INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
CLASS: BSIR 1ST SEMESTER (M)
SUBMITTED TO: MAM SADIA NAZ
SUBMITTED BY:
1- ADNAN KHAN(3050)
2- MUHAMMAD SAJJAD(3031)
TITLE: KOREAN WAR
KOREAN WAR
The Korean war began on June 25, 1950, when some 75,000
soldiers from the North Korean People’s Army poured across the
38th parallel, the boundary between the Soviet-backed
Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to the north and the pro-
Western Republic of Korea to the south. This invasion was the
first military action of the Cold War. By July, American troops had
entered the war on South Korea’s behalf. As far as American
offi cials were concerned, it was a war against the forces of
international communism itself. After some early back-and-forth
across the 38th parallel, the fighting stalled and casualties
mounted with nothing to show for them. Meanwhile, American
offi cials worked anxiously to fashion some sort of armistice with
the North Koreans. The alternative, they feared, would be a wider
war with Russia and China–or even, as some warned, World War
III. Finally, in July 1953, the Korean War came to an end. In all,
some 5 million soldiers and civilians lost their lives in what many
in the U.S. refer to as “the Forgotten War” for the lack of
attention it received compared to more well-known conflicts like
World War I and II and the Vietnam War. The Korean peninsula is
still divided today
Revolution, Division, and
Partisan Warfare, 1945–50
The Korean War had its immediate origins in the collapse of the Japanese
Empire at the end of WW2 in September 1945. Unlike China, Manchuria, and the
former Western colonies seized by Japan in 1941–42, Korea, annexed to Japan
since 1910, did not have a native government or a colonial regime waiting to
return after hostilities ceased. Most claimants to power were harried exiles in
China, Manchuria, Japan, the U.S.S.R., and the United States. They fell into two
broad categories. The first was made up of committed Marxist
revolutionaries who had fought the Japanese as part of the Chinese-
dominated guerrilla armies in Manchuria and China. One of these exiles
was a minor but successful guerrilla leader named Kim Il-sung, who had
received some training in Russia and had been made a major in the Soviet army.
The other Korean nationalist movement, no less revolutionary, drew its
inspiration from the best of science, education, and industrialism in Europe,
Japan, and America. These “ultranationalists” were split into rival factions, one of
which centered on Syngman Rhee, educated in the United States and at one time
the president of a dissident Korean Provisional Government in exile.
In their hurried effort to disarm the Japanese army and repatriate the Japanese
population in Korea (estimated at 700,000), the United States and the Soviet
Union agreed in August 1945 to divide the country for administrative purposes at
the 38th parallel (latitude 38° N). At least from the American perspective, this
geographic division was a temporary expedient; however, the Soviets began a
short-lived reign of terror in northern Korea that quickly politicized the division by
driving thousands of refugees south. The two sides could not agree on a formula
that would produce a unified Korea, and in 1947 U.S. President Harry S.
Truman persuaded the United Nations (UN) to assume responsibility for the
country, though the U.S. military remained nominally in control of the South until
1948. Both the South Korean national police and the constabulary doubled in size,
providing a southern security force of about 80,000 by 1947. In the meantime,
Kim Il-sung strengthened his control over the Communist Party as well as the
northern administrative structure and military forces. In 1948 the North Korean
military and police numbered about 100,000, reinforced by a group of southern
Korean guerrillas based at Haeju in western Korea.
The creation of an independent South Korea became UN policy in early
1948. Southern communists opposed this, and by autumn partisan
warfare had engulfed parts of every Korean province below the 38th
parallel. The fighting expanded into a limited border war between the
Souths’s newly formed Republic of Korea Army (ROKA) and the North
Korean border constabulary as well as the North’s Korean People’s
Army (KPA). The North launched 10 cross-border guerrilla incursions in
order to draw ROKA units away from their guerrilla-suppression
campaign in the South.
