Summary

• Wolverine's war experiences range from real-world conflicts to fictional ones, showcasing his role as a soldier throughout history.
• Some of Wolverine's war stories, while notable, may not have as much significance for him personally compared to other events in his life.
• Wolverine's involvement in wars includes fighting alongside iconic Marvel characters, surviving a nuclear detonation, and even becoming the new Apocalypse in an alternate reality.

Wolverine is known for being perhaps the most brutal member of the X-Men in Marvel Comics history, but he’s not just a mutant hero, he’s also a soldier who’s fought in practically every war since the early 1900s. The wars in which he fought range from those of real world history - such as WWI, WWII, and the Vietnam War - to conflicts that are purely fictitious, only having happened in the Marvel Universe.

With each instance, Logan had unique experiences that would put even Captain America’s war stories to shame (those Wolverine wasn’t included in, anyway). Here are the 10 best Wolverine war stories, ranked!

10 Wolverine Fought Omega Red With Team X While Extracting a CIA Mole During the Cold War

Wolverine Origins #8 by Daniel Way and Steve Dillon

When Wolverine was being weaponized by the Weapon Plus Program, he along with Sabretooth and a few other operatives were placed on a hit-squad called Team X. Team X were essentially soldiers for hire that Weapon Plus would send to do contract jobs, and at one point during the Cold War, they did a job for the U.S. government to extract a CIA mole from Soviet territory, where Wolverine had his first encounter with Omega Red.

This conflict was cool, but compared to some of Wolverine’s other war stories, this one just seems like a run-of-the-mill mission that pitted Wolverine against a dangerous villain. Noteworthy, to be sure, but not that special, either.

9 Wolverine Fought Bucky During World War II

Wolverine Origins #19 by Daniel Way and Steve Dillon

Logan fought alongside Captain America and Bucky during World War II, but he and Cap’s trusty sidekick did not see eye-to-eye. Bucky was skeptical of Wolverine from the start of their wartime relationship, and even pulled a gun on Logan when the two were alone together. This sparked a physical confrontation which ended with Logan mercifully putting Bucky in a sleeper hold until he ed out.

This is one of the most hardcore things Bucky has done pre-Winter Soldier, as this scene proves he wasn’t just a happy-go-lucky sidekick, but a hardened soldier who tried to kill Wolverine based on a hunch. However, this seems to be more significant in Bucky’s history than that of Wolverine, meaning this war story is still fairly low in of significance for Logan himself.

8 Wolverine Fights with Captain America to Battle the Hand & Save Black Widow

Uncanny X-Men #268 by Chris Claremont and Jim Lee

While fighting alongside Captain America and Bucky during World War II (before Bucky threatened to shoot him), Wolverine was on a mission to take down Hydra and the Hand, a mission that quickly turned into the extraction of a little girl - a girl who would grow up to be Black Widow. Wolverine and Captain America were trying to save this girl from being trained by a high ranking member of the Hand and turned into a deadly assassin. Little did they know, she was already a trained assassin who was on an assassination mission at that very moment, as she was tasked with killing this high-ranking ninja while disguised as a helpless victim.

This is an absolutely insane war story, especially in hindsight, as not only is it an instance where Wolverine fought an army of fascist ninjas alongside Captain America, but they did so while trying to save Black Widow, who was just using them the whole time as cover.

7 Wolverine Survived the Nuclear Detonation of “Little Boy” at Hiroshima During WWII

Logan #2 by Brian K. Vaughn and Eduardo Risso

World War II was probably Wolverine’s busiest war, as not only did he save Black Widow with Captain America and get into a fight with Bucky, but Logan also found himself in Hiroshima, Japan the day the nuclear bomb “Little Boy” was dropped. The instantaneous destruction around him was as horrific as the vision of Wolverine himself, who was reduced to a charred, skeletal version of his former self.

Wolverine can say that he experienced one of the most catastrophic moments in human history, and lived to tell the tale.

6 Wolverine Got His Own Iron Man Armor During the Superhuman Civil War

Wolverine Vol. 3 #45 by Marc Guggenheim and Humberto Ramos

The superhuman Civil War is a conflict that only exists in Marvel Comics, yet it was still an impactful war within Marvel continuity nonetheless, which means Wolverine naturally had a role to play. In Civil War, the X-Men didn’t choose sides, as the mutant community was rocked after Scarlet Witch’s ‘no more mutants’ spell pushed them to near extinction. However, Wolverine still made himself available if he believed in what he was fighting for, which is why he agreed to help Iron Man in his conflict with Namor, and Tony gave him his own Iron Man armor to do it.

