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 38 th 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.