Congress created the Continental Army from
militias fighting British forces in the
American Revolutionary War, with General
George Washington appointed its
commander in chief. From those humble
beginnings, for better or for worse, the US
Army would become one of the most
powerful militaries in the world.
The US Army is marking its birthday on
Sunday, with the White House issuing a
commemorative tweet, and the Army
releasing a bland recruitment video. The
Pentagon, meanwhile, solemnly marked the
occasion with a wreath laying ceremony at
Arlington National Cemetery, where over
400,000 soldiers from the Civil War to
America’s many foreign wars are buried. In
honour of the occasion, Sputnik recalls ten
of the Army’s most amazing triumphs and
most humiliating defeats.
Today, we recognize 245 years of bravery,
commitment, skill and answering the call to
serve.
We are America's Army. #ArmyBday
#ServeWithHonor pic.twitter.com/
skfWN16XpP
— U.S. Army (@USArmy) June 14, 2020
LIVE: @USArmy leaders commemorate the
Army’s 245th birthday with a wreath-laying
ceremony at @ArlingtonNatl . https://t.co/
zTzMNm4TvW
— Department of Defense 🇺🇸
(@DeptofDefense) June 14, 2020
1: Revolutionary War
Undoubtedly the most important of the many
battles that would follow it, the Army’s
performance in the Revolutionary War of
1775-1783 was perhaps its most spectacular
victory, with the militia-turned-soldiers from
13 British colonies in North America banding
together under General George Washington’s
leadership and ousting the British, at the
time the largest and most powerful empire in
history. With a little help from French and
Spanish forces, as well as American Indian
allies, the US Army of 200,000 men total
was able defeat some 48,000 Redcoats, the
Royal Navy, and some 25,000 British
loyalists who took up arms, and establish
the American republic. In 1783, the United
States and Great Britain signed the Treaty of
Paris, and London formally recognized
Washington’s status as a sovereign nation.
2: War of 1812
In 1812, with Britain and its allies busy
fighting Napoleon in Europe, the US declared
war, attempting to annex British holdings in
North America (i.e. Canada). Both sides
proved unprepared for the conflict, with
American men who eagerly took up arms to
throw off the yoke of the British three
decades earlier unenthusiastic about signing
up to fight in a war of aggression. British
Canada, meanwhile, was defended by just
over 6,000 men. The war quickly turned into
a war of position along the vast borders
between the US and Canada, with most of
the fighting taking place in the Great Lakes
region, along with a naval campaign in the
Atlantic which included a blockade of the US
East Coast. Possibly the most memorable
event for both sides was the successful
redcoat amphibious invasion of Washington,
DC, and the burning of the White House in
August 1814. The conflict would claim some
15,000 American and 10,000 British and
Loyalist lives, and end in a stalemate.
Strategically, however, this was a defeat for
the US Army, which failed to make
Washington politicians’ dreams of conquering
North America a reality. In 1814, the warring
parties signed the Treaty of Ghent, with no
territorial changes made.
Battle of Queenston Heights, painting
by James B. Dennis.
3: Mexican-American War
In 1846, a year after the Republic of Texas’s
annexation by the United States, a territorial
dispute between the US and Mexico turned
into a full-blown war. The war ended in a
major victory for the US Army, with Mexico
ceding over 1.3 million square km of territory
from the Rio Grande River to the Pacific
Ocean at the cost of ‘just’ 1,700 US and
5,000 Mexican troops. The Mexican-
American War set the stage for turning the
US into a true continental economic and
military power.
4: Civil war.
US Army 'Open to Discussion' on
Renaming Bases Currently Honouring
Confederate Leaders
In the early to mid-1860s, the United States
would wage what remains the deadliest
conflict in American history – the Civil War,
which saw Army forces loyal to the Union
fight it out with the secessionist Confederate
States of America between 1861 and 1865.
The conflict had several causes, with slavery
at the center, with the North seeking to
abolish it while wealthy landowners in
southern states sought to keep it). The war
saw a series of bloody campaigns from
Texas and Arizona to the Mississippi River,
Kentucky, Virginia and the Carolinas, with
365,000 Union Army troops, and 290,000+
Confederate Army and militia, perishing in
the conflict. All told, the war caused as
many as a million deaths, or 3 percent of
America’s entire population at the time. The
war ended in April 1865, when Confederate
General Robert E. Lee Surrendered to
General Ulysses S. Grant at the Battle of
Appomattox Court House in Virginia. The
collapse of the Confederacy led to the
freeing of four million black slaves.
Battle of Antietam, charge of the Iron
Brigade. Painting by Thure de
Thulstrup.a
5: World War I
On April 6, 1917, two and a half years after
the beginning of the Great War, Washington
entered the conflict after a year-long
propaganda campaign by the Wilson
administration to convince mostly pro-
neutrality Americans to see the need to join
the British and French-led conflagration
against the Central Powers of Germany,
Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire.
More than anything, the US Army’s
contribution to the war was as a morale
builder to relieve the exhausted Western
allies, particularly after the Russian
Revolution and Russia’s exit from the war in
March 1918. Militarily, the US troops helped
blunt the German Spring Offensive of March
1918, and took part in the August-November
1918 series of attacks against Germany and
Austro-Hungary. Militarily, however, US
commanders’ tactics were just as horrific as
those of their French, British and German
counterparts, with 53,400 of the 4 million+
troops mobilized killed, many of them sent
into the meat grinder of trench warfare to
be cut down and bled white in frontal
assaults on enemy machinegun
emplacements.
