I’ve been reading up on the history of Finland in World War II; it’s my understanding that despite an official state of war being in effect between Britain and Finland no shots were ever fired.
I assumed that the 40 minute long Anglo-Zanzibar war wouldn’t have many casualties, but surprisingly ~500 people died (!).
Were there many other situations in history where nations were officially belligerent, but never took action against each other?
Look at North vs South Korea. They never signed a peace treaty so theyre still at war. Granted a war that hasnt resulted in action in 40 or so years.
Thanks for your reply; It’s my understanding that the Korean situation is an extended ceasefire from the Korean War, a war which certainly did have casualties.
I was thinking more along these lines for my OP; Apparently due to an accident of history the Scilly Isles and Netherlands were officially at war (without a shot fired) from 1651 until an official peace treaty in 1986.
Stalin, while playing buddy-up to Hitler, invaded Finland in the winter of 1940 and got a Pyrrhic victory. The Finns kicked @$$ and took names, but the mass of Soviet troops finally pvercame them. Peace treaty lost Finland about 10% of land area and about 18% of population.
Then Hitler invaded Russia. Finland took advantage of this to try to win back their losses, acting in loose alliance with Germany. British public opinion had been on the Finnish side in the Winter War, and was still pretty much in their favor – even though they were now Hitler’s allies. Churchill, who knew and respected Finland’s leader Mannerheim, made no move to declare war.
Summer of 1942, Stalin gets irritated that Romania and Finland have invaded the Soviet Union and the U.K. is still at peace with them – demands that Britain declare war. Churchill temporizes, tries to use the threat of British declaration of war to convince them to make peace – this fails. His correpondence with Mannerheim is reprinted in “The Hinge of Fate” and is quite interesting to read. Churchill ends up telling Mannerheim that if Finland doesn’t agree to peace with the USSR, Britain as Russia’s ally will be forced to declare war on Finland, “and if so will wage war as opportunity presents.” (This is, I believe, diplomatic code for ‘we’re not going to put any effort into making an opportunity’ – consider it a formality.)
I believe that Churchill’s punctiliousness about this contributed greatly to getting Finland to sue for peace as soon as it became clear that Germany was going to lose – with a treaty that the Soviet Union honored to the letter, one of a very few they never breached.
The Panamanian “War of Independence” from Colombia in 1903 had exactly one casualty, a Chinese shopowner killed in his bed by a shell from a Colombian gunboat. Casualities were prevented by 1) the Panamanians buying off the officer in charge of the Colombian garrison in Panama City; 2) the US sending a warship to prevent Colombia from sending reinforcements from the port of a Colon. Colombia didn’t recognize Panamanian independence until 1909, so I suppose the “rebellion” was technically going on until then.
The Pig War had only one casualty: a pig belonging to the Hudson Bay factor on San Juan Island.
The Aroostook War had no casualties due to combat, although apparently a number of soldiers died from other causes during the “war”.
I don’t know any myself but I’m sure throughout history there must have been sieges where the besieging side eventually gave up and left; in which case there would probably be no casualties. If the sieges were between city states (Sparta besieging Athens, that sort of thing) then it would have been considered a war.
If you want to call those sorts of confrontations “wars”, there’s probably a lot of examples. I don’t believe there were casualties in the Cod Wars, in spite of severe damage to several vessels from rammings and shots fired by a few gunboats.
Oh, and of course, wiki turns out to have a list of “bloodless wars”:
The small list includes the previously mentioned Pig, Cod and Aroostook wars, and a few local confrontations which sound even more dubious to label “wars”. However, it does include the Anglo-Swedish war, which is probably more what the OP is looking for:
In the closing months of World War II, countries which were small and/or far removed from the European and Pacific theatres were falling over themselves to declare war on the Axis powers in hopes of currying favour with the Allies. The vast majority of these countries never sent any troops to fight; at best they may have contributed some material resources.