The Most Consequential Battles in Major US Wars

The first battle of the American Revolution was fought after British forces attempted to seize weapons and gunpowder in Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, amid rising unrest caused by the iron-fisted policies of Massachusetts Royal Governor General Sir Thomas Gage. The battle pitted 1,500 British troops against 3,960 colonists, who emerged victorious with 93 casualties to the 300 for the British troops.

British troops regrouped in Boston after their defeat in Lexington and Concord, where they began planning a two-front attack against militias in the north and south of the city. But the Americans caught wind of the plot. Some 1,000 militia members from across New England joined 1,400 local fighters (including some enslaved and freed African Americans) in a battle against 3,000 British troops. Though the Americans lost, the victory was costly for Britain, which sustained 1,054 casualties compared to the Americans’ 450.

The Battle of Trenton is enshrined in Emanuel Leutze’s 1851 romantic painting depicting Gen. George Washington and his troops crossing an icy Delaware River during a storm. Washington’s troops handily defeated Hessian (Germanic) mercenaries fighting on behalf of Britain, opening the way for another victory in nearby Princeton a week later. Americans sustained only five casualties (and no fatalities) compared to 905 casualties for the British, including 800 missing or captured.

15,000 Americans were pitted against 6,000 British troops during the Battle of Saratoga in upstate New York which marked a turning point in the Revolutionary War. The British lost control of the Hudson River Valley, a critical route for the British Army as it attempted to meet up with fellow soldiers coming south from Canada. The Americans sustained 330 casualties compared to 1,135 for the British forces. The victory convinced French King Louis XVI that the Americans could hold their own, persuading him to provide financial and military support to the revolutionaries.

After six years of war, and with French backing assured following the Continental Army’s victory in Saratoga, Gen. George Washington and French ally Lt. Gen. Comte de Rochambeau pivoted nearly 20,000 troops to a 9,000-troop British garrison at Yorktown, Virginia, hundreds of miles to the south. After three weeks of brutal fighting, the British surrendered in the last major battle of the American Revolution. The Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783, marking the war’s official end.

The South began appropriating U.S. forts and other Federal properties within its territory shortly after forming the Confederate States of America. This culminated in the first battle of the Civil War at Fort Sumter, one of three forts guarding the important port of Charleston, South Carolina. Despite initial shelling by Confederate forces and infrequent replies from the fort, there were no casualties in the first battle of the Civil War. The 90 Union forces at the fort were allowed to evacuate to New York. However, the relatively nonviolent start to the Civil War would quickly escalate into carnage.

One of the deadliest one-day battles in U.S. military history was the Battle of Antietam, near Sharpsburg, Maryland. Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee committed his entire army of 45,000 troops to invade Maryland, while Union Gen. George B. McClellan sent in less than three-quarters of his troops. Though Lee was outmatched two-to-one, the battle that claimed 12,401 casualties for the North and 10,316 for the South (killing a total of 3,654 soldiers) ended as a tactical draw.

Both sides of the Civil War coveted Vicksburg’s strategic position on the Mississippi River. After a 47-day siege, the Union Army emerged victorious, giving the North control of the important waterway that ran through the South. Some 77,000 Union troops fought against 33,000 Confederate soldiers. The Union sustained nearly 5,000 casualties, including 806 killed, but nearly all of the Confederate soldiers were captured or went missing, and 805 were killed.

The bloodiest battle of the American Civil War was a turning point for the Union, which once again beat Gen. Robert E. Lee’s attempt to invade the North, his second. Losing this battle dashed Southern hopes of becoming a pro-slavery independent nation. The battle pitted 93,921 Union troops under Gen. George G. Meade against Lee’s 71,699 forces. Both forces sustained more than 51,000 casualties, including more than 7,000 killed and more than 33,000 wounded.

