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Here’s a List of Battles fought against Communists

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NOTE: The author of this column was a “Cold War Warrior” who has fought Communism throughout his 23 year military career and he still does to this very day. He fought in the “Tet Offensive” of 1968 as a Field Artillary Second Lieutenant with the 2nd Battalion 501st Airborne Infantry, 101st Airbrone Division in Vietnam.

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Here is a chronological list of major military conflicts, campaigns, and battles fought globally to resist, contain, or overthrow communist forces and regimes throughout the 20th century.

The Early Era & Interwar Period (1917–1939)

  • The Russian Civil War (1917–1922): Following the Bolshevik Revolution, the White Army (a loose coalition of anti-communist forces) fought the Red Army. They were supported by the Allied Intervention, which included troops from the United States, Great Britain, France, and Japan.

  • The Battle of Warsaw (1920): A decisive battle in the Polish-Soviet War, often referred to as the “Miracle on the Vistula.” Polish forces under Marshal Józef Piłsudski decisively defeated the advancing Soviet Red Army, halting the spread of communism into Western Europe.

  • The Chinese Civil War – First Phase (1927–1937): The Nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) forces led by Chiang Kai-shek launched campaigns to eliminate the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), culminating in the Fifth Encirclement Campaign which forced the communists into the “Long March.”

The Cold War Era (1945–1991)

The Korean War (1950–1953)

United Nations forces, primarily led by the United States and South Korea, fought against invading North Korean and Chinese communist forces.

  • Battle of Inchon (1950): An amphibious invasion led by General Douglas MacArthur that successfully broke North Korean supply lines and recaptured Seoul.

  • Battle of Chosin Reservoir (1950): A brutal winter battle where UN forces fought their way out of a massive encirclement by the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army.

The Vietnam War & Indochina Conflicts (1946–1975)

  • Battle of Dien Bien Phu (1954): The decisive engagement of the First Indochina War, where French Union forces were defeated by the communist Viet Minh.

  • Battle of Ia Drang (1965): The first major conventional battle between the United States Army and the People’s Army of Vietnam (North Vietnamese Army).

  • The Tet Offensive (1968): A massive surprise campaign launched by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces against South Vietnamese and US positions. While a tactical defeat for the communists, it was a strategic turning point.

Anti-Communist Insurgencies & Counter-Insurgencies

  • The Malayan Emergency (1948–1960): A successful counter-insurgency campaign led by British and Commonwealth forces against the communist Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA).

  • The Greek Civil War (1946–1949): The Greek government army, heavily backed by the UK and later the US under the Truman Doctrine, defeated the communist-led Democratic Army of Greece (DSE).

  • The Soviet-Afghan War (1979–1989): Anti-communist Islamic guerrillas, known as the Mujahideen (supported by the US, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and others), fought a protracted war against the Soviet Union and the Marxist Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.

Post-Cold War & Border Conflicts

  • The Angolan Civil War (1975–2002): A proxy conflict featuring battles like the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale, where anti-communist UNITA forces (backed by South Africa) fought the ruling Marxist MPLA government (backed by Cuba and the Soviet Union).

  • Sino-Vietnamese War (1979): A brief border war fought between two rival communist powers, where China launched a punitive expedition against Vietnam in response to Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia.

History of Communism in a column titled “Repression and executions under communist dictatorships” writes:

Communist dictatorships in the 20th century were characterized by brutal repression, mass killings, forced labor camps, and executions of political opponents and civilians seen as threats to the regime. The total death toll is estimated at over 100 million people across communist states like the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, North Korea, and Eastern Europe. These regimes maintained power through secret police, propaganda, violently silencing dissent, and a massive apparatus of repression and terror.

