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

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

*you include:

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

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

>Russo Japanese war

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

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.

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

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

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]

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

Tf?

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

ww1 was nothing like that

Rhodesian Bush War.

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.

100 years war. Basically.

Those Stark guys when Robb was King in the North.

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.

best example I can think of

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.

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."

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