Toll of Korean War remembered in numbers, 75 years later

With her brother on her back, a war-weary Korean girl tiredly trudges by a stalled M-26 tank, at Haengju, Korea, on June 9, 1951. [U.S. NATIONAL ARCHIVES]

 
Many in the West call it the “Forgotten War,” but to Koreans, the conflict that began 75 years ago today is anything but.
 
Triggered by a large-scale North Korean invasion, the 1950-53 Korean War ultimately claimed almost three million lives — the majority of them civilians — and utterly devastated the peninsula.
 
As the first conflagration of the Cold War, the Korean War also marked the first time that the young United Nations, and its mission to safeguard international peace, were put to the test.
 
Ultimately, 16 nations answered the Security Council’s call for troops to defend South Korea — forming the UN’s largest and only true collective security force to date to militarily confront aggression — while six others sent medical units to help the wounded and the dying.
 
Though eclipsed in popular memory by later 20th-century conflicts, the Korean War perhaps remains the longest-lasting — not least because it ended in only a ceasefire, but also due to the inter-Korean division and hostility it cemented.
 
From liberation to war in 5 years
 
Whereas the North’s 1950 invasion was carefully planned, Korea’s partition upon its liberation from Japanese colonial rule five years prior was conceived with little foresight and implemented in haste.
 
As Japan’s defeat in World War II loomed in July 1945, the United States and Soviet Union agreed to establish a joint trusteeship over Korea. Beneath the surface, however, their wartime alliance was already fraying. Angered by U.S. secrecy over its nuclear weapons program, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin sent troops into Manchuria and northern Korea on Aug. 9, 1945, a day after the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, catching the Americans by surprise.
 

Civilians comb through rubble in downtown Seoul, Nov. 1, 1950. The badly damaged General Government Building, a relic of the Japanese occupation of Korea, is visible in the distance. [U.S. NATIONAL ARCHIVES]

In response, two U.S. Army officers in Washington were tasked with devising a partition of Korea acceptable to the Soviets. Using a National Geographic atlas, they proposed dividing the peninsula at the 38th parallel. The Soviets agreed.
 
The plan was intended to be temporary and to prepare Korea for full independence under joint U.S.-Soviet tutelage. But as Cold War tensions deepened, the line between the two zones began to harden into a border.
 
With the two sides still unable to agree on how to unify the country in 1947, the United States turned to the UN, which called for nationwide elections. The Soviets refused. They backed a 35-year-old guerrilla-turned-communist leader named Kim Il Sung as the leader of their zone. In the south, U.S. officials threw their support behind Syngman Rhee, a U.S.-educated nationalist and ardent anti-communist.
 
In the end, the UN-backed election of May 1948 was held only in the South. By the autumn of that year, Korea had two rival governments — each claiming to be the sole legitimate ruler of the entire peninsula.
 
A 2:1 troop advantage for the North, zero tanks and fighter jets for the South 
 
While neither Rhee nor Kim was satisfied with a divided Korea, only Kim could persuade his superpower patron to back a war of reunification.
 
Initially, Stalin was cautious. But that changed after the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb in August 1949 and communists led by Mao Zedong seized power in China two months later, forcing Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists to retreat to Taiwan.
 
When U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson outlined America’s defense perimeter in Asia in a January 1950 speech — conspicuously excluding South Korea — Stalin gave his approval. Mao also promised to support Kim if needed.
 

Moscow supplied Pyongyang with state-of-the-art weaponry, including more than 200 Soviet-made T-34 tanks and dozens of fighter planes and bombers. Meanwhile, some 50,000 to 70,000 ethnic Koreans who had fought alongside Chinese communists joined Kim’s military ranks.
 
By June 1950, North Korea’s army had grown to almost 200,000 men. In contrast, South Korean forces — lightly armed and lacking tanks or combat aircraft — numbered only around 100,000. The Americans, wary that Rhee might launch an invasion of his own, had refused to supply South Korea with heavy weapons.
 
With this edge, Kim struck first.
 

The North Korean invasion of June 1950.

Seoul changes hands 4 times
 
In the early hours of June 25, 1950, North Korean troops surged across the 38th parallel in six coordinated assaults. Overwhelmed and outgunned, South Korean forces fell back in disarray. To compound the disaster, the South Korean military blew up the Han River Bridge in Seoul three days later while it still held the capital, stranding some 30,000 South Korean soldiers on the wrong side.
 
By the war’s fourth day, the South Korean army could account for only a quarter of its men, and Seoul had fallen to the North Koreans.
 
Though the North claimed its offensive was a counterattack against an invasion by the South, few fell for this deception. In New York, the United Nations moved swiftly. Hours after the news of the invasion reached Washington, the Security Council passed a U.S.-drafted resolution calling for an immediate cessation of hostilities and a North Korean withdrawal.
 
The vote passed unanimously, aided by a stroke of luck: the Soviet Union, in protest over the UN’s refusal to seat communist China instead of Taiwan, was boycotting the council.
 
