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NINE BATTLES THAT CHANGED THE ARMY

The battle history of the United States Army is long and storied. The following are nine important campaigns that defined, changed or improved what is now the most powerful Army in the history of the world.

Trenton

In December 1776 the future of the young republic hung in the balance as Gen. George Washington’s disheveled Continental Army retreated across New Jersey.

On Dec. 8, Washington crossed the Delaware River from Trenton, N.J., into Pennsylvania. His Army consisted of only 3,000 bedraggled soldiers, most of whose terms of enlistment were up at the end of the year. Fearing the worst, Congress had already deserted Philadelphia for Baltimore.

Across the river were about 12,000 British and Hessian troops, manning an 80-mile string of outposts in New Jersey. Washington needed a quick victory to boost the spirits of his men and the public. He settled on the 1,400-man Hessian garrison in Trenton as the best place to strike.

On Christmas night, about 2,400 Continentals crossed the ice-clogged Delaware. Splitting into two columns, they converged on Trenton at 8 a.m., achieving total surprise. Supported by 10 cannons, the Americans engaged the sleepy Hessians in bitter street-fighting. The combat was violent but swift. The initiative never left the Americans.

As important as the military victory, Washington rallied his troops and the American public. Grateful Philadelphians forked over $50,000 that the Army’s first chief of staff used to re-enlist his troops for another six weeks. Meanwhile, inspired by the victory, new militia marched to join him.

Yorktown

The climactic battle of the Revolutionary War took place in 1781 near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. There, in August, the British general, Lord Charles Cornwallis, had led 7,200 troops into the small tobacco-trading port of Yorktown.

Cornwallis had fortified approaches by land and considered himself secure. He believed the Royal Navy could keep him supplied and reinforced from the sea. Unbeknownst to him, however, was that 10,000 American and French troops were marching on his position from New York as French Adm. Comte de Grasse was en route from Haiti with 24 warships and 3,000 additional troops.

With the French dominating the bay, the 17,000-strong Continental and French armies began their siege Sept. 28.

Unable to evacuate his 7,000 men and his artillery ammunition exhausted, Cornwallis surrendered Oct. 19.

Gettysburg

In the summer of 1863, Confederate Lt. Gen. Robert E. Lee invaded the North for a second time, foraging for supplies and hoping to draw Union forces away from Richmond. On June 30, Union commander Maj. Gen. George Meade was cautiously pushing two corps towards the small Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg when he ran into Confederate troops west of the town.

Lee, who had lost contact with his cavalry under Lt. Gen. J.E.B. Stuart at this crucial stage of the war, did not realize the full significance of the encounter early enough. Meanwhile, Stuart’s Union counterpart, Brig. Gen. John Buford, took the most decisive action of the battle before the battle had even been joined, when he occupied the town and Seminary Ridge to its west with his two brigades of cavalry.

When Maj. Gen. Harry Heth’s Confederate division attacked his positions July 1, Buford’s troops held long enough to allow Maj. Gen. John Reynolds’ I Corps to arrive in support. But with two divisions, Lee forced the Union troops back to Cemetery Ridge, to the south of town.

Had he pressed his attack and seized Cemetery Ridge, Lee would have controlled the battlefield. But he waited until the rest of his army had arrived. In the meantime, two more Union corps arrived to fortify the Blue lines.

Ignoring his I Corps commander Lt. Gen. James Longstreet’s advice to wheel south and get his army between the Union troops and Washington, D.C., Lee decided instead on a head-on attack into the teeth of the Union forces. That afternoon, a series of Confederate assaults failed to dislodge the Blue ranks from their advantageous positions.

The next day Union troops, supported by ferocious artillery fire, rebuffed an even more concerted Confederate attack — highlighted by the moment remembered as “the high tide of the Confederacy,” when Maj. Gen. George Pickett’s troops gained, but failed to hold, Cemetery Ridge.

That moment marked Lee’s last hope of victory at Gettysburg, and the beginning of the end for the Confederacy.

The Meuse-Argonne

In September 1918, the western Allies geared up for the culminating campaign against the German line that stretched across Belgium and France. The American Expeditionary Force was given the toughest assignment: forcing the Germans from their positions between the Argonne Forest to the west and the Meuse River to the east. On Sept. 26, the lead elements of a force of about 1 million men under the command of Gen. John Pershing advanced across a 25-mile front toward the German defenses.

Having held the Argonne since 1914, the Germans had missed no opportunity to fortify their lines with barbed wire, steel, concrete and machine guns. The defenders subjected the Americans to withering machine-gun and artillery fire as they advanced three miles on the first day.

Slower progress followed, and the attack bogged down entirely when six fresh German divisions joined the fight Sept. 29. Tactically, the Americans were hindered by the broken terrain, which dissipated the force of their attack. Operationally, poor staff work slowed logistics and revealed the Americans’ inexperience at conducting campaigns on this scale.

On Oct. 4, Pershing tried again, pushing the First American Army against 16 German divisions, but progress was measured in yards. On Oct. 14, Pershing split his force into two armies for better command and control.

On Nov. 1, the largest American force ever committed to battle moved forward behind an intense artillery barrage and broke through the German lines. The Germans fell back stubbornly, but by Nov. 4 were in full retreat. Their position on the Western Front was no longer viable, and at 11 a.m. on Nov. 11, the guns fell silent.

Normandy

In the spring of 1944, Allied commanders chose the beaches of Normandy to launch their invasion of Europe. Before dawn on June 6 — known forever since as D-Day — American paratroops from the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions, together with their British counterparts, dropped behind the beaches to secure key routes inland.

