and answers with casualties. Waterloo: "approximately 47,000 casualties (killed and wounded)". Stalingrad: "approximately 2 million casualties (killed, wounded, captured)". Gettysburg: "51,000 casualties (killed, wounded, missing)". Those are not death tolls, and an exam will punish the confusion — Gettysburg's dead number about 7,000–10,000, not 51,000. Edit those fifteen fronts to read "How many casualties at…" before your first review.

2. Ignore the deck's order as a ranking. The first cards descend by toll (WWII 70-85M, Taiping 20-70M, the Mongol conquests 30-40M) and then the sort collapses: the An Lushan Rebellion, at 13-36M one of the deadliest events in history, sits at card 99, and the Dungan Revolt (8-12M) at card 36. Learn the order of magnitude, not the position: tens of millions (WWII, Taiping, Mongols, An Lushan, Three Kingdoms), millions (WWI, Napoleonic, Thirty Years', Congo), hundreds of thousands (Gulf War, Boxer Rebellion, Opium Wars, Waterloo).

And do not add the numbers up: the Siege of Jerusalem (~1 million) sits inside the First Jewish-Roman War (~1 million), Cannae inside the Second Punic War, Gettysburg inside the American Civil War, Waterloo inside the Napoleonic Wars. The deck lists nested events as separate pairs.

Next

For the chronological backbone behind these conflicts, pair this deck with our guide to the 184 key dates of ancient history.

Log in to Flip It, open Major Wars & Battles (HH5335), and let spaced repetition bring the 81 pairs back at the right interval.