Korea's hot war froze a DMZ that still has not thawed
The Korean War ran 25 June 1950 to 27 July 1953 between North and South Korea and their allies—China and the USSR behind the North, a U.S.-led UN coalition behind the South. A 1945 38th-parallel occupation split after Japanese colonial rule hardened into rival 1948 states.
The division had deep roots. Japan pushed Chinese influence out of Korea in 1894 to 1895, made it a protectorate in 1905 and annexed it in 1910. Exiles formed a Provisional Government in 1919 that never won recognition and quarrelled with its first president, Syngman Rhee, while Korean fighters joined Chinese nationalist and communist forces, Kim Il Sung among the communists in Korea and Manchuria. At Cairo in 1943 the Allies promised Korea independence in due course.
The line itself was drawn in haste. The Soviet Union declared war on Japan on 8 August 1945 and entered northern Korea two days later. On 11 August two American colonels in Washington, Dean Rusk and Charles Bonesteel, picked the 38th parallel as the boundary between occupation zones, partly so the capital would fall in the American sector, and the Red Army halted there for three weeks to await US troops.
When the North attacked in 1950, the United Nations Command that answered drew on 21 countries, with Americans making up about nine-tenths of the troops. After the Inchon landing, UN forces broke out of the southeast, retook Seoul, captured Pyongyang and advanced toward the Yalu, until China's People's Volunteer Army crossed the river on 19 October and pushed them back out of the North.
The fighting mixed armoured offensives, Chinese tunnel warfare and the first large battles between jet aircraft, and it cost about a million soldiers' lives along with an estimated 1.5 to 3 million civilians. Even the name differs by country: 625 in the South after its starting date, the Fatherland Liberation War in the North, the War to Resist America and Assist Korea in China, and a police action for Truman, since the United States never declared war. English speakers often call it the Forgotten War.
Source: Korean War
