The Korean War
The Korean War began on June 25, 1950, when some 75,000
soldiers from the North Korean People’s Army poured across the 38th parallel,
the boundary between the Soviet-backed Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to
the north and the pro-Western Republic of Korea to the south. This invasion was
the first military action of the Cold War. By July, American troops had entered
the war on South Korea’s behalf. As far as American officials were concerned,
it was a war against the forces of international communism itself. After some
early back-and-forth across the 38th parallel, the fighting stalled and
casualties mounted with nothing to show for them. Meanwhile, American officials
worked anxiously to fashion some sort of armistice with the North Koreans. The
alternative, they feared, would be a wider war with Russia and China–or even,
as some warned, World War III. Finally, in July 1953, the Korean War came to an
end. In all, some 5 million soldiers and civilians lost their lives in what
many in the U.S. refer to as “the Forgotten War” for the lack of attention it
received compared to more well-known conflicts like World War I and II and the
Vietnam War. The Korean peninsula remains divided today.
North vs. South Korea “If the best minds in the world had set out to find us the worst
possible location in the world to fight this damnable war,” U.S. Secretary of
State Dean Acheson (1893-1971) once said, “the unanimous choice would have been
Korea.” The peninsula had landed in America’s lap almost by accident. Since the
beginning of the 20th century, Korea had been a part of the Japanese empire,
and after World War II it fell to the Americans and the Soviets to decide what
should be done with their enemy’s imperial possessions. In August 1945, two
young aides at the State Department divided the Korean peninsula in half along
the 38th parallel. The Russians occupied the area north of the line and the
United States occupied the area to its south.
Did you know? Unlike World War II and Vietnam, the Korean War did not get
much media attention in the United States. The most famous representation of
the war in popular culture is the television series “M*A*S*H,” which was set in
a field hospital in South Korea. The series ran from 1972 until 1983, and its
final episode was the most-watched in television history.
By the end of the decade, two new states had formed on the
peninsula. In the south, the anti-communist dictator Syngman Rhee (1875-1965)
enjoyed the reluctant support of the American government; in the north, the
communist dictator Kim Il Sung (1912-1994) enjoyed the slightly more
enthusiastic support of the Soviets. Neither dictator was content to remain on
his side of the 38th parallel, however, and border skirmishes were common.
Nearly 10,000 North and South Korean soldiers were killed in battle before the
war even began.
The Korean War and the Cold War Even so, the North Korean invasion
came as an alarming surprise to American officials. As far as they were
concerned, this was not simply a border dispute between two unstable
dictatorships on the other side of the globe. Instead, many feared it was the
first step in a communist campaign to take over the world. For this reason,
nonintervention was not considered an option by many top decision makers. (In
fact, in April 1950, a National Security Council report known as NSC-68 had
recommended that the United States use military force to “contain” communist
expansionism anywhere it seemed to be occurring, “regardless of the intrinsic
strategic or economic value of the lands in question.”) “If we let Korea
down,” President Harry Truman (1884-1972) said, “the Soviet[s] will keep right
on going and swallow up one [place] after another.” The fight on the Korean
peninsula was a symbol of the global struggle between east and west, good and
evil, in the Cold War. As the North Korean army pushed into Seoul, the South
Korean capital, the United States readied its troops for a war against
communism itself.
At first, the war was a defensive one to get the communists
out of South Korea, and it went badly for the Allies. The North Korean army was
well-disciplined, well-trained and well-equipped; Rhee’s forces in the South
Korean army, by contrast, were frightened, confused and seemed inclined to flee
the battlefield at any provocation. Also, it was one of the hottest and driest
summers on record, and desperately thirsty American soldiers were often forced
to drink water from rice paddies that had been fertilized with human waste. As
a result, dangerous intestinal diseases and other illnesses were a constant threat.
By the end of the summer, President Truman and General Douglas MacArthur
(1880-1964), the commander in charge of the Asian theater, had decided on a new
set of war aims. Now, for the Allies, the Korean War was an offensive one: It
was a war to “liberate” the North from the communists. Initially, this new
strategy was a success. The Inch’on Landing, an amphibious assault at Inch’on,
pushed the North Koreans out of Seoul and back to their side of the 38th
parallel. But as American troops crossed the boundary and headed north toward
the Yalu River, the border between North Korea and Communist China, the Chinese
started to worry about protecting themselves from what they called “armed
aggression against Chinese territory.” Chinese leader Mao Zedong (1893-1976)
sent troops to North Korea and warned the United States to keep away from the
Yalu boundary unless it wanted full-scale war.
'No Substitute for Victory' This was something that President
Truman and his advisers decidedly did not want: They were sure that such a war
would lead to Soviet aggression in Europe, the deployment of atomic weapons and
millions of senseless deaths. To General MacArthur, however, anything short of
this wider war represented “appeasement,” an unacceptable knuckling under to
the communists. As President Truman looked for a way to prevent war with
the Chinese, MacArthur did all he could to provoke it. Finally, in March 1951,
he sent a letter to Joseph Martin, a House Republican leader who shared
MacArthur’s support for declaring all-out war on China–and who could be counted
upon to leak the letter to the press. “There is,” MacArthur wrote, “no
substitute for victory” against international communism. For Truman,
this letter was the last straw. On April 11, the president fired the general
for insubordination.
The Korean War Reaches a Stalemate In July 1951, President Truman and
his new military commanders started peace talks at Panmunjom. Still, the
fighting continued along the 38th parallel as negotiations stalled. Both sides
were willing to accept a ceasefire that maintained the 38th parallel boundary,
but they could not agree on whether prisoners of war should be forcibly
“repatriated.” (The Chinese and the North Koreans said yes; the United States
said no.) Finally, after more
than two years of negotiations, the adversaries signed an armistice on July 27,
1953. The agreement allowed the POWs to stay where they liked; drew a new
boundary near the 38th parallel that gave South Korea an extra 1,500 square
miles of territory; and created a 2-mile-wide “demilitarized zone” that still
exists today.
Korean War Casualties The Korean War was relatively short
but exceptionally bloody. Nearly 5 million people died. More than half of
these–about 10 percent of Korea’s prewar population–were civilians. (This rate
of civilian casualties was higher than World War II’s and the Vietnam War’s.)
Almost 40,000 Americans died in action in Korea, and more than 100,000 were
wounded. Today, they are remembered at the Korean War Veterans Memorial near
the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., a series of 19
steel statues of servicemen, and the Korean War memorial in Fullerton,
California, the first on the West Coast to include the names of the more than
30,000 Americans who died in the war.
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