Gen. Ulysses S. Grant ordered five simultaneous offenses to deal a final blow to the South in the spring of 1864. Grant gave the task of taking Atlanta to Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman to bend the knee of this vital industrial and logistical center that connected Confederate troops east of the Mississippi River. The Confederate loss of Atlanta boosted Northern morale and assured President Abraham Lincoln’s reelection.

The Gallipoli campaign was aimed at knocking the Ottomans out of World War I by allowing Allied ships to pass through the key waterway of the Dardanelles to capture Constantinople. However, the Allies underestimated the Ottomans, and neither the British nor the forces of Australia and New Zealand were able to advance in brutal trench warfare that lasted months. The retreat helped encourage the U.S. to enter the war in the following year.

The longest battle of the First World War was marked by horrific trench warfare and the first use of chemical weapons, along with new artillery, tank, and aircraft technologies. The French were forced to pull back from the German offense, but the Germans were also forced to redirect resources at the British and Russians who had launched their own offenses. The U.S. had not yet declared war, but watching the French get pummeled helped cinch the decision to declare war on the German Empire in 1917.

The largest naval battle of the First World War saw the British assert their naval dominance and gain control of vital shipping channels. The Germans ceded control of the North Sea to the British. Before this Allied victory, U.S. merchant ships were being attacked as they tried to break attempts by Germany to isolate Britain. Those attacks, coupled with Britain’s ability to assert naval dominance played a role in the U.S. about-face decision to declare war on the German Empire in 1917.

The most vicious arena of battle during World War I was the Western Front, and one viewed as essential in defeating the Germans and ending the conflict. The battle took place over 141 days, in which the British and French were only able to advance 7 miles. More than a million soldiers died in the Battle of the Somme. Five months after the end of the battle, the U.S. declared war on Germany.

In early 1918, the Germans had rolled through northern France and were within 50 miles of Paris. The U.S. had finally committed troops to the war, and France greeted them with parades as well as concern about newbie soldiers, some arriving without weapons, and going up against battle-hardened German troops. But the Americans proved their worth in the Second Battle of the Marne that beat the Germans back and helped win World War I.

Six months after the devastating surprise attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the U.S. into World War II, the U.S. successfully beat back an attack from the Imperial Japanese Navy north of the Midway Atoll. The victory came after American codebreakers determined the date and location of the attack, allowing the U.S. to set up an ambush. The U.S. lost 362 men, 144 aircraft, a carrier, and a destroyer. Japan lost over 3,000 soldiers in addition to four aircraft carriers and hundreds of planes and was forced to retreat.

More commonly known as D-Day, the cross-channel invasion of Normandy involved 133,000 British, Canadian, and American troops, 7,000 vessels and landing craft, and 195,000 naval personnel from eight allied countries. The costly success of Operation Overlord would help to cement U.S.-European cooperation that remains to this day, notably through the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949.

The U.S. invaded the largest and most populated island in the Philippines to liberate the island from the Japanese. Forty-six years earlier, the U.S. had invaded and occupied the Philippines in its first military adventure outside of the country in the wake of the Spanish-American War. Relations that were soured by that first invasion improved by the American liberation. This led to a decades-long welcoming by most of the Philippines to U.S. naval and air force presence on this strategically located island nation.

The Germans launched a Hail Mary counteroffensive in late 1944 in an attempt to beat back Allied forces months after their D-Day victory. The Nazis had some initial success around the Ardennes Forest in Belgium and Luxembourg, punching through the middle of the American line (hence the term “Bulge”). But American soldiers kept control of vital road junctions long enough for Allied reinforcements to arrive, prompting British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to call it the “greatest American battle of the war.”

In one of the greatest and costliest military victories of the U.S. Marine Corps, the Battle of Iwo Jima was fought in bunkers and tunnels dug into the island’s volcanic rock. Though the Japanese were vastly outnumbered, by more than three-to-one, their defense proved formidable. In thirty-six days of fighting, 7,000 Marines were killed and 20,000 were wounded, a staggering 39% of the total number of U.S. forces deployed on the island.