Then, at 6.30 a.m. the first of the massive invasion fleet’s 4,000 landing craft headed for the beaches. German resistance to the American, British and Canadian invaders was stubborn, and U.S. troops landing on Omaha Beach took particularly heavy casualties. Nevertheless, by nightfall, Allied forces had achieved a firm foothold on the continent.

For the rest of June, the Allies built up their forces, moving inland 20 miles and landing almost a million men and 177,000 vehicles in their expanding beachhead. But German resistance was stiff.

On July 25 a massive aerial bombardment put 70 percent of the frontline German defenders out of action, and U.S. VII Corps pressed forward, gaining another two miles inland.

The Americans made more progress the next day, and finally achieved the breakthrough on July 27. The 2nd Armored Division broke German defenses on the Americans eastern flank, while 3rd Armored and 1st Infantry divisions advanced down the left.

The way was now open for the Allied advance into France led by then Army Lt. Gen. George Patton.

The Battle of the Bulge

In December 1944, with the Allies paused on the German border west of the Rhine, Adolf Hitler decided to gamble all on a counteroffensive through the thinly defended Ardennes hills.

Hitler’s goal was to split the Allied line, isolating four Allied armies to the north, and drive for the Belgian port of Antwerp.

He scraped together 25 divisions — his remaining reserves — and grouped them in three armies. Two launched themselves Dec. 16 at the American lines.

The American troops holding this previously-sleepy section of the western front were shocked by the advance.

Nevertheless, despite their stealth, the Germans were soon thrown off their timetable by a combination of difficult terrain and stiff, if spotty, American resistance.

Key to the American efforts to hold back the advance were the crossroads towns of St. Vith and Bastogne. At St. Vith, four 7th Armored Division companies held two German divisions at bay for five days, buying crucial time for other U.S. units to establish defenses to their rear.

Meanwhile, elements of the 101st Airborne Division clung tenaciously to Bastogne. Like Lee at Gettysburg, the Germans missed the opportunity to seize the town when it was weakly defended, and were to rue their mistake for the rest of the campaign.

The Ia Drang Valley

The Army’s first major battle of the Vietnam war began in late October 1965.

The North Vietnamese had been building up their forces in the south, with the apparent intention of splitting South Vietnam in two along a line from Pleiku to Qui Nhon on the coast.

In September the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) arrived in Tet.

In late 1967, North Vietnamese communist leader Ho Chi Minh and his military commander, Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, decided the time was ripe for an all-out offensive.

Giap’s plan was to distract the South Vietnamese and their American allies by launching a series of peripheral attacks, culminating with a siege of the Marine firebase at Khe Sanh.

With American attention focused on Khe Sanh, Giap then made the final preparations for what he hoped would be his masterstroke: coordinated attacks by Vietcong forces in every major South Vietnamese town.

By launching his attack on the Vietnamese new year’s holiday of Tet, which fell on Jan. 30, Giap achieved total surprise. But by delaying delivery of his exact plans to the units that were to execute them, Giap failed to co-ordinate the attacks tightly enough. Instead of all falling on the same day, they were staggered across three days, and much of the impact was lost.

In addition, the South Vietnamese people did not rise up as Giap had predicted. Instead, their army fought vigorously with the Americans to defeat the offensive.

Tet was an operational disaster for Giap. The Vietcong were thrown back everywhere, with casualties so heavy that they ceased to be an effective fighting force in the south. But the psychological impact the attack achieved in the United States made it a strategic success.

Desert Storm

In August 1990, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein caught the United States and the rest of the western world by surprise when he invaded the tiny oil-rich emirate of Kuwait.

The United States’ response was swift: The lightly armed 82nd Airborne was flown in to establish a defensive line south of Kuwait. As the Army rushed to deploy the heavy divisions designed to fight in central Europe, those who realized how little stood between Saddam and the conquest of the Saudi oil fields held their breath.

For six months, a mighty coalition force gathered and trained in Saudi Arabia. At its heart were two U.S. Army corps, including seven divisions and two armored cavalry regiments.

On Feb. 24, 1991, after the coalition air forces had pounded Iraqi units for a week, the Allies attacked. The U.S. Army carried out the decisive “left hook” which caught the Iraqis unaware and dealt them a swift and deadly blow. The war was over four days later.

Mogadishu

The United States had deployed soldiers and Marines to Somalia in December 1992 in the hopes of helping the Somalis fight famine by civil war between clan-based factions.

However, by October 1992, U.S. forces had been sucked into that civil war with the deployment that August of Task Force Ranger, a 400-hundred strong force of Rangers, “Delta Force” operators and pilots and crews from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment.

The task force was to find and capture Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aideed. While the elusive warlord escaped capture, several of his lieutenants were soon snared. However, the raids all followed the same pattern, using the 160th’s low-flying Black Hawk helicopters. Aideed’s men were taking notes.

On Oct. 3, the task force launched another raid, acting on intelligence that Aideed was meeting with some of his top leaders. In broad daylight, the Black Hawks swooped into the heart of Aideed territory in Mogadishu.

The raid was going well when first one Black Hawk, then a second, were downed by volleys of rocket-propelled grenades fired by the Somali guerrillas.

As thousands of Somali gunmen surrounded their positions, the task force troops raced to the first crash site.

Meanwhile, two Delta snipers, Master Sgt. Gary Gordon and Sgt. 1st Class Randall Shughart, were killed defending the second crash site. A rescue convoy from the 10th Mountain Division rescued the beleaguered task force, but not before 18 U.S. troops had been killed.

Political wisdom aside, the battle demonstrated the Army’s need for medium-weight combat vehicles and urban combat training.

Sean Naylor