I know it is normal for countries to deflate their casualty numbers during war, but how do they do it? If for example 1000 soldiers are killed in a month, how could a government claim only 400 were killed without the public discover this to be a lie? Surley the families of the killed soldiers are promptly informed.
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The other commenters are right that limited information can allow you to scale down the no. of dead as very few people will be able to check every single person. The other thing that countries can do is list their presumed dead under “missing”. In wars where the majority of casualties will come from attacks into enemy lines it is unlikely that bodies will be recovered and when weapons like artillery are used there may not be bodies remaining.
So if you don’t want to admit that you got 1000 men killed you put 400 men in the dead column (Especially any that have bodies to return, and the rest you can put in the missing category and whether truthfully or not claim you don’t know what happened, maybe they were captured by the enemy forces.
In a war both sides will often try to inflate the numbers of enemies killed and downplay their losses, which is why some organisations are currently using things like obituaries and probate cases to try and gain a more reliable data. Though again this has limits on the accuracy.
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