North Korea vs South
Korea
“If the best minds in the world had set out to find us the worst possible
location in the world to fight this damnable war,” U.S. Secretary of
State Dean Acheson (1893-1971) once said, “the unanimous choice would
have been Korea.” The peninsula had landed in America’s lap almost by
accident. Since the beginning of the 20th century, Korea had been a part
of the Japanese empire, and after World War II it fell to the Americans
and the Soviets to decide what should be done with their enemy’s
imperial possessions. In August 1945, two young aides at the State
Department divided the Korean peninsula in half along the 38th parallel.
The Russians occupied the area north of the line and the United States
occupied the area to its south. By the end of the decade, two new states
had formed on the peninsula. In the south, the anti-communist dictator
Syngman Rhee (1875-1965) enjoyed the reluctant support of the American
government; in the north, the communist dictator Kim 2 Sung (1912-1994)
enjoyed the slightly more enthusiastic support of the Soviets. Neither
dictator was content to remain on his side of the 38th parallel, however,
and border skirmishes were common. Nearly 10,000 North and South
Korean soldiers were killed in battle before the war even began.
THE KOREAN WAR AND COLD
WAR;
Even so, the North Korean invasion came as an alarming surprise to
American offi cials. As far as they were concerned, this was not simply a
border dispute between two unstable dictatorships on the other side of
the globe. Instead, many feared it was the first step in
a communist campaign to take over the world. For this reason,
nonintervention was not considered an option by many top decision
makers . (In fact, in April 1950, a National Security Council report known as
NSC-68 had recommended that the United States use military force to
“contain” communist expansionism anywhere it seemed to be occurring,
“regardless of the intrinsic strategic or economic value of the lands in
question.”) “If we let Korea down,” President Harry Truman (1884-1972)
said, “the Soviet[s] will keep right on going and swallow up one [place]
after another.” The fight on the Korean peninsula was a symbol of the
global struggle between east and west, good and evil, in the Cold War. As
the North Korean army pushed into Seoul, the South Korean capital, the
United States readied its troops for a war against communism itself. “If we
let Korea down,” President Harry Truman (1884-1972) said, “the Soviet[s]
will keep right on going and swallow up one [place] after another.” The
fight on the Korean peninsula was a symbol of the global struggle between
east and west, good and evil, in the Cold War. As the North Korean army
pushed into Seoul, the South Korean capital, the United States readied its
troops for a war against communism itself. At first, the war was a
defensive one to get the communists out of South Korea, and it went
badly for the Allies. The North Korean army was well-disciplined, well-
trained and well-equipped; Rhee’s forces in the South Korean army, by
contrast, were frightened, confused and seemed inclined to flee the
battlefield at any provocation. Also, it was one of the hottest and driest
summers on record, and desperately thirsty American soldiers were often
forced to drink water from rice paddies that had been fertilized with
human waste. As a result, dangerous intestinal diseases and other
illnesses were a constant threat.
By the end of the summer, President Truman and General Douglas
MacArthur (1880-1964), the commander in charge of the Asian theater,
had decided on a new set of war aims. Now, for the Allies, the Korean War
was an offensive one: It was a war to “liberate” the North from the
communists.
Initially, this new strategy was a success. The Inch’on Landing, an
amphibious assault at Inch’on, pushed the North Koreans out of Seoul and
back to their side of the 38th parallel. But as American troops crossed the
boundary and headed north toward the Yalu River, the border
between North Korea and Communist China, the Chinese started to worry
about protecting themselves from what they called “ armed aggression
against Chinese territory.” Chinese leader Mao Zedong (1893-1976) sent
troops to North Korea and warned the United States to keep away from
the Yalu boundary unless it wanted full-scale war.
