Has a side ever lost a war despite winning every battle?

Vietnam

>yfw the VC chose and won most of the individual engagements

Just because they were rarely large enough to be called battles, just because the VC lost more men than the US, doesn't mean they weren't winning.

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Napoleonic France in Russia

>>3101826
The American Revolution was kind of like that

>>3101843
Fpbp

2nd Punic War for the most part, until the end when Rome stopped fucking around and got a decent general in Scipio Africanus.

Every single war against Russia.

>>3101913
Lexington, Ticonderoga, Saratoga, Trenton, Yorktown...

>>3101862
This might actually be right, the worst fuckup I can think of is Borodino and even that was technically a French victory.

>>3101843
this

>>3102250
Unless you include, World War II, or World War I, or the Crimean War, or the Russo-Turkish War, or the Russo-Japanese War....

>>3102796
*you include:

>>3101826
Epirus invading Italy, I don't recall him losing anything except the war

>>3102824
He got his ass kicked pretty badly at both Beneventum and the strait of Messina.

>>3102796
>Russo Japanese war

Ruskies got BTFO so hard, you don't even realize

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>>3101862
This would be correct if the battles were considered within the battle only and not the campaign as a whole. Technically the russians kept winning because small russian formations slowly bled off the french army. They never gave Napoleon a clear defenceless path to Moscow while at the same time not allowing him a victory near the border.

Apart from that the russians won many battles so aside from the strategic briliance of the russians this war still doesn't count as OP's criteria.

>>3102796
>Russo-Japanese War
A war against Japan, not Russia.

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>>3101826

Not what you meant, but definitely true. In some sense every war is a phyric victory- for the families and the permanently crippled.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhic_victory
The armies separated; and, it is said, Pyrrhus replied to one that gave him joy of his victory that one other such victory would utterly undo him. For he had lost a great part of the forces he brought with him, and almost all his particular friends and principal commanders; there were no others there to make recruits, and he found the confederates in Italy backward. On the other hand, as from a fountain continually flowing out of the city, the Roman camp was quickly and plentifully filled up with fresh men, not at all abating in courage for the loss they sustained, but even from their very anger gaining new force and resolution to go on with the war.
—Plutarch, Life of Pyrrhus[1]

>>3101861
>> the VC chose and won most of the individual engagements

Tf?

>>3103070
But the Japanese literally struck first against the Russians, and the Russians were the ones who were being invaded

>>3102250
ww1 was nothing like that

Rhodesian Bush War.

>>3101861
The US may have lost Vietnam, but it didn't beat the US.
The US beat the US, and there just wasn't any morale or motivation to buckle down and go full WWI for a foreign shithole that probably would have resented US occupation anyway.

>>3101826
100 years war. Basically.

>>3101826
Those Stark guys when Robb was King in the North.

>>3101913
Yeah, we basically lost almost every big field battle in the first few years of the war, since we hadn't trained an experienced core army yet. We did manage to win Saratoga at that point though.

>>3101843
best example I can think of

>>3101861
dude, shut up. The VC were complete amateurs. They were garbage warfighters, and loss every battle. The reason the VC won was because it was a costly war that the American people came to revolt against, so they pulled out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Hill_488

look at this crap. 18 marines fighting hundreds of VC for days, and only 6 were killed. Imagine being such an incompetent and cowardly unit that you outnumber the enemy over 10 to one, surround them, but can not advance on and destroy them.

NVA knew this. To paraphrase a NV prison commissar, speaking to Jim Stockdale, from his book "Thoughts a Philosophical Fighter Pilot": "You Americans may win on the battlefield, but we will the war on the streets of America."

>>3103221
I think what he means is, they lost major battles, but most of their engagements were tiny, platoon scale ambushes.