6: US Intervention in the Russian Civil
War
The US military intervention in the Russian
Civil War is an important but little-talked
aspect of the wider conflict between the
‘White’ forces, their Western financial and
political backers, and the fledgling Bolshevik
government in territories from the Baltic and
the Black Sea all the way to the shores of
the Pacific. In September 1918, the United
States landed some 5,000 troops in
Arkhangelsk, northern Russia in what would
become known as the ‘Polar Bear
Expedition’. 8,000 more troops had already
been deployed in Vladivostok a month
earlier. The US joined troops from over half
a dozen other nations to try and stop the
Reds’ takeover of Russia, but, in the end,
proved unsuccessful, with American forces
withdrawing from Arkhangelsk in July 1919,
and from Vladivostok in 1920. During their
deployment, the troops were tasked with
guarding local communications lines and
railways, transporting goods out of the
country as ‘compensation’ for their presence
and, occasionally, clashing with the Red
Army. All told, the US forces lost 424 men in
northern Russia, and 328 more in the Far
East. The failed intervention in the Russian
Civil War proved one of the contributing
factors to Moscow’s distrust of Washington
and other Western nations for much of the
remainder of the 20th century.
7: World War II
In December 1941, after Japan attacked
Pearl Harbor, and Hitler declared war on the
USA, Washington joined the Second World
War, which to date remains the bloodiest
conflict in human history. The US Army
joined with the Navy and Air Force in
fighting in the North African, European and
Pacific theatres, helping to liberate North
Africa from Italian and German occupation in
1943, engaging in an island-hopping
campaign in the Pacific starting in 1942
after a series of naval engagements, and, in
1943 and 1944, landing troops in southern
Italy and France, opening up the Western
Front long awaited by the Soviets in the
east. The Second World War cost the US
407,000 military dead, with 318,000 of them
Army and Air Force men, but also helped
establish America as an undisputed
superpower in the post-war world, a status it
continues to enjoy today.
8: Korea
In June 1950, following months of escalating
tensions between North and South Korea,
Pyongyang declared war on Seoul, starting
what would become a three-year-long US-led
war against North Korea, Communist China,
and, unofficially, Soviet fighter pilots. After
being exhausted to the point of near defeat
in the first two months of the conflict, US
and allied forces launched an amphibious
invasion at Incheon, near Seoul, driving
through North Korea to the Yalu River border
with China. However, in October 1950,
Chinese forces entered the war, driving the
US and its allies back to the 38th parallel,
near to where the war began. By 1951, the
conflict turned into a war of position, and an
armistice treaty was signed in 1953. Over
1.7 million Americans took part in the war,
with 36,500 troops losing their lives, and
100,000 more receiving injuries. The war
prevented the defeat of Washington’s puppet
South Korean ally, but also shattered the air
of invisibility behind the US armed forces
that emerged after the Second World War. It
was also the Korean War that saw the US
make the shift to an air power-heavy military
doctrine, with US carpet bombing destroying
nearly three quarters of North Korea’s
population centers, and dropping more
bombs on the country than during the entire
Pacific Theatre of WWII.
9: Vietnam
In 1964, using the false flag Gulf of Tonkin
incident as a pretext, President Lynden
Johnson justified direct US entry into the
war in Vietnam, a conflict which would claim
the lives of some 58,000 US servicemen,
wound 150,300 others and become
America’s fourth deadliest war. By any
measure, the Vietnam War was a defeat for
the US Army, and all other branches of the
military, with the Pentagon failing to achieve
any of its strategic goals (stopping
communism in Southeast Asia, preserving
the regime in Saigon, defeating the North
Vietnamese). On the ground in Vietnam, the
US faced off against both North Vietnamese
forces and fanatical Viet Cong militia, and
the war quickly expanded into neighbouring
Laos and Cambodia. Between 1965 and
1975, the US Air Force dropped over three
times more bombs on Vietnam, Laos and
Cambodia than the total dropped by the
Allies during the Second World War. The US
suspended all combat operations in January
1973, withdrawing all forces by March of
that year. Two years later, in April 1975,
communist Vietnamese forces took Saigon,
and the war was over. The Vietnam War
severely damaged the reputation of the US
armed forces at home amid the rise of a
massive anti-war protest movement, and a
shaken Pentagon.
10: War on Terror
Following the 9/11 terror attacks in
Washington, New York and Pennsylvania, the
United States began the largest military and
security operation in the modern era, known
as the War on Terror, with the US Army
playing an active role in this fight. In late
2001, the US intervened in Afghanistan,
toppling the Taliban government only to
spend the next two decades engaging a
slow-burning insurgency. In 2003, the Bush
administration used the pretext of the War
on Terror to kick off the War in Iraq, another
conflict where the US Army easily defeated
the enemy army, only to get bogged down in
deadly and costly counterinsurgency
operations, culminating in the rise of Daesh
(ISIS) terrorists in 2014. The War on Terror
is a truly global conflict, with US forces
intervening in conflicts in Pakistan, Syria,
Libya, West Africa, East Africa, Yemen, and
the Philippines. By late 2018, the war was
estimated to have killed over 507,000
people, including nearly 4,500 US troops in
Iraq, and 2,200 in Afghanistan, with 50,000
more injured. Furthermore, despite President
Trump’s campaign pledge to stop being the
‘policeman of the world’ , the war has yet to
end, costing over $6 trillion to date.
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