Casualties:
Approximately 3 million people died in the Korean War, the majority of whom
were civilians, making it perhaps the deadliest conflict of the Cold War-
era. Samuel S. Kim lists the Korean War as the deadliest conflict in East Asia—
itself the region most affected by armed conflict related to the Cold War–from
1945 to 1994, with 3 million dead, more than the Vietnam War and Chinese Civil
War during the same period. Although only rough estimates of civilian fatalities
are available, scholars from Guenter Lewy to Bruce Cumings have noted that the
percentage of civilian casualties in Korea was higher than in World War II or the
Vietnam War, with Cumings putting civilian casualties at 2 million and Lewy
estimating civilian deaths in the range of 2 million to 3 million. Cumings states
that civilians represent "at least" half of the war's casualties, while Lewy suggests
that the civilian portion of the death toll "may have gone as high as 70 percent",
compared to Lewy's estimates of 42% in World War II and 30%–46% in the
Vietnam War. Data compiled by the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) lists just
under 1 million "battle deaths" over the course of the Korean War (with a range
of 644,696 to 1.5 million) and a mid-value estimate of 3 million total deaths (with
a range of 1.5 million to 4.5 million), attributing the difference to excess mortality
among civilians from one-sided massacres, starvation, and disease.] Compounding
this devastation for Korean civilians, virtually all of the major cities on the entire
Korean Peninsula were destroyed as a result of the war. In both per capita and
absolute terms, North Korea was the country most devastated by the war, which
resulted in the death of an estimated 12%–15% of the North Korean population
(c. 10 million), "a figure close to or surpassing the proportion of Soviet citizens
killed in World War II, according to Charles K. Armstrong. The May 1953 bombing
of major North Korean dams threatened several million more North Koreans with
starvation, although large-scale famine was averted with emergency aid provided
by North Korea's allies.
Military:
According to the data from the US Department of Defense, the US suffered
33,686 battle deaths, along with 2,830 non-battle deaths, during the Korean War.
American combat casualties were over 90 percent of non-Korean UN losses. ] U.S.
battle deaths were 8,516 up to their first engagement with the Chinese on 1
November 1950. The first four months of the Korean War, that is, the war prior to
the Chinese intervention (which started near the end of October), were by far the
bloodiest per day for the US forces as they engaged and destroyed the
comparatively well-equipped KPA in intense fighting. American medical records
show that from July to October 1950, the US Army sustained 31 percent of the
combat deaths it would ultimately accumulate in the whole 37-month war. The
U.S. spent $30 billion in total on the war.[311] Some 1,789,000 American soldiers
served in the Korean War, accounting for 31 percent of the 5,720,000 Americans
who served on active-duty worldwide from June 1950 to July 1953.
South Korea reported some 137,899 military deaths and 24,495 missing. Deaths
from the other non-American U.N. militaries totaled 3,730, with another 379
missing.
Civilian:
According to the South Korean Ministry of National Defense, there were over
three-quarters of a million confirmed violent civilians deaths during the war,
another million civilians were pronounced missing, and millions more ended up as
refugees. In South Korea, some 373,500 civilians were killed, more than 225,600
wounded, and over 387,740 were listed as missing. During the first communist
occupation of Seoul alone, the KPA massacred 128,936 civilians and deported
another 84,523 to North Korea. On the other side of the border, some 406,000
North Korean civilians were reported to have been killed, 1,594,000 were
wounded, and 680,000 were missing. Over 1.5 million North Koreans fled to the
South during the war
Armistice:
The 1950-53 Korean War ended in an armistice, with neither side able to claim
outright victory.
Decades on, the truce is still all that technically prevents North Korea and the US -
along with its ally South Korea - resuming the war, as no peace treaty has ever
been signed.
Both sides regularly accuse the other of violating the agreement, but the
accusations have become more frequent as tensions rise over North Korea's
nuclear programme.
When the armistice was signed on 27 July 1953, talks had already dragged on for
two years, ensnared in testy issues such as the exchange of prisoners of war and
the location of a demarcation line.
Military commanders from China and North Korea signed the agreement on one
side, with the US-led United Nations Command signing on behalf of the
international community. South Korea was not a signatory.
The armistice was only ever intended as a temporary measure.