Soviet Union Under Stalin

The Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin from the 1920s-1953 saw some of the worst repression and mass killings in history. Key elements included:

  • The Great Purge (1936-1938): Stalin unleashed a wave of terror, involving show trials, mass arrests, torture, and executions of Communist Party members, government officials, and military officers. Estimates of the death toll range from 700,000 to 1.2 million executed.1
  • Gulag forced labor camps: Millions of Soviet citizens were sentenced to forced labor in the brutal Gulag camp system. Inmates faced starvation, exposure, exhaustion, and summary executions. Estimates of total deaths in the Gulags range from 1.5 to 1.7 million people.2
  • Collectivization and terror-famine (1932-1933): The Soviet state’s forced collectivization of agriculture and seizure of crops and food led to a man-made famine killing an estimated 7 to 10 million people, mainly in Ukraine (the Holodomor). Stalin used the famine to crush peasant resistance and nationalism.3

Historian Robert Conquest called Stalin’s Soviet Union “a regime of unrivaled cruelty and total negation of human rights” that “far exceeded even Nazi Germany in the scale and range of its physical terror and torture, executions and mass murders.”4

China Under Mao

Under Mao Zedong, the Chinese Communist Party carried out massive repression and caused the deaths of tens of millions through executions, labor camps, and man-made famines:

  • Land Reform and Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries (1949-1953): Mao launched violent campaigns to seize land and eliminate landlords and perceived enemies of the revolution. An estimated 1 to 4.5 million landlords were executed.5
  • The Great Leap Forward (1958-1962): Mao’s crash industrialization and collectivization campaign caused economic collapse and the Great Chinese Famine, killing an estimated 15 to 55 million from starvation and overwork.6
  • The Cultural Revolution (1966-1976): Mao unleashed the Red Guards to violently purge perceived capitalist and traditional elements, killing up to 20 million and subjecting countless others to public torture, humiliation, and labor camps.7

Mao proclaimed “We have a very good solution called execution. With the death of one, many may live.”8 His rule turned China into a land of paranoia, repression and death on a colossal scale.

Cambodia Under the Khmer Rouge

From 1975-1979, the communist Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot carried out one of the worst episodes of mass killing in the 20th century, causing the deaths of 1.5 to 2 million people, around 25% of Cambodia’s population.9

  • Executions and torture: The Khmer Rouge executed hundreds of thousands of perceived enemies, including intellectuals, Buddhists, and ethnic minorities. Prisoners were tortured into giving false confessions at sites like Tuol Sleng prison before being brutally executed.
  • Forced labor and starvation: Millions were forced into agricultural labor camps and subjected to starvation, overwork and disease. Countless died from the nightmarish conditions.
  • The Killing Fields: The remains of over 1.3 million victims, many executed, have been uncovered in over 23,000 mass graves known as the Killing Fields across Cambodia.10

Historian Ben Kiernan stated the Khmer Rouge’s rule “ended up killing over one quarter of the country’s population, through execution, starvation, and overwork. It was one of the worst holocausts in modern history.”11

Other Communist Dictatorships

Repression and executions occurred across other communist regimes as well:

  • North Korea: Has operated a brutal system of repression since the 1940s, with 400,000 believed to have died in labor camps and 25 million estimated to have starved.12
  • Eastern Europe: Stalinist terror gripped Eastern Europe in the late 1940s and early 1950s, with hundreds of thousands killed, imprisoned or sent to labor camps. The Soviet invasions crushed uprisings in East Germany (1953), Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968).
  • Cuba: Thousands were killed by Fidel Castro’s regime, especially in the early 1960s, and many thousands imprisoned for political dissent.13

Conclusion

The historical record shows that communist dictatorships were responsible for repression, executions and deaths on a massive scale, causing immense human suffering. These regimes ruled through fear, violence and the crushing of individual freedom – the antithesis of their hypocritical promises of liberation and equality. The staggering death toll is a tragic testament to the lethality of totalitarian communism. As Stéphane Courtois stated in The Black Book of Communism, “Communist regimes did not just commit criminal acts…they were criminal enterprises in their very essence, on principle, so to speak, in the name of an ideological project.”14 Communism’s legacy of repression and mass killing must never be forgotten.

References

  1. Timothy Snyder, “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin”
  2. Anne Applebaum, “Gulag: A History”
  3. Norman Naimark, “Stalin’s Genocides”
  4. Robert Conquest, “Reflections on a Ravaged Century”
  5. Frank Dikötter, “Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962”
  6. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, “Mao: The Unknown Story”
  7. Li Zhisui, “The Private Life of Chairman Mao”
  8. Ben Kiernan, “The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia Under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979”
  9. Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland, “Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid, and Reform”
  10. Rudolph J. Rummel, “Statistics of Democide: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900”
  11. Stéphane Courtois et al., “The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression”

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