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Yet while the men and women who fought the Korean War certainly did their part and deserve praise, the question is not how well did they do, but what did the war accomplish?

Just as in Vietnam and Iraq, the final measure of war is one relating to whether it achieves its goals or not. And clearly, without clear goals being set before a war ensues it is hard to determine if they have been accomplished or not when it ends. The problem then is that in the case of the Korean War, as in our analogy above of firing Roman Candles at a neighbors house, the question as to what the expected end result was supposed to be of that war was largely left blank at the time the war was started. More simply put, it seems in retrospect that our American government at the time was quite comfortable in using military force, and even going to war, without clear sight of what they expected to get done. That is, they took the attitude that a quick response was necessary and that they would wait and decide what the conclusion should be later on, down the road, once the war was well underway. Does this sound a bit like what was going on a few weeks ago when Obama and Kerry were publicly opining on Syria's use of chemical weapons?

Why is this? Why have politicians become like this, where on the issue of war they seem only too happy to act now and think later?

We think that part of the answer lies in the fact that the outcome of the Korean War helped water down in America’s mind—from then until today—the idea of what the conclusion of a war should look like. No longer is it necessary to have a clear victor. Now a negotiated stalemate is enough to declare a war over. One can see this in the “negotiated” outcome of the Vietnam War, and the political free for all that pulled every soldier out of Iraq as soon as the political parties in Washington changed hands. What we are saying is that starting with the negotiated partitioning of Korea at the end of its war, and continuing until today, this constant watering down of what an acceptable conclusion to a war has become has resulted in America losing sight of why wars are supposed to be fought in the first place, and what their outcome is supposed to be.

Has this helped America, or hurt it?

Whatever your answer, it seems clear that war has lost its relevance in terms of its original purpose. For one thing, it has lost its impact on the life of the average American… not those whose sons and daughters die in it, but the average American who couldn’t point out Syria on a map if their life depended on it.

War is no longer real to these people, and to many in Washington. It has become just another political tool to be wielded by our government leaders… a tool where the relevance of its usage is more important within the realm of political infighting than in terms of what the activity itself will really accomplish. It has truly become what von Clausewitz said of it, politics by just another means… and unnecessary politics at that. In other words, we seem now to be at that stage in our nation’s growth where our government goes to war more for the purpose of one party scoring political points against the other, then for the purpose of accomplishing a stated military objective or social good. We, in the military, have, since the time the Korean War ended, become pawns of politicians… politicians playing a grand chess board game of one ups-manship, brinksmanship and power politics.

One need only watch a senile McCain use the threat of missile strikes against Syria as an argument with which to score points against President Obama to see the truth of this. And the same for the White House, whose press spokespeople cloak every phrase of war they utter in terms meant to denigrate the Republican point of view rather than state the intended outcome of the conflict being proposed.

In the mean time, America’s military sits and waits… to see if they will go to war and die, or not. "Boots on the ground"... the triteness of the phrase is beyond offensive, it is profane. We are not boots on the ground, we are people... real men and women... real American men and women, whose lives our government toys with as though we are expendable.

Government is expendable. We, the people, are not.

The unfortunate fact is, it seems today that no one expects war to actually accomplish anything. War has simply become something our country periodically gets involved in, for little to no intended purpose.

How did we get here?

Korea is part of the answer, as is most certainly Vietnam. With these two wars America learned how to settle for second best. By the time of Iraq, second best had become the stated norm.

Most of our readers know the history of the Korean war… many of them intimately. However, there are a surprisingly large number of young readers who browse this website, one presumes either out of curiosity or as a reference tool for research. Looking at web reports, most seem to come from the High School demographic and the early stages of college. For these readers it might serve us well to pause and give a simple overview of what the Korean War was all about, from a soldier-historian's viewpoint.

    The Korean War

For one thing, the Korean War was too significant for modern day American’s to neglect to understand the impact of on our daily lives today. Even now, sixty years from its occurrence, it’s influence is still felt. Why? Because as we alluded to above, the Korean War helped set the tenor of what the American public expects as a normalized outcome of war.

