KOREAN WAR

The Korean war began on June 25, 1950, when some 75,000 soldiers
from the North Korean People’s Army(KPA) crossed the 38 th 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 side.
American officials believed that the war was against
the forces of international communism itself. The
North Korean Invasion came as an alarming surprise
to American officials. They are concerned that this
was not simply a border dispute between two
unstable dictatorships on the other side of the
globe but rather the first step in a communist
campaign to take over the world. This mindset is
reflected in a statement by the then-U.S President,
Harry Truman: ”If we let Korea down, the Soviet[s]
will keep right on going and swallow up one [place] after another.“
At first, the war was a defensive one to get the communists out of South Korea
and it went badly for the Allies. South Korean
Army(ROKA) and the US forces rapidly dispatched to
Korea were on the point of defeat. The North
Korean army was well-disciplined, well-trained, and
well-equipped; President Rhee’s South Korean army
on the other hand were frightened, confused, and
easy to flee the battlefield at any provocation. On
June 28, Seoul fell to the North Korean. As a result,
the ROKA and US troops retreated to a small area
behind a defensive line known as Pusan Perimeter.
In September 1950, an amphibious UN
counter-offensive, commanded by Gen. Douglas
Macarthur, successfully landed at Incheon and cut
off many KPA troops in South Korea. UN forces invaded North Korea in October
1950 and moved rapidly towards the Yalu River on the border between China
and Korea. On October 19,China, worried that the approaching UN forces
might enter Chinese territory, crossed the Yalu River and entered the war. The
surprise Chinese intervention triggered a retreat of UN forces back below the
38th parallel by late December.
Chinese leader, Mao Zedong, warned US to keep away from Yalu
boundary unless it wanted full-scale war. This worried President Harry Truman
and his advisers because they knew such war would certainly lead to the
deployment of atomic weapons and millions of senseless deaths; in contrast,
Gen. Macarthur wanted to use nuclear
weapons against the Chinese and North
Korean. This led to his dismissal by President
Truman on April 11, 1951. On July 27 1953,
fighting between both side ceased when the
Korean Armistice Agreement was signed. The
agreement created the Korean Demilitarized
Zone(DMZ) to separate North and South Korea
and allowed the return of prisoners. However,
no peace treaty was signed and the two Koreas
were technically still at war but both side had
met to work towards a way to formally end the
Korean War.
The Korean War was among the most destructive conflicts of the
modern era, with approximately 3 million war fatalities and a larger civilian
death toll than World War II or the Vietnam War. It caused the destruction of
virtually all of Korea's major cities, thousands of massacres by both sides
(including the mass killing of tens of thousands of suspected communists by
the South Korean government), and the torture and starvation of prisoners of
war by the North Korean command. North Korea became among the most
heavily-bombed countries in history.