Mormon doesn’t clearly state whether this battle took place in one day or several days. He certainly doesn’t indicate that it was a long conflict to this point. At any rate, it is useful to compare this Nephite civil war with the American Civil War. The records indicate that the scale of the Nephite conflict was often on par with or even greater than that of the Civil War.
The battle of Antietam is well known as the bloodiest battle in the history of the Civil War. The following is taken from an encyclopedic website on Antietam, “In the ensuing action, the Union army suffered about 12,000 casualties, including 2,108 killed. Lee lost some 25 percent of his force; at least 2,700 Confederate soldiers were killed, and about 10,000 were wounded or missing.” Let’s compare the Nephite Civil War with this bloodiest of battles. In the Nephite conflict, there was a total of 19,094 fatalities. At Antietam, there was a total of about 4,800 fatalities and many more wounded. By comparison, the brutality of the slaughter among the Nephites is truly amazing. In World War II, less than 4,000 Allied soldiers died on the first day of fighting on the beaches of Normandy, June 6, 1944. Yet the Nephites, in brutal hand-to-hand combat, killed each other on just as large a scale. The next battle demonstrates how devastating and ghastly the Nephite battles were as the banks of the river had to be cleared of dead bodies by throwing the bodies of the Lamanites…into the waters of Sidon (v. 34).