In part because it was fought long before today's youth were ever born, very few people today know its story. But make no mistake, the Korean War was much too momentous to ignore, or more pointedly, it was too pivotal in creating the precedent that Presidents today use to their political advantage for us not to understand how this came about. In this regard and many others, it is a war far too costly to be forgotten.

In its most simple sense the Korean War was a civil war, as was the Vietnam War, the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, and dare we say this… the war in Syria that blazes across our TV screens each night. Much like all of these wars the Korean War erupted into an international conflict because of America’s viewpoint as to who should win the civil war.

The complexities of how America ended up in the Korean War are far too numerous for us to discuss here, suffice it to say that the same can be said for the complexities that dragged America into Vietnam and Iraq too, although not so for Afghanistan. Unfortunately, for those trying to understand today why America went to war in Korea 60 years ago the complexities work against us, as the level of these complexities makes it far too easy for a speaker today to summarize America’s true purpose in entering the Korean War by spouting simple sentence of twisted facts and conclusions, usually for the purpose of supporting some modern day political or ideological leaning. In other words, if someone tells you why we went to war in Korea in anything less than 100 paragraphs, don’t believe them. The cause of the Korean War is much too complex to be so simply explained.

Yet while the cause may be complex and subject to ideological revisionism, the facts of the war are simple and can be explained with ease.

The Korean War owes much of the facts that surround it to historical roots that are tied to the Japanese colonial experience and the legacy it left after WWII ended. Under Japanese colonial rule from 1910 to 1945 the Japanese imperial government implemented what was referred to within Japan as the “divide and rule” policy. This policy broke the Korean peninsula into two geographic zones, with each being set up on the basis of its respective ability to support exploitation of the resources held within it. Because of this the mountainous north, which was rich with raw minerals, was targeted by Japan as an area for the development of heavy industry. The southern portion of the country, on the other hand, was intended to support light industry and the production of rice and other crops. Strangely, and here is where the cause of the Korean War becomes more complex, it just so happened to occur that the delineation the Japanese set up also coincided with a long festering sociological and ideological division within the Korean people themselves. Because of this, while the Korean people may want the world to think otherwise, they are not without fault themselves when it comes to why the South can not get along with the North even today, or vice-versa.

In the early 1900s as communism as a form of government began to take root in Asia, communist sympathizers made their way into the northern part of Korea. When the Japanese took over in 1910 small cells of communist sympathizers were already there. Not surprisingly, the audacity of the Japanese in taking control of the territory of Korea only drove these sympathizers to redouble their efforts. As a result, just as they were in fact doing elsewhere in Asia from Singapore to Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and other countries, the communist sympathizers incited guerrilla warfare in North Korea as a form of resistance. In support of this conservatives (yes… what we would see as Republicans in America…) and collaborationist groups congregated and began to operate in the south, with the intent of taking Korea back from the Japanese.

Needless to say, they failed. However, what they were unable to do on their own World War II was able to do for them. With the end of WWII came the expelling from the Korean Peninsula of Japan and its occupying troops.

Unfortunately the Japanese (as occupiers) were replaced with U.S. and Soviet Union troops. As can be expected these new foreigners were seen by the locals as no more than just another set of occupiers, even if they were only supposed to be in country for a short while to help establish a new government. For the locals, the question was ‘where do these foreigners get off thinking they can determine who will rule the future Korea?’ And so while we in the west saw our occupation of Korea along with the Soviets as having been a stabilizing step on the road towards giving Korea full independence, many of the Korean people saw it as simply one more occupying army coming to replace the other.

At the time the decision the U.N. made to separate the country along the 38th parallel seemed to be the only way out. More to the point, it seemed to provide the only solution to dealing with the legacy of Japan’s earlier splitting of the country into two economic sectors, providing a way to address the traditional sociological differences that had evolved between North and South Korean values, and the fact that the communist organizing efforts that had taken place and were still taking place in the North were very effective.

Today we wonder how anyone in their right mind could think that this approach was going to work… or for that matter how Henry Kissinger could have thought that North Vietnam would stay on its side of the border while the people of South Vietnam voted on what their future should be after America left. Partitioning a country is not a solution to warfare, it only sets the true beginning point of the conflict between those left behind, once the overlord countries leave.

