How Wars Get Their Names

The war that Israel is now fighting for its security, integrity, and future as yet has no name. The official one given it at its outset, “Operation Iron Swords,” is used by almost no one and already half-forgotten, nor has anything taken its place.

This is not unusual in the history of warfare. Wars do not need agreed-upon names, or even names at all, in order to be fought, and major wars have been fought without them. What is now known to Americans as the Vietnam War was called by them at the time it took place “the war in Vietnam,” or simply “the war.” For anyone who lived through those years, “Vietnam War” has a retroactive ring.

There are wars that are called by names given them dozens or even hundreds of years later. The Wars of the Roses, a series of campaigns fought from 1455 to 1487 between two English royal houses, was first referred to by the heraldic badges of their combatants, the white rose of York and the red rose of Lancaster, following the 1829 publication of a novel by Sir Walter Scott in which these figured. We have names for wars that were not even perceived by those who experienced them as single conflicts deserving of a name. It was only in the 19th century, too, that the Hundred Years War between England and France (it actually lasted 116 years), which ended in 1453, was first called that by historians and treated as one prolonged military episode.