The Korean War: 'The Forgotten War' American troops were sent to support the South and by the time a ceasefire was proclaimed in 1953, over five million soldiers and civilians had died. To this day, a formal peace treaty has not been signed.
The Korean conflict is often called “America's Forgotten War.” For the families of Americans killed or missing there, it is anything but forgotten. It has been seven decades since the Korean conflict began in 1950 and finally ended three years later with an armistice between the United States, North Korea and China.
Twenty-five years after the ignominious American withdrawal from what was then South Vietnam, this much is clear: the United States lost the war, but won the peace.
The War of 1812 has been called “America's Forgotten War.” It is studied much less than the American Revolution or the Civil War, as a result, many of its battlefields are ignored for development. In 2007 the National Parks Service identified 214 battlefields and other important sites to the War of 1812.
Britain effectively won the War of 1812 by successfully defending its North American colonies. But for the British, the war with America had been a mere sideshow compared to its life-or-death struggle with Napoleon in Europe.
The U.S. also declared victory, having successfully negotiated an end to its first war as a sovereign nation, made humble the "conqueror of Europe," and acquired millions of acres of Indian territory to expand its borders.
The US army had superior conventional weapons but they were ineffective against a country that was not industrialized and an army which employed guerrilla tactics and used the dense jungle as cover.
The conventional view remains that the United States lost the Vietnam War because our opponent, North Vietnam, conquered the side we backed, South Vietnam, which surrendered in April 1975.
Since 1945, the United States has very rarely achieved meaningful victory. The United States has fought five major wars — Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan — and only the Gulf War in 1991 can really be classified as a clear success.
The CIA-organized group of Hmong tribesmen fighting in the Vietnam War is known as the "Secret Army", and their participation was called the Secret War, where the Secret War is meant to denote the Laotian Civil War (1960–1975) and the Laotian front of the Vietnam War.
The longest war in history is believed to be the Reconquista (Spanish for Reconquest), with a duration of 781 years.
The Anglo-Zanzibar War was fought between the United Kingdom and the Zanzibar Sultanate on Aug. 27, 1896. The conflict lasted around 40 minutes, and is the shortest war in history.
Sweden has not been part of a war since 1814. This makes Sweden the nation which has had the longest period of peace. Has adapted policy to protect its interests.
Officially, the Korean War never technically ended. Although the Korean Armistice Agreement brought an end to the hostilities that killed 2.5 million people on July 27, 1953, that ceasefire never gave way to a peace treaty.
Although the war ended where it began, the United States and its allies did succeed in preventing communism from overtaking South Korea.
America did not experience a “lost victory” in Vietnam; in fact, victory was likely out of reach from the beginning. There is a broad consensus among professional historians that the Vietnam War was effectively unwinnable.
If America and South Vietnam end the war in 1968, there will be no military incursions into Cambodia. In our timeline, those incursions laid the foundations for the rise of the Khmer Rouge, without them there would be no genocide.
Firstly most of the war was fought as a guerrilla war. This is a type of war which conventional forces such as the US army in Vietnam, find notoriously difficult to fight. Conventional forces are easy to identify, guerrillas are not. In Vietnam the Vietcong were peasants by day and guerrillas by night.
There were a couple of reasons for this. First, the Americans were an invading force, and the Vietnamese were fighting on their own soil. Second, the Americans were not willing to make an all-out commitment to win.
Many Americans opposed the war on moral grounds, appalled by the devastation and violence of the war. Others claimed the conflict was a war against Vietnamese independence, or an intervention in a foreign civil war; others opposed it because they felt it lacked clear objectives and appeared to be unwinnable.
The United States was woefully unprepared for war. The army consisted of fewer than 7000 soldiers; the navy of less than 20 vessels. The American strategy called for a three-pronged invasion of Canada and heavy harassment of British shipping.
On February 18, 1815, the Treaty of Ghent was officially ratified by President Madison, and the nation ended the War of 1812 with "less a shout of triumph than a sigh of relief." 15,000 Americans died during the war.
Why did the Federalists oppose the War of 1812 so vehemently? Many viewed the whole conflict as an unnecessary one, manufactured by James Madison and his Republican Party to further their own political interests.