At any rate, two separate Korean governments were formed in 1948. The one backed by the United States, the government of the Republic of Korea (ROK), was headed by Syngman Rhee. His northern counterpart, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), was headed by the erstwhile Kim Il-sung… who benefited from the support of the Soviet Union. What the U.S. leaders of the time seemed to have closed their ears to however was that both Syngman Rhee and Kim Il-sung were both extremely loud and vocal in stating their intent to reunify Korea under their own political systems, once the foreigners left. In other words, long before the agreement to separate the country was even written, both of these men were stating that they would go to war if needed to unite the country.

Rhee called for a democratic government. Kim, as to be expected, wanted to establish a unified communist Korean government that represented the entire peninsula. Again, the question is raised: why is it that the U.S. and the U.N. did not forsee that their endorsement of a splitting of the country would lead to war between the North and the South? Did they not know or did they simply not care? Or was it possible that the people of America were… dare we say this… war weary because of the country's efforts in WWII... war weary and willing to let these two countries go at it themselves rather than intervene with American troops?

Sound familiar?  

Whatever the reason, as should have been expected, the competing interests of each group created both tensions and enmity between the South and the North. And rather quickly, this turned into open persecution of both individuals and whole groups, whenever they could be identified as affiliating with the opposing political system. The result: in short order the entire Korean peninsula was polarized and headed towards war.          

In our view this is the point in time when political expediency in the U.S. began to replace logic in terms of what should be expected as a normalized outcome of a potential war in Korea. Where up until 1950 the world expected that the normal outcome of war was that one side would win and the other lose, and that therefore there would be victors who would rule the subject country, with the splitting of Korea along the 38th parallel this principle was tossed out the window.

Splitting Korea into two, simply to avoid having to deal with the dirty details left over from Japan’s per-WWII occupation, doomed the logic of war to the trash heap of history. From this point forward it became acceptable for countries that had once been a battle ground of war to be partitioned (by the world at large) in any and every form imaginable, simply to avoid the leading powers of the world having to argue over which political element in the country being broken apart should rule if the country was to stay united. That is, it was easier to set up two rulers in one country by partitioning the country than have the leading powers of the world argue ad nauseam over which one ruler should take precedence.

And thus, no longer was the outcome of war considered on the basis of what was best for the war torn country where the battles took place (in this case, the battles of WWII to defeat the Japanese forces that occupied Korea). Instead, the consideration was now over what was best for the opposing sides that, in many cases, had been fighting a proxy war in the Korean battle space in the first place.

Remember, the comments we offer here apply to Korea at the end of WWII... at that point in time the Korean War that America fought had not yet started. Even so, as the cartoon above shows, Korea was already full of proxy players that had designs on what the new, evolving Korea should be. Not the least of these was the Soviet Union, who actively and even aggressively supported efforts to recruit and organize communist sympathizers in the North. What is not shown in the above cartoon however is that the U.S. was, at the same time, supporting and aiding the South. With this building situation it was only natural that both the U.S. and the Soviets would opt to cut up the country like a piece of cheap cloth on a cutting table, rather than concede one to the other to either unify Korea under Northern Communist rule, or Southern Korean Democracy.

As far as the proxy players were concerned, with this little nicety of splitting the country into two out of the way, and with no regard for the potential consequences of this decision, both sides could then set about removing the troops they still had in Korea from the end of WWII and sending them home. In the U.S’s case some of the post WWII troops in Korea were sent home, while most were simply re-stationed to occupied Japan.

With the foreigners gone, almost immediately open conflict broke out between North and South Korea. At the time it was more in the vein of a virtual war than a declared war, but as nascent as it was, it was still a war.

Numerous skirmishes in the form of guerilla warfare and border conflicts took place between the two Koreas, literally on the heels of American troops loading their equipment onto flights headed for Japan. In the period between 1948 and 1950 the tensions between the South and the North escalated exponentially. Unlike when the British left India and conflict broke out sometime later between the Hindus and the Muslims, in the case of North and South Korea conflict exploded even as the U.S. and Soviet armies were packing their bags to go home.

