Worst Military Loss in History

[Greaselburger]

Market garden, pretty much lost an airborne division for little gain in the long run.

Though, it ended up becoming the stuff of legends for the British army.

 

[firedfns13]

Right next to that was the US invading Vietnam. We got our dicks cut off in that war. Everyone knows it was an embarrassing loss that should have never even happened. We lost 60,000 men and lost our hard won dignity from WWII.

While I think I'd admit we lost because the South Vietnamese Government wasn't really what it should've been, and the whole peace/hippy movement at home cut what support for the war we had...
We kicked some serious ass though. I had a paper on it last year, and I was appalled at how the girls in the class claimed we lost Khe Sahn. 500 Marines vs upwards of 40,000 (80:1 in US favor) died there [if I remember the commie number correctly]. I'd rack that on the victory column. Too bad we didn't have the support at home to seriously wreck or invade North Vietnam. However, it too probably would have been shitty because the South lacked a real leader with the people's support.

 

[el topo]

"Actually, I'd like to amend that to just 'France'. There is so much that has been a militaristic loss. Even in FICTION, they can't win. And googling 'French War Victories' has the search engine ask you if you meant defeats."

LOL! Yeah, those frogs are the same people who told the US they shouldn't go to Vietnam and Iraq. Joke's on them for sure!

 

[Vilhelm123]

Nothing posted so far even compares to the Battle of Karánsebes [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kar%C3%A1nsebes] that Toasterhunter86 posted up a couple of months ago.

Ah I remember him linking that! When you've read about that one all the others in this thread seem like major victories!

 

[Blandman]

Stuff about Britain getting beaten.

I assume you are referring to the Battle of Isandlwana:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_isandlwana

The worst defeat of a British army to native forces (or so my sources would have me believe). It has been depicted in some films, such as Zulu Dawn, but generally isn't very well-known about. Because we were good at covering things like that up. But, we also make sure to do a damn sight better next time. It just so happens that the "next time" was the battle at Rorke's Drift. Which was promptly immortalized (rightly so) and used to cover up that little defeat the day before. (What defeat?)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rorke%27s_Drift

 

[kiwisushi]

There must be a battle which was meant to happen but both sides totally forgot they were supposed to battle or nobody gave them the order to fight and just stood there in a mass staring contest before they just decide to call it a day and end it. That must have happened at some point!!

 

[Shock and Awe]

Battle of Gaugamela. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Gaugamela]

 

[FightThePower]

Battle of Cannae on August 2, 216 BC. Hannibal and his 40,000 Carthaginian, Gaulish, and Spanish soldiers along with 10,000 calvary utterly annihilate an entire Roman army of around 80,000. The number of Roman dead is estimated as being between 45,000 and 70,000. It was the worst defeat ever inflicted upon Rome. It is remembered as being the first example of a battle of annihilation.

That's what I was going to say.

Me too. The Romans were packed so tightly together they could barely move, and the fighting was incredibly fierce - Livy says that some men had lost their weapons and were so desperate they began fighting with their nails and teeth.

Most number of people killed in one day of a battle for 2132 years. GG Hannibal.

 

[letsnoobtehpwns]

Napoleon invading Russia. He was destined to lose that battle.

 

[eatenbyagrue]

It's been mentioned earlier, but I'll expound on it: the battles of Trebia, Lake Trasimene and Cannae during the Second Punic War.

Trebia - After Hannibal completed the long and treacherous crossing of the Italian Alps, he engaged the Romans at Trebia. The Romans, despite outnumbering the Carthaginians (16-18,000 infantry, +4,000 cavalry and 20,000 auxiliaries compared to Hannibal's 30,000 infantry, 11,000 cavalry and a few elephants) were provoked into a frontal assault and were later encircled by the Carthaginians, a tactic which Hannibal would use to great effect at Lake Trasimene and Cannae. The battle however, set the stage for Cornelius Scipio to eventually take power and defeat Hannibal.

Lake Trasimene - The largest and most successful ambush in history. Carthaginian troops attacked the Roman legions at Lake Trasimene. The Romans, who were not used to fighting out of formation, were slaughtered and pushed back into the lake, where they drowned due to their heavy armor.

Cannae - Rome's second biggest military loss. Rome fielded 86,000 men under the command of two Consuls (Gaius Terentius Varro and Lucius Aemilius Paullus) and were soundly defeated by Hannibal's 56,000 troops. The Romans massed their infantry in deeper formation than normal and charged at Hannibal's "center" (his Gallic auxiliaries). As the Gauls fell into a fighting retreat, the Romans were sucked into the Carthaginian lines, which surrounded them while they were fighting the Gauls. When the Romans were fully surrounded, the Carthaginians simply went and collapsed the Roman lines.

 

[Shock and Awe]

Yeah, look at the death toll sparky.

 

[Obrien Xp]

Thermopylae THIS IS SPARTA!

No way, the Spartans had a geographic advantage so immense that they could have held out there forever if they had more reinforcements. They could have put a halt to the Persain invasions right there if they held out longer, more important (and humiliating) would have been Salamis where Greece's miniscule fleet layed waste to most of Persia's.

I meant a loss for the Persians. and yes salamis was epic too. Thermopylae has repeated itself with Wizna.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivgCD31iKyg&feature=player_embedded

 

[Robert632]

Battle of Mactan. if you read about it, you should know.

 

[HotFezz8]

the battle of the somme for the sheer fucking waste and stupitidity. although any WW1 battle deserves a honourable mention.

 

[HotFezz8]

faillllllllllllllllll

your a troll, stop sending replies. oh, and reported.

 

[Dorian Cornelius Jasper]

The only war that the French ever won.
A civil war.

Hundred Years War. Anglo-Norman dynasty attempted to claim the French throne as its own, resulting in a dynastic squabble that sparked a war of proto-nationalism between the would-be conquering English and the French. The English, while winning many victories utilizing superior tactics and a distinctly modern approach to pragmatic fighting, were eventually pushed back to a mere port outpost--somewhere, you may find mention of one Joan of Arc in there. The result was England being reduced to an island nation for centuries after, a far cry from its past heights as the Angevin Empire. Granted, they bounced back from that with a vengeance by the 19th century.

(Note: I should mention that England's ruling House Plantagenet probably self-identified more as French or Norman, but their successors who led the English in the Hundred Years War were by then as Anglicized as one could get.)

It's easy to forget that France was once the continent's dominant military power, now that it tends to embarrass itself more often than not. However, no matter how one feels about France now, one shouldn't attempt to pass humorous misconceptions as absolute truth.

No nation or state could survive as long as France did if it lost every war it fought. Losing countries tend not to exist anymore, their domains claimed as territories of their conquerors and their people absorbed or, more rarely, exterminated.

Hopefully, you won't be so quick to stand beside a bad joke and claim it as truth in the future.

(EDIT: Though Napoleon did lose eventually, he won the majority of the wars he fought. They were called the Napoleonic Wars, not War. So even then you were wrong on a technicality in your own rebuttal.)