Service & Sacrifice

The war began on April 19, 1775, when Massachusetts militia met British regulars sent to seize colonial military stores at Lexington and Concord. That June the Second Continental Congress adopted the forces besieging Boston as a Continental Army and chose George Washington of Virginia to command it; that fall it authorized a Continental Navy and Continental Marines. Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.

Fighting ranged from Quebec to Georgia and across the Atlantic. Washington’s army survived defeats around New York and a hard winter at Valley Forge, and the American victory at Saratoga in October 1777 helped bring France into an alliance in 1778. French troops and warships were decisive when a combined force trapped Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown, Virginia, in October 1781. The Treaty of Paris, signed on September 3, 1783, recognized American independence.

The Department of Veterans Affairs estimates that about 217,000 Americans served, though the exact number is unknown. Thousands of Black Americans, free and enslaved, served the Patriot cause, while others sought freedom behind British lines.

Congress declared war on Great Britain on June 18, 1812—the first declaration of war in the nation’s history. Americans cited British restrictions on neutral trade, the impressment of American sailors into the Royal Navy, and British support for Native American resistance in the Northwest.

American invasions of Canada largely failed, but the small U.S. Navy won celebrated victories: USS Constitution earned the nickname “Old Ironsides” by defeating HMS Guerriere in August 1812, and Oliver Hazard Perry’s squadron won control of Lake Erie in September 1813. In August 1814 British troops burned the Capitol and the White House. Weeks later the defense of Fort McHenry at Baltimore inspired Francis Scott Key’s verses that became “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the national anthem since 1931.

The Treaty of Ghent, signed December 24, 1814, restored the prewar boundaries. Because news crossed the Atlantic slowly, Andrew Jackson’s victory at New Orleans on January 8, 1815, came after the signing but before the treaty took effect. The war strengthened American national feeling, while the Native nations that had fought alongside Britain lost the ally that had backed their resistance to U.S. expansion.

The United States annexed Texas in 1845. Mexico had never recognized Texan independence, and the two nations disputed the boundary: the United States claimed the Rio Grande, while Mexico regarded the Nueces River, farther north, as the limit. After President James K. Polk sent troops under Gen. Zachary Taylor into the disputed area, a clash with Mexican cavalry in April 1846 led Congress to declare war on May 13, 1846.

Taylor won battles in northern Mexico at Palo Alto, Resaca de la Palma, Monterrey and Buena Vista, while other American forces secured New Mexico and California. Gen. Winfield Scott landed at Veracruz in March 1847 and fought his way inland to capture Mexico City that September. Many officers who later led Union and Confederate armies, including Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, served in the campaign.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed February 2, 1848, fixed the border at the Rio Grande and transferred California and much of the present-day Southwest to the United States. The war divided Americans: its critics included a first-term congressman from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, and the failed Wilmot Proviso, which would have barred slavery from the new territory, deepened the sectional conflict. Disease killed far more American soldiers than combat.

After Abraham Lincoln’s election in November 1860, eleven slave states seceded and formed the Confederate States of America. Confederate batteries opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor on April 12, 1861, and Lincoln called for volunteers to suppress the rebellion.

The war was fought across the South and the border states and at sea, where a Union blockade tightened around Confederate ports. The Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, made freedom a Union war aim, and roughly 179,000 Black men served as soldiers in the U.S. Army, with some 19,000 more in the Navy. Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in July 1863, the capture of Atlanta in September 1864 and Grant’s long campaign against Richmond led to Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865; the remaining Confederate forces surrendered in the weeks and months that followed.

Disease killed more soldiers than combat. The Defense Department counts more than 364,000 Union deaths, and Confederate records are incomplete; historians long estimated total military deaths at about 620,000, and more recent demographic research suggests the toll may have been closer to 750,000. The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in December 1865, abolished slavery throughout the United States.

Americans had followed Cuba’s war for independence from Spain since 1895 when the battleship USS Maine exploded in Havana Harbor on February 15, 1898, killing more than 250 of her crew. The cause of the explosion is still debated, but “Remember the Maine!” became a rallying cry, and in April Congress declared war.

On May 1 Commodore George Dewey’s squadron destroyed the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay in the Philippines. In Cuba, regulars and volunteers—among them Theodore Roosevelt’s 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, the “Rough Riders,” and the Black regulars of the 9th and 10th Cavalry and 24th and 25th Infantry—took El Caney and the San Juan Heights on July 1, and the Navy destroyed Spain’s Caribbean squadron off Santiago on July 3. An armistice ended the fighting on August 12.

In the Treaty of Paris, signed December 10, 1898, Spain ceded Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines to the United States and gave up Cuba, which became independent in 1902 after a period of U.S. military occupation. Filipino resistance to American rule led to the Philippine–American War, a longer and deadlier conflict; the VA’s fact sheet dates this service period 1898–1902. Disease killed far more American soldiers than Spanish fire.

The United States remained neutral when war broke out in Europe in 1914. Germany’s resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917 and the Zimmermann Telegram, which proposed a German–Mexican alliance against the United States, led President Woodrow Wilson to ask Congress for a declaration of war, approved on April 6, 1917.

The Selective Service Act of May 1917 eventually registered some 24 million men. Under Gen. John J. Pershing, the American Expeditionary Forces grew to roughly two million soldiers in France and fought at Cantigny, Belleau Wood, Château-Thierry and St. Mihiel before the Meuse–Argonne offensive, one of the largest battles in American history, which continued until the Armistice took effect at 11 a.m. on November 11, 1918.