Didn’t anyone see that war between the North and the South was inevitable if the peninsula was divided? Why then didn’t the U.S. simply stop its plans to exit, invite the Soviets to do the same, and agree to lower the threshold of violence before the two departed? Why didn’t the U.N. step in… after all, the U.N. was the catalyst for the splitting of the country? Was it post-WWII war weariness? Was it that no one frankly cared what happened on the Korean peninsula, as it was thought too small a nation to impact life in America? Or was it in reality a cynical effort on the part of the political leaders of the day to redefine what the outcome of war… WWII in this case… could be?

In our view, it was a little bit of all of this, but most especially the latter. That is, as the only two strong man victors of WWII, the U.S. and Soviet Union felt they could do anything they wanted with the rest of the world... carve it up, leave it alone or whatever. After all, who was going to challenge them? The British? The French? The Germans? The old Ottoman Empire? And since at that time neither the U.S. nor the Soviets wanted to confront each other in a new war, each likely felt it much easier to simply agree to carve up those numerous, nasty little countries with internal political problems of their own, rather than fight over them.

This then set in motion in the minds of U.S leaders the idea that perhaps there should be a middle ground in terms of how wars end… not just with one side being the victor and deciding how the underlying country should be ruled, and with the other side losing and having no say in the decision, but instead something in between… something where both the victor and the loser agree to let the country where the conflict took place fight it out on its own, internally, to see who would end up running the place. Separate the two sides through partition, and then hope for the best.

No, you say? How then to explain the eventual result of the Korean War… or the Vietnam War… or the Iraq War… or what is going on in Syria today?

Continuing with the story of the Korean War, during 1948 and 1949 conflict escalated, with neither side wanting to lose to the other. During that time North Korea pushed the Soviets for both permission to invade the South and for support in its efforts. They made no bones about their intention: they intended to reunify the Korean people under communist rule.

Reluctant to risk a confrontation with the U.S. the Soviets initially refused, but the North Koreans kept the pressure on. In early 1950 the Soviet’s caved in and gave a somewhat reluctant and tepid o.k. to the North’s plan… but only if the North Korean’s could get China's blessing too.

We all know what happened next. On June 25, 1950, the Korea People's Army (KPA) of the DPRK marched southward and crossed the 38th parallel on their way to Seoul.

 

Again... one simply must stop and ask: did the politicians in Washington really think that a bifurcated Korean peninsula was going to work? Do the politicians in Washington today really think that they can stem Syrian and Iranian ambitions by sealing up a bunch of chemical weapons? Or are they simply putting off the inevitability of war for another day… or another administration?

In response to the DPRK’s invasion America entered the war. Within short order Secretary of State Dean Acheson's decision to intervene and to commit U.S. military forces to the war was supported by President Truman, and the U.S.’ actions were later approved by the United Nations. Unfortunately, even with a dominant number of US forces on the ground, the North’s army continued to push southward. By the summer of 1950 the ROK and US armies had retreated as far south as Pusan, the most southeastern port city on the peninsula.

Finally, in early August the North’s advance was halted, albeit neither side saw any dramatic change of status until MacArthur's successful landing at Inchon (a.k.a. Incheon, Inch'on, 인천 상륙 작전) in mid-September. At that time Mac did his usual magic and recaptured Seoul from the KPA. With that one move, Kim Il-sung's plan to "win and end the war in a month" was dashed.

Instead, the war that ensued proved to be much more difficult than either side expected. For one thing, it caught the United States flatfooted and totally unprepared for combat. Drawing troops from the only logical place they could come from, troops in Japan were rushed into battle with little ammunition and ineffective weapons. Recognizing that in scrapping its armament at the end of WWII the U.S. military had acted shortsightedly, the military in the U.S. went about scrounging for arms, finding them wherever they could.

One could see this happening at Fort Knox when the Army, short of tanks that worked, took down those on the concrete pedestals outside the front gate and reinstalled engines, transmissions and other equipment in them, before sending them off to Korea. Rusting tank hulks from South Pacific battlefields were scrounged up and sent to Japan for refurbishing. Again, just as in the early days of WWII, America found that if it weren’t for the shear economic strength of the country things might have turned ugly. Fortunately economic strength prevailed where political decisions failed, and in less than three months from its outbreak the U.S. found itself able to direct the tune to which the war proceeded.

