I can think of one, UN in Korea winter of 1950 vs the Chinese. I suppose we could count Israel’s defeat at Sultan Yacub in 1982 and the few reverses that the Indians suffered (including a major one at Hilli) in 1971 in ertswhile East Pakistan, but in each case they achieved their major objective (though any threat to Damascus was removed at Sultan Yacub, though I doubt that it was the Isarelis aim).
I don’t want to include CI operations like the present ones in the middle east/.
I don’t know if this would count as a major battle but in the early stages of the invasion of Iraq I seem to recall a large assault on a city where Marines using AH64 helicopters were beaten back by defenders with RPGs and MGs. It sounded like it was basically air power (total superiority USMC) vs. ground troops.
I don’t believe so. Not, that is, after the Chinese intervention. Before that I well believe it. I think the UN eventually established air superiority after the Chinese entered the war, but never uncontested supremacy.
The Yom Kippur War is interesting, since once again the Israelis controlled the skies. However they were at least partially stymied when attempting to translate that supremacy into air-ground attacks, due to big improvements in the Arab forces’ ground-based AA arsenals ( both guns and missiles ). So it’s a highly qualified example.
Oh, just thought of another one in the same sense as the YKW example above - Dien Bien Phu. French air superiority proved useless under those particular conditions.
Well, that’s rather complicated, as for some ungodly reason nobody much remembers the actual series of events. We “lost” after we left by cutting off any and all aid to South Vietnam. But it was a viable state. We largely achieved our war aims, but then abandoned them for political reasons.
The US war aims in Vietnam was to stop the spread of communism. We most decidedly did not succeed at that. The support for the communists grew throughout our efforts in Vietnam.
Which battle or campaign did NATO lose in the Balkans? Same goes for Vietnam and the USSR in Afghanistan. The US and USSR lost the latter two wars, but they were more due to an inability to completely win militarily and political issues.
The responces so far pretty much tally with what I suspected, outside of insurgencies you find these rarely.
As for the Korean Winter 1950 campaign, although the Chinese did attempt to contest the air, they were pretty unsuccessful, when they had to move large formations at night and during the day their tactics were small unit infiltrating the UN positions. 1st Cavalry Divison had pretty much uncontested air support IIRC, but still got hammered.
What about early U.S. defeats in North Africa in WWII?
And during Stalingrad, the Germans had at least the upper hand in the air, if not total superiority.
Arguably the Allies were the losers for many months of the U-boat campaign in the North Atlantic, despite absolute and total control of the skies, and you can argue they eventually won the campaign, but it was a near thing, and only because new Allied technology got into use while new German technology came too late in the war to make a difference.
I’d argue that it was specifically air supremacy that won the battle of the Atlantic, as much as it was any one thing. It was indeed close…when there was a huge “air gap” in the middle of the Atlantic. When the Very Long Range Liberators and the “jeep carriers” came into service and closed that gap, the fortunes of the U-boats went into immediate decline, and Doenitz withdrew them from the conflict literally within a few months.