Here are five battles from American history where losing wound up putting the nation on the path to victory.
5. The Battle of Long Island:
George Washington's effort to hold off the British Invasion of New York could not have gone worse. Luckily, the Continental Army avoided complete annihilation by slipping across the Long Island Sound, under cover of darkness. The battle itself was a humiliating defeat for Washington. But, the loss also revealed an insight that was key to the ultimate American success: The Continental Army could afford to lose battles; but if it remained an Army-in-being, the British couldn't declare victory. Washington rightly surmised that, as long as the enemy couldn't win the war, they would eventually lose.
4. Little Big Horn:
Custer had better days. When his small detachment of the 7th Cavalry was wiped out on the Montana plains, there were big repercussions. After the Civil War, the lion's share of the military budget went into the Army's coastal fortifications. The Army ground forces were mostly a constabulary, second-hand lot strewn across the Southern and Western states. Custer's last stand was a bit of a wake-up call. Congress began to supply better arms and equipment. The Army started on the long march to becoming a modern landpower. D-Day was more than a half-century in the future. But the journey from the Spanish-American War to World War I to World War II started out West.
3. Kasserine Pass:
No less an authority than General George Marshall, the U.S. Army Chief of Staff, argued that the route to victory in World War II ran through Western Europe. The sooner the Allies invaded France the better. But to Marshall's chagrin, the American Army was detoured to North Africa. In its first major battle with the Nazis, the GIs learned they weren't ready for primetime. The list of shortfalls was long—bad senior leaders, poor air-ground coordination, inadequately trained troops, and on and on. Rather than being remembered as the horrific defeat that it was, the battle became the first lesson in learning how to win on the ground in modern war. Two years later, the Americans hit the beach in Normandy knowing far better how to confront the face of battle.
2. Task Force Smith:
North Korea invades. President Truman, while on break in Independence, Mo., quickly orders in U.S. troops. The closest forces are American occupation troops in Japan. Rushed to the front, they barely present a speed-bump to the invading army as it heads south. The tragedy of Task Force Smith is often recalled as a case study in unpreparedness. The troops had little training and rusty ammunition; some trudged to the front in sneakers because the Army was short on boots.
On the other hand, even if the task force had had been stocked by Rambo, the troops still would have been steam-rollered. The numbers they faced were just overwhelming. What's crucial about this battle is that it demonstrated Americans’ determination to act as a Cold War Asian-Pacific power, even in the face of defeat. There were terrible trials ahead—not just in Korea, but in Vietnam as well. Nonetheless, America stuck it out in Asia. Arguably that determination contributed to victory in the Cold War as well as the region’s development in the post-Cold War era.
1. Desert One:
Once the Iranian Revolution was underway, it became clear that the new regime in Tehran were not going to be our friends. Angry crowds seized the U.S. embassy. The staff was taken hostage. There were no signs the regime planned on giving them back. President Carter green-lighted a rescue mission by U.S. special operations forces. It does not go well. In fact, at Desert One, the designated landing site inside Iran, everything goes wrong. Nobody gets rescued. Servicemen die in a horrible, fiery crash. Maybe, technically this was not a battle, since the only enemies present proved to be misfortune and misjudgment.
Still, this was not one for the win column. But years later, the Senate Armed Services staff used the mission failure as a case-study to inform and push for joint reforms. Arguably, the operation was less about failures in joint-interservice cooperation than the staff contended. Nevertheless, highlighting the Desert One disaster served as the catalyst for the Goldwater-Nichols reforms, and those reforms helped revitalize the U.S. military in the 1980s.
However America still continue to be a home of the finest set of soldiers in battlefield.
credit: nationalinterest.org