For the next year a tough and gritty war was waged up and down the Korean Peninsula. After that it settled into what seemed to be a two-year stalemate, not far from where it began on the 38th parallel.

Three years after its start, fighting ended in a negotiated armistice.

   Legacy & Lessons

The lessons able to be learned from the Korean War are among the best any nation has ever had presented to it for its own improvement. One wonders why we haven’t learned from them... or for that matter why the Koreans, Chinese or Russians haven’t learned either.

The appalling, vicious fratricidal war that was the Korean War left Korea with scars that have yet to heal. Sources estimate that as many as 3,000,000 Koreans, at least half of which were civilians, died in the war. Physical and corporeal destruction aside, the war scarred the Korean psyche beyond the norm, as Koreans killed Koreans to an extent and in more troubling ways than is usually found in a civil war. The animosity this has bread, and the fear felt by one side for the other, did not end with the war. Instead it continued to proliferate over all of the interceding days from the signing of the armistice agreement up until today, as incidents of conflict, such as border skirmishes, espionage attempts, kidnappings, vessel sinkings, artillery shelling, and the like continued to take place. And as we all know too well, attempts to develop nuclear and chemical weapons by the North have not made things any easier.

During all of this time the two Koreas have developed their own states, each under the most different of conditions and forms of government that can be imagined. As we know, South Korea worked its way through a rocky period of democratic autocracy to something approaching true democracy, layered on top of an oligarchic form of capitalism. North Korea on the other hand has developed… well… it’s hard to say what North Korea has developed. Whatever it is, it remains one of the most severe, strict and isolated quasi-communist states in the world today. We say quasi-communist because without any doubt what is being practiced in North Korea is not communism in any sense of the word… not at least according to what Marks and Engels defined, nor Mao for that matter. In North Korea there is no sharing of resources, work according to your means, receive according to your needs type of thing going on. Instead, it’s simply a corrupt dictatorship that prays on its own people.

The result of this has clearly given the South the edge in terms of economic development. Beginning in the 1960s South Korea underwent a rapid industrialization, and over the next four decades it became a global player. The North on the other hand says that it is adhering to a policy of juche, or self-reliance. Not so, no matter what Dennis Rodman may tell you when he’s sober. North Korea is simply a defunct country whose leader rapes his people… both economically, literally and figuratively.  If it weren’t for foreign aid, extortion and the sale of weapon systems, mostly used to sustain its military, North Korea would have turned into a sixth generation growth forest with no one living in it except for a bunch of semi-naked hunter-gatherers.

This then is the legacy of the Korean War, where the country was partitioned in order to save the “victors” the trouble of having to actually care what happened to the people that remained behind. It happened first in Germany, although in that case it was thought that the Germans had it coming to them. It happened next in Korea. Then in Vietnam, and then Iraq. Will it happen in Afghanistan? More to the point, is it now considered acceptable to partition a country when a war ends, or better still, leave it up to the remaining citizens to fight it out among themselves to see who triumphs and survives?

In Korea’s case the result was a nation where over 3 million citizens lost their lives only to see the country evolve into one where one-half of the remaining people live in the dark ages while the other half learns about Twerking from Miley Cyrus.

In Vietnam’s case the North overthrew the South once America left, and then added to the 1.7 million it had already killed in democide from 1945 to 1987 another 3.7 million that it murdered (including Laotians and Cambodians) when it took over the south. [1] It may be true that in the 25 years since the "war ended," and the North Vietnamese took control and unified the country, things have gotten ever so slightly better, but does that justify 5.4 million people being murdered by the rulers of the country? Does that justify America walking away from a war that it essentially started, knowing full well that the partitioning of the country it signed off on would not work, and leaving the people to their own defenses? [2] And how should we classify Iraq? Have all we have done with our effort in that war is to hand Iran a client state that it can now control until it turns the country into another Shi’a state that subjugates its own minority Sunni brethren… another country permanently split by how the western countries that fought on its soil left it when they went home? 

