I know one can delete all documents from a certain type via deleteByQuery.
Example:
curl -XDELETE \'http://localhost:9200/twitter/tweet/_query\' -d \
From ElasticSearch 5.x, delete_by_query API is there by default
POST: http://localhost:9200/index/type/_delete_by_query
{ "query": { "match_all": {} } }