Wolverine getting his own specialized Iron Man armor is one of the cooler perks he has experienced while fighting in a war, making it one of his cooler stories to tell.

5 Wolverine Got a Horrific ‘Gift’ From Sabretooth During the Sabretooth War

Wolverine #41 by Victor LaValle, Benjamin Percy, Geoff Shaw, and Cory Smith

The Sabretooth War just kicked off at the start of 2024 in the pages of Wolverine #41, and already it’s probably the most traumatic war Wolverine has ever experienced. Sabretooth gathers a small army of his own variants from across the multiverse to slaughter the X-Men of Earth-616. However, after he found that Orchis effectively did that during Hellfire Gala 2023, Sabretooth set his sights specifically on Wolverine, and decided to wage a more personal war against his lifelong enemy.

The worst thing Sabretooth has done to Wolverine so far during this war is killing his son, Akihiro, and then rearranging his body parts to spell out ‘happy birthday’. To be fair, it was Wolverine’s birthday, but this is likely one ‘party’ he will want to forget, no matter how memorable a war story it is.

4 Wolverine Travels Back in Time & Fights in the Spanish Civil War

Wolverine Vol. 2 #35 by Larry Hama and Marc Silvestri

Even though Logan was alive during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), he didn’t fight in it until the 1980s, when he was caught in a time-displacement vortex and sent back in time. Wolverine was in the middle of an entirely different conflict with Lady Deathstrike when he was literally swept away by this temporal phenomenon, only to find himself in a war that he managed to avoid fighting in the first time around.

The headline of this war story isn’t even the ‘war’ aspect of it at all, but the fact that Wolverine literally traveled through time to fight in it.

3 Wolverine Actually BECOMES Apocalypse During the Age of Apocalypse

Uncanny X-Force #12 by Rick Remender and Mark Brooks

The Age of Apocalypse is a war that wages across the entire world in the skewed reality of Earth-295. To be clear, this isn’t another universe, but a fractured branch from the Earth-616 timeline that was created when Legion went back in time and accidentally killed Professor X - and it didn’t get erased even after Legion’s actions were undone by Bishop. So, when Apocalypse was defeated at the end of the ‘90s storyline, the war continued to rage, and Wolverine became the new incarnation of En Sabah Nur.

This is the future Earth-616’s Wolverine would have lived through if Legion’s actions weren’t corrected, and it is still what a version of Earth-616’s Wolverine has to experience, making this just as significant to the original Wolverine as anything he’s experienced himself. In other words, living through a literal apocalypse only to become the new Apocalypse is an absolutely insane war story that Wolverine has full rights to tell.

2 Wolverine was Hired By Nick Fury To Be a Symbiote-Soldier Killer During the Vietnam War

Web of Venom: Ve’Nam #1 by Donny Cates and Juanan Ramírez

Wolverine didn’t just fight in the Vietnam War, he was tasked with a very special and top-secret mission by Nick Fury himself: kill the Symbiote Soldiers. During Vietnam, the government was testing out a new way to create super soldiers by attaching symbiotes to a small group of hand-selected soldiers. Each one got their own symbiote, which was derived from the symbiote dragon found by the U.S. government that was sent to Earth by Knull hundreds of years earlier. However, these Symbiote Soldiers needed to be kept in check, and the person who was hired to put them down if the situation called for it was none other than Wolverine.

Wolverine is so deadly, that he is called upon to kill a ‘Venom’ strike force specifically chosen for their deadliness. If that’s not a war story worth bragging about, nothing is.

1 Wolverine Actually Killed the Angel of Death During World War I

Wolverine Vol. 3 #58 by Marc Guggenheim and Howard Chaykin

When Wolverine was chopping through enemy soldiers during World War I, he came across a strange man wielding a sword, who had just finished slaughtering soldiers from both sides of the conflict. Wolverine didn’t know who this man was, but he knew he had to go, so the two engaged in brutal combat that ended with Wolverine stealing the man’s sword and impaling him with it.

Wolverine would later learn that this man was named Lazaer, which was actually an anagram for his true name: Azrael aka the Angel of Death. Wolverine literally killed Death during World War I, which is easily the coolest war story anyone could tell, making this the best of the 10 greatest Wolverine war stories in Marvel Comics.