If one looks at these countries one cannot help but see that in the years since World War II ended what has become an accepted settlement to war has changed. We say again that in our view this all began with the Korean War. Our state of mind today as to how a war can end is a result of how the Korean War was allowed to end by America's leaders at the time.

To be sure, events of the time shaped what the world did in dividing Korea into two countries and abandoning the principle that when a war was over the objective should be to rebuild the war torn country until it can take its rightful place again, back in global society, living with freedom and economic health, on its own feet, under one united government. That is clear. But what is less clear and what few people realize is that since the results of the time influenced how the Korean War ended, the Korean War itself… especially its terrible destructiveness and near loss in the early days… created an influence of its own that has trickled down to influence events in our times today.

The legacy of the Korean War has come home to roost in our own henhouse, today, with the very concept of war now being thought of not for the severity of the pain and anguish it inflicts on those who fight it and/or are subject to it, not on the ferociousness of force it can bring to resolve an international dispute, but instead on the fact that after the carnage is over politicians can revert back to spineless indecision in carving up a country and peoples until what is left is an ungovernable mass of humanity that will be of little value to the world or the people themselves for years to come.

This kind of end result is not a fault of the soldiers who fight these wars, for they only determine the kinetic outcome. The political outcome is determined in Washington.

It is also not a fault of the people who live in these war torn countries, as they barely have enough influence to survive on what is left when the war ends, never mind determine how their country will move forward.

Whose fault is it then? We would say it is the fault of mid 20th century progressivism gone wrong. Progressivism: a desire to feel good about what one claims they are doing without actually doing anything except talking about the good they are doing. The reader should note, we are not taking a stand for or against progressivism here, for progressivism is as much a political ideology as it is a social hypothesis. All we are doing here is identifying the fact that one of the more profound uses of it in the past 60 years was in the influence it had on the decision to end the Korean War by partitioning the Korean peninsula. By breaking the country in two along the 38th parallel all of the big players of the day got to spout progressive logic and feel good about themselves, without actually doing anything except making a decision that impacted lives other than their own.

And so the pattern was set; and so today we have pin prick missile attacks being proposed on Syria. Lengthy discussions about rounding up chemical weapons to seal them off from further use, while the man who committed actual, real crimes against humanity is allowed to walk free and proudly take interviews on CNN and FOX News. Instead of arresting this man and his henchmen and taking them to the Hague for trial, the world acts to lock up his chemical toys so that he can't play with them anymore. Progressivism: the act of acting like something is being done when in fact nothing is being done. Progressivism, the root cause of a people of a nation suffering while the world twiddles its fingers in indecision. Progressivism, a mode of thinking and axiom that says it is better for the proxy overlords to partition a country as a viable means to end a war than deal with the messy fact that neither side is winning and therefore the war may go on for years to come. Progressivism: a concept that first gained acceptance at the end of the Korean War, when it was used to allow the proxy fighters to walk away from the stalemate they had created.

Our point then is that the Korean War had a far greater influence on America today than many give it credit for. The guns went silent long ago, but their reverberations continue until today. In our estimation the biggest impact the Korean War has had on the world is that a) it ushered in and gave credibility to the concept of modern day progressive thinking and b) that progressive thinking brought to the fore the acceptance of partition as a means for two proxy fighters to walk away from a battlefield without either having to admit defeat.

Watch for these two "P"s: Partitioning and Progressivism... used in unison as a means to end a war. Watch for them. They will be coming again soon to a battlefield near you.

 

   The Korean War – Other Impacts and Effects

In terms of what other affects the Korean War and the division of the Korean peninsula had on society, we offer these too for your consideration:

● The Korean War militarized and hardened the Cold War, creating a permanent state of political and military tension between the U.S. and the Soviet Union that lasted from 1947 to 1991. The reason for this is simple: while both sides knew that they had taken the easy way out in ending the Korean War via a partitioning of the country, both also knew that they hadn't solved the problem, and that while progressive thinking made them feel good it wasn't solving any problems... not in Korea, nor anywhere else around the world.

