The Korean War (1950–1953) was a civil struggle that originated in the division of Korea after World War II, and entered into a phase of conventional war on 25 June 1950, when North Korean forces crossed the dividing line and invaded the South. Soon the United States entered the fighting under the banner of the United Nations, along with small contingents of British, Canadian, Australian, and Turkish troops. In October 1950, Chinese forces in large numbers joined the war on the North's side. By the time a cease-fire agreement was signed on 27 July 1953, U.S. casualties were 33,629 dead and 103,284 wounded. South Korea had lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers and over a million civilian lives. Although no precise figures exist for Communist losses, North Korea suffered perhaps 3 million military and civilian casualties and the obliteration of nearly every modern building, and China lost almost 1 million soldiers. The 1953 armistice ended the fighting, but Korea remained divided for decades thereafter and subject to the possibility of a new war at any time.
The Korean War has been subject to frequent reinterpretation since it was fought in the early 1950s. For President Harry Truman (1884–1972), Korea was a "police action" that began, in the official American view, when North Korean forces backed by the Soviet Union launched a full-scale, unprovoked invasion across the thirty-eighth parallel. By the 1960s, Westerners had renamed it "the limited war," a conflict different from the world wars in being less than a total war and in being shaped by political decisions taken in Washington: mainly the Truman-MacArthur controversy, with President Truman seeking to limit the conflict to the Korean peninsula, and General Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964) seeking to extend the war to China. Under this interpretation Korea was a success for Truman's containment policy, but a failure for MacArthur's strategy—a stalemate yielding a substitute for victory.
The Korean War After Vietnam
The U.S. war in Vietnam influenced another revision of meaning, as scholars in the 1970s increasingly came to see Korea as a civil war in which anticolonial nationalism confronted a status quo–oriented United States. Attention focused on the Korean experience of American and Soviet occupations after World War II, political and guerrilla conflicts (1945–1949) and small border wars (1949–1950), and Korea's colonial experience with Japan, during which time the military leaderships of North and South Korea were formed (northerners had been anti-Japanese guerrillas, whereas the high command of the South Korean Army had fought with Japan), with a corresponding deemphasis on the conventional "start" of the war in June 1950, and a significant spreading of responsibility for the initiation of this war.
The Korean War Viewed from the 1980s
By the 1980s, however, Korea was "the forgotten war." Books and documentaries by that title proliferated, and the war entered an ambiguous realm: not World War II, not quite Vietnam either, more a question mark than a known quantity. Korean War veterans protested their exclusion from the American popular memory. This was also a decade of new light on the war, however, as scholars exploited reams of newly declassified documents. Most historians questioned the assumption that Joseph Stalin launched the war for his own purposes; the conventional assault in June 1950 was thought to be the idea of North Korea's Kim Il Sung (1912–1994), with perhaps more Chinese than Soviet support. The direct American role in suppressing left-wing politics in the South during its military occupation (1945–1948) was definitively proved, and captured Korean documents showed that the origins of the North Korean regime were muchmore complex than had been thought, with significant indigenous and Chinese influence in addition to the Soviet role. Both Korean sides were deeply implicated in the border fighting that ensued from May through December 1949. New materials showed that the American decision to march into North Korea was taken by Harry Truman, not Douglas MacArthur, under a frankly stated "rollback" doctrine; Truman also thought long and hard about extending the war to China, and sacked MacArthur in April 1951 mainly because he wanted a reliable commander in place should that happen.
U.S. marines on a road heading toward North Korea in November 1950. The mountainous terrain made movement difficult and also made soldiers in the open valleys easy targets for machine gunners in the hills. (BETTMANN/CORBIS)
New Chinese materials also showed how difficult the decision to intervene in Korea was, with Mao Zedong (1893–1976) taking the lead but also deeply conflicted. Chinese materials also depicted a combined North Korean-Chinese strategy to lure United Nations forces deep into the interior of Korea after the famous amphibious landing at Inchon, hoping to stretch supply lines and gain time for a dramatic reversal on the battlefield. That reversal came as 1950 turned into 1951, when Sino-Korean forces threw U.N. troops back well below the thirty-eighth parallel and captured Seoul again; finally, General Matthew Ridgway (1895–1993) organized a successful defense that stabilized the front well south of the thirty-eighth parallel. U.N. forces then resumed the offensive, retaking Seoul and reestablishing a Korea divided roughly along the lines of the demilitarized zone that still exists today. Here the war could have ended, but it continued through two years of difficult peace negotiations.
The Korean War After the Cold War
The 1990s have brought new interpretations, based mostly on newly declassified Russian documentation. These materials show more involvement by Stalin than most scholars had thought in the outbreak of conventional war in June 1950, although his involvement was ambiguous and wavering. Kim Il Sung held several secret meetings with Stalin and Mao in early 1950, hoping to gain their backing for a conventional assault on the South. Stalin was reluctant and worried, but ultimately supportive; the full record of Kim's discussions with Mao remains secret, but Beijing was also supportive, particularly because Kim had been a member of the Chinese Communist Party in the 1930s and had many Chinese allies from that period. Ultimately though, the dominant impetus—and responsibility— for taking the existing conflict to the level of conventional war was North Korea's.
All these are Western views. For Koreans in North and South, the likelihood of war came with the division of the ancient integrity of the Korean nation, through the unilateral action of the American officials in mid-August 1945, to which Stalin quickly acquiesced. For the South it was a just war to recover "lost territories" in the North and to resist Soviet and Chinese expansion. For the North it was a just war to resist American imperialism and reunify the homeland. For Koreans and thirty-seven thousand American soldiers, the war still continues today through a cold peace held only by the 1953 armistice, and with a hot war an ever-present possibility, given that more than a million soldiers still confront each other along the demilitarized zone. But in June 2000, the leaders of South and North Korea met for the first time since the country was divided, and the southern leader, longtime dissident Kim Dae Jung (b. 1925), has determined to try to bring a final end to the Korean War before he leaves office in 2003.
Eventually the Korean War will be understood as one of the most destructive and one of the most important wars of the twentieth century. In the aftermath of war two Korean states competed toe-to-toe in economic development, both turning into modern industrial nations. Finally, it was this war and not World War II that established a far-flung American base structure abroad and a national security state at home, as defense spending nearly quadrupled in the last six months of 1950, reaching a peak of $500 billion (in current dollars) that was never reached again during the Cold War. Today Koreans continue to seek reconciliation and eventual reunification of their torn nation, and Americans have a massive and expensive military-industrial complex that has lost its original raison d'etre with the collapse of the Soviet Union, but which continues apace as the primary American legacy of the Korean War.
