Cold War First Turned Hot in Korea

By the time the Korean War ended on July 27, 1953, most Americans had all but forgotten there was a war.

The fighting had begun 37 months earlier when the young Republic of Korea was invaded by forces from Communist North Korea. Within days, President Harry S. Truman had committed American air and ground forces to resist the invaders. In time, a few other countries sent troops.

Before the last shots in the conflict were fired, North Korea would be all but destroyed by U.S. bombing, which exceeded in tonnage all the bombs dropped in the Pacific theater of operations during World War II. Seoul, South Korea’s capital, would change hands four times. One-third of South Korea’s housing would be destroyed, along with more than 40% of its industry. Total casualties, combatants and civilians, would approach an estimated 4 million. Among them were 33,629 Americans killed in action, 103,284 wounded, 5,178 missing or captured.

The war ended Truman’s presidency. Facing almost certain defeat at the hands of a dispirited electorate, he chose not to run again in 1952. Korea also ended the legendary military career of the imperious Gen. Douglas MacArthur, fired by Truman in 1951 for insubordination. It made an international figure of the aged and obstreperous South Korean strongman Syngman Rhee, who had first pleaded the case for Korean independence to President Theodore Roosevelt in 1905. It brought from Gen. Omar Bradley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the famous declaration that Korea was “the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong enemy.”

Controversy continues to this day over whether the Truman administration inadvertently invited North Korea’s attack by publicly indicating in 1949, following a recommendation of the Joint Chiefs, that South Korea was not an area the United States felt it had to defend. Truman’s decision to intervene in Korea, applauded at the time even by many of his Republican critics, was driven by a strong consensus that failure to take up arms against such overt adventurism could well invite Soviet-sponsored aggression elsewhere, especially in Europe.

Korea was the first armed conflict of the Cold War. Fifty years later, with the peninsula still divided between the Communist north and the American-allied south, it remains the Cold War’s last arena of confrontation.

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Korea’s division was unplanned. Conquered and annexed by Japan in the early years of the century, Korea was occupied by thousands of Japanese troops as World War II ended. The United States and the Soviet Union, which had joined the war against Japan in its final days, agreed that each would enter Korea to take the surrender of these forces, with the 38th parallel, about the midpoint of the peninsula, as the line of separation. What was supposed to be a temporary arrangement became permanent as the Soviets installed a Communist regime in the north and rejected U.N.-supervised elections. By 1949, two Korean states, bitterly antagonistic and neither recognizing the other, had emerged.

Communist leader Kim Il Sung was determined to unify Korea under his rule, and that goal seemed near in the war’s early weeks. North Korea’s well-equipped army rolled over U.S. and South Korean troops. Then, in mid-September, MacArthur launched a brilliant counterstroke. In a bold amphibious operation, U.S. forces were put ashore at Inchon, just south of the 38th parallel. Within a short time they had cut North Korea’s supply lines and begun to encircle its army. Truman then made a fateful choice. Going beyond the initial U.N. call to repel the invasion of South Korea, he responded to MacArthur’s urging and decided to drive north and unify the peninsula. Within a month Pyongyang, the north Korean capital, was captured.

Then military disaster struck. China intervened massively, confronting U.N. forces with a new war. It would take a year of brutal back-and-forth fighting before a military stalemate set in. It would take two years of frustrating and deadlocked truce talks and bitter and costly fighting along a shallow front before an armistice was finally achieved, helped along by strong hints that the United States was considering the use of nuclear weapons if the impasse didn’t end. Two-thirds of U.S. casualties were suffered while the stalemate dragged on and while most Americans, preoccupied with their own affairs, paid little attention.

Truman’s decision to intervene in Korea is now widely regarded as a necessary and courageous action that preserved the independence of South Korea and gave substance to the notion of international collective defense against aggression. But for most Americans, save for those who served there and the loved ones of those who died there, Korea remains a strangely forgotten war, waged long ago in a faraway place, with an equivocal military outcome that few at the time felt moved to cheer.