The Korean peninsula had been dominated to a greater or lesser extent by China for 2,000 years, and particularly between the 13th and 19th centuries, after which, following a short period of independence, it was annexed by Japan in 1910. After the Japanese defeat at the end of the Second World War, Korea was partitioned into areas under Soviet and US military control along the 38th parallel. Attempts to agree on a democratic unification failed, and two separate states were set up, the Republic of Korea in the South after elections which were held in early 1948, and shortly after the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea under Soviet influence in the North. US forces were withdrawn from the Republic of Korea in 1949 and in June 1950 Northern troops invaded the South. At US instigation the United Nations (UN) Security Council ordered a withdrawal, and asked member nations to provide troops to enforce its edict. The USA immediately acted and sent its first troops into South Korea at the end of June.
The initial results were devastating for the USA and the UN. The first US troops to arrive, all taken from comfortable posts as occupation troops in Japan, were undertrained, unwilling and ill-equipped, and were soundly beaten by the North Koreans who not only captured the South Korean capital of Seoul, but nearly drove the UN forces out of the country. Reinforcements from the USA, coupled with contingents from several other UN members, including the United Kingdom, Canada, France and Turkey, landed at Inchon in September and forced the North Koreans well back into their own territory. At this stage a disastrous political conflict took place between the US government and the UN commander in Korea, the US war hero General Douglas MacArthur. Fiercely anti-communist, MacArthur insisted on driving north, with the intention of destroying the North Korean state. In so doing he came to seem threatening to the newly-installed communist government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which immediately sent huge, if also ill-equipped, peasant armies to the aid of the North Koreans. The combined communist forces succeeded again in driving the UN forces south, in vicious battles that caused the USA to suffer more casualties than the Vietnam War was to do later.
MacArthur was relieved of his command, and the UN finally regained some of its ground, pushing the communist forces back to the original frontier on the 38th parallel.
Peace negotiations started in July 1951, although fighting continued until an armistice agreement was reached in July 1953. No peace treaty has ever been signed between any of the combatants, and the North/South Korean border remained a site of armed tension. However, some progress was made towards an eventual peace treaty, and indeed reunification of the two Koreas, in the early 1990s, including a reduction in the number of US forces stationed in South Korea. Further progress in the late 1990s and early 2000s failed to bring about a treaty, although the two states appeared less likely to resume open hostilities than at any time since the war’s conclusion.
The Korean War was deeply unpopular with the US public, who saw no reason why they should be engaged in a campaign that had no obvious connection to their national interest. In a complex way the military experience in Korea was to do the US military great harm 15 years later in Vietnam. The military felt they had been defeated, or at the best only scored a draw in Korea, and this seriously affected morale and planning in Vietnam. But the war had even more far reaching consequences. Though there is little direct evidence that the Soviet Union planned or approved of North Korea’s actions, they supported their war effort as a way of competing with the USA. More than anything else this Soviet involvement convinced US policy-makers of the need for a firm military stand against ‘International Communism’, and led to the arms races and confrontations in Europe, Asia and Latin America (see Cuban missile crisis) that characterized the cold war for the next 35 years. One further consequence should be noted. The unpopularity of the war, and the cost of the conventional arms hardware and tactics it involved, convinced President Dwight Eisenhower, who came to office towards the end of the war, that US military policy should be primarily nuclear, with all the inevitable development of nuclear strategy and hardware that followed. North Korea remains to this day one of the states identified by the USA as a threat to world security, and the US military presence in the south, while reduced, remains numerically significant.
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