● The failure of the partition of Korea to solve the country's problems and especially to stem the desire of the communists to spread their doctrine around the world focused U.S. resistance to communist expansion on other countries in the Far East. Thus, within a few years Vietnam came to center stage, as the U.S. recognized that rather than slow the advance of communism the partitioning of Korea did the opposite. It gave the communist organizers and sympathizers hope that if they fought hard enough in other countries... like Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines... they might force the U.S. to allow the partition of these countries too, rather than suffer a prolonged war on the battlefield for a country most Americans could care less about.

● Economically, the enormous amount of money that the U.S. spent in Japan, as it used it as a base from which to fight the Korean War, helped Japan quick start its own economic recovery after WWII. In this sense the Korean War had a good impact on society. Unfortunately, this is one of the few instances where positive benefit can be claimed.

● The Korean War poisoned U.S.–China relations for twenty years. During that time, in the eyes of much of the world, China attained the status of a great power. In reality however it struggled on its home grounds to feed its own people and figure out a political system of its own that would work. It was not until its abandonment of communism in all but name that China was able to improve the lives of its people.

All in all, the Korean War was a watershed event, as it altered for all time not just the nature of international affairs but what the world considers an acceptable outcome of war. Yet while we toy here with the philosophical nature and product of the Korean War, and do so as though we are enlightened academics, the fact still remains that America lost 36,913 men and women in the Korean War. And the Korean people, in addition to their loses, have carried around their neck the albatross of an attitude of antipathy towards each other, something made worse by the partition of the country along the 38th parallel. [3]

 

   Miscellaneous Korean War Facts

A) In addition to a fledgling nuclear arsenal, the North Korean army has more than 13,000 artillery tubes—more than any other country— with most of them aimed at South Korea. Their artillery arsenal includes chemical weapons.

B) North Korea has the world's largest special operations forces and more submarines than any other nation. The North's military—the fourth-largest on the planet—includes the world's third-largest ground army. Three-fourths of the army is deployed between the North Korean capital of Pyongyang and the DMZ.

C) Except for the un-electrified black hole that is North Korea, northeast Asia is a booming corner of the world—one of the fastest-growing pieces of the global economy. It produces one-fifth of the world's economic output and trade. The area also represents 25% of all U.S. trade and $221 billion in direct U.S. investment.

D) More than 2,000 American companies operate in South Korea, which in a little more than a decade transformed itself from an agricultural-based economy to the world's largest shipbuilder and a leading microchip producer.

E) South Korea was the second-largest provider of ground troops (following the U.S.) in the Vietnam War. At any one time South Korea had about 50,000 troops in South Vietnam.

 

 

             

Footnotes

[1] In 1974 Congress voted not to enforce the commitments agreed to in the Paris Peace Accords. Air support for Cambodia, South Vietnam, and Laos was cut off. The military aid promised was scaled back or never materialized, the North was allowed to resume support for the Khmer Rouge, and to invade the south and take control.   - To return to your place in the text click here:

[2] Statistics of Democide; Chapter 6, Statistics Of Vietnamese Democide; Estimates, Calculations, And Sources, R.J. Rummel External link: é - To return to your place in the text click here:

[3] CBS News, How Many Americans Died In Korea?, February 11, 2009. External link: é - To return to your place in the text click here:

Additional Sources

Overview of the Korean War and its Legacy; HyoJung Julia Jang, Graduate Student, Center for East Asian Studies, Stanford University. External PDF link: é

Though all but forgotten now, Korean War leaves far-reaching legacy, David Hendee, World-Herald staff writer, Omaha.com.

Stanford Program on Cross Cultural Education; External link: é

Certain photos in this article courtesy of Kim Jae-Hwan, by AFP, Getty Images.

Lynn, Hyung Gu. Bipolar Orders: the Two Koreas Since 1989. Halifax, NS: Fernwood Pub., 2007.

The Korean War: A History; Cumings, B. (2010), New York: Modern Library.

The Government Role in Economic Development, South Korea: A Country Study; Andrea Matles Savada and William Shaw, editors, Washington: GPO for the Library of Congress, 1990. External link: é  

 

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This page originally posted 1 October 2013