More than 116,000 Americans died in service, more than half of them from disease and other non-battle causes, including the influenza pandemic of 1918. Those who served included the soldiers of the 369th Infantry, the African American “Harlem Hellfighters,” who fought under French command, and thousands of women who served as Army and Navy nurses and, for the first time, as enlisted members of the Navy and Marine Corps. The war’s end gave the nation Armistice Day, now Veterans Day.

Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, killed more than 2,400 Americans and brought the United States into a war already raging in Europe, Africa and Asia. Congress declared war on Japan the next day, and Germany and Italy declared war on the United States on December 11.

American forces fought in North Africa, Sicily and Italy, in a long air campaign over Europe, and—after the D-Day landings in Normandy on June 6, 1944—across France and into Germany, which surrendered in May 1945. In the Pacific, the Navy’s victory at Midway in June 1942 was followed by the Guadalcanal campaign and advances across the central and southwest Pacific to the Philippines, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. After atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, Japan announced its surrender and signed the formal instrument aboard USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945.

More than 16 million Americans served, and more than 405,000 died. Their ranks included women in every branch, the Tuskegee Airmen, the Navajo Code Talkers and the Japanese American soldiers of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, many of whose families were held in government incarceration camps at home. American factories turned out ships, aircraft and munitions on a scale that supplied both U.S. forces and their allies.

North Korean forces invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950. The United Nations Security Council called on member nations to help repel the attack, and President Harry S. Truman committed U.S. air, naval and ground forces to a United Nations Command led by Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

After UN forces were pushed back to a perimeter around Pusan, MacArthur’s amphibious landing at Inchon in September 1950 turned the tide. As UN troops neared the Yalu River that fall, Chinese forces entered the war, and Marines and soldiers fought their way out of the Chosin Reservoir in bitter cold. The front then settled near the 38th parallel, where two more years of hard fighting continued during armistice negotiations.

The armistice signed at Panmunjom on July 27, 1953, ended the fighting and created the Demilitarized Zone, but no peace treaty has followed, and U.S. forces remain in South Korea. Racially integrated units fought in Korea as the armed forces carried out President Truman’s 1948 order ending segregation in the military. The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency continues to search for thousands of Americans still unaccounted for.

The United States sent military advisers to South Vietnam in the 1950s to support its government against communist North Vietnam and the Viet Cong insurgency. After reported attacks on U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in August 1964, and in March 1965 the first U.S. ground combat units—Marines at Da Nang—came ashore. American troop strength in Vietnam peaked at more than 540,000 in 1969.

The war was fought in jungles, highlands, rice paddies and cities, on rivers and in the air over North and South Vietnam. The Tet Offensive of early 1968 was a military setback for North Vietnam and the Viet Cong but a turning point in American public opinion. Under President Richard Nixon, U.S. troops were gradually withdrawn as South Vietnamese forces took over more of the fighting, and the Paris Peace Accords of January 27, 1973, ended direct U.S. military involvement and brought home 591 American prisoners of war.

North Vietnamese forces captured Saigon on April 30, 1975. Many returning veterans received little public recognition. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, dedicated in 1982, became a place of national reconciliation, and in 2017 Congress designated March 29 as National Vietnam War Veterans Day.

Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, invaded and annexed Kuwait on August 2, 1990. President George H. W. Bush sent U.S. forces to defend Saudi Arabia in Operation Desert Shield and assembled a coalition of dozens of nations, while the United Nations Security Council demanded Iraq’s withdrawal and authorized the use of force if it had not left by January 15, 1991. Congress approved the use of military force on January 12, 1991.

Operation Desert Storm began on January 17, 1991, with an air campaign against Iraqi forces and infrastructure. The ground offensive launched on February 24 liberated Kuwait in about 100 hours, and offensive operations were suspended on February 28.

Nearly 700,000 U.S. service members deployed to the Gulf, including large numbers of National Guard and Reserve troops. Many later reported chronic, unexplained symptoms, and the VA presumes that certain undiagnosed and chronic multisymptom illnesses among Gulf War veterans are connected to their service.

On September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four airliners and killed nearly 3,000 people at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Congress authorized the use of force against those responsible, and on October 7 the United States and its allies began Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, toppling the Taliban government that had sheltered al-Qaeda.

In March 2003 a U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq and removed Saddam Hussein’s government. The decision, based in part on intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that proved mistaken, remains debated. The fight against insurgents and militias that followed became the deadliest phase of the post-9/11 wars for American troops; a troop “surge” in 2007 preceded a sharp decline in violence, and U.S. forces left Iraq at the end of 2011. They returned in 2014 to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria under Operation Inherent Resolve.

In Afghanistan, fighting against a resurgent Taliban continued for two decades. U.S. forces killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in May 2011, and the U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan formally ended in December 2014, followed by a train-and-advise mission. The United States completed its withdrawal on August 30, 2021, days after a suicide bombing at Kabul’s airport killed 13 U.S. service members during the evacuation. The VA dates the Global War on Terror from October 2001 to September 2021; according to the Defense Casualty Analysis System, more than 7,000 U.S. service members have died and more than 53,000 have been wounded in action in these operations.