Within a week, U.S. forces began arriving in Korea, marking the start of their three-year participation in military operations on the peninsula — longer than America had boots on the ground in Europe during World War II.  
 
But their initial efforts failed in the face of the well-trained North Korean onslaught. By August, UN and South Korean troops had retreated to the Pusan Perimeter, a last-ditch defensive line along the Nakdong River in the southeastern corner of the peninsula.
 

Lieutenant Baldomero Lopez of the Marine Corps scales a seawall after landing on Red Beach Point on Sept. 15, 1950. Lopez was killed covering a live grenade with his body minutes after the photo was taken. He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. [U.S. NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND]

Then came the boldest maneuver of the war.
 
On Sept. 15, 1950, Gen. Douglas MacArthur orchestrated amphibious landings at Incheon, near Seoul, turning the tide of the war. The surprise move cut North Korean supply lines and allowed UN forces to retake the South Korean capital.
 
By October, they were driving north, pushing Kim’s forces all the way to the Yalu River that marks Korea’s border with China.
 

UN forces held a defensive line around the southeastern corner of the peninsula until the Incheon landings took place, enabling them to break out.

Kim’s pleas for a direct Soviet intervention were rejected by Stalin, who ordered him and his troops to evacuate the North.
 
Help came instead from Mao, who felt threatened by the approach of American troops onto his country’s doorstep.
 
Hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops poured into Korea beginning in late October 1950, forcing UN troops into retreat by December. Seoul fell to the Chinese in January 1951, only to be recaptured by UN forces two months later.  
 

After recapturing all the territory lost in the initial North Korean invasion, UN forces pushed toward the Yalu River until their progress was reversed by Chinese forces in late 1950.

Over 3 million dead to maintain the status quo
 
From mid-1951 onward, the war devolved into a static struggle reminiscent of World War I: trenches, dueling artillery bombardments and high-casualty battles.
 
Both sides continuously injected soldiers into the fight. By 1952, the South Korean military had reached a peak of 600,000 men, while the Americans kept just under 330,000 troops on the peninsula through the war.
 
Altogether, over 3 million soldiers participated on the UN side during the war, while a similar number fought under the communists.
 

Chinese forces captured Seoul in early 1951. The Chinese intervention prompted civilians to flee en masse from the North.

Peace talks opened at Panmunjom in July 1951, but soon stalled — mostly over the fate of prisoners of war. 
 
The Chinese and North Koreans wanted all of their captured soldiers, estimated at 150,000, to be returned, while the United Nations Command (UNC) argued that anticommunist POWs should not be repatriated against their will. Further, the communists claimed they had only 10,000 POWs, a figure disputed by the UNC. 
 
Many of the unaccounted South Korean prisoners, as it turned out, were deported away from the front to toil in mines, with only a handful managing to escape in the decades after the war’s end.

By mid-1951, the drastic changes of territory that had characterized the early phase of the war had given way to a stalemate.

 
For two years, talks over POWs proceeded haltingly as soldiers continued to die.
 
It took Stalin’s death, and the subsequent change in Soviet policy, to push the two sides to reach a settlement, which was to include a commission of neutral nations to observe the processing of POWs.  
 
But South Korea under Rhee remained opposed to an armistice, which would leave the country divided despite the deaths of millions. He attempted to scuttle the impending ceasefire by releasing 27,000 anticommunist North Korean POWs. He insisted that the South Korean military would reunify the peninsula, with or without the UNC.
 
To call his bluff, the Chinese launched a final offensive in the last month of the war, pushing the South Korean military almost six miles south. After that, there was no more talk of Seoul carrying on the war alone.
 
An armistice was finally signed without South Korea on July 27, 1953. By that point, approximately 10 percent of the peninsula’s pre-war population had perished, while millions more were displaced or separated from their families.
 
A formal peace treaty was never concluded.
 
No end 75 years later, but 22 countries remembered
 
The Korean War’s most visible legacy is the demilitarized zone, a heavily fortified buffer strip that continues to divide the peninsula — and a reminder that the two Koreas remain technically at war.
 
But the true impact of the conflict runs deeper.
 
For the United States, South Korea’s survival and economic rise reinforced American belief in the power of military intervention to support nation-building — a lesson that influenced later U.S. actions in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, often with far different outcomes.
 
In China, the war became both a point of pride and a source of grievance. Standing toe-to-toe with the United States gave Mao Zedong’s regime a sense of legitimacy, but lingering resentment over Stalin’s refusal to become directly embroiled, even as the Chinese death toll mounted, precipitated a rift between Beijing and Moscow. The war also led to a U.S. commitment to Taiwan’s defense, locking in another Cold War flashpoint that persists today.
 
Perhaps no country was more profoundly reshaped by the war than North Korea. Beyond the physical ruin of its cities and colossal loss of life, the regime emerged from the conflict clinging to a foundational lie: that the South had started the war.
 
In the aftermath, Kim moved swiftly to consolidate power, purging Soviet- and Chinese-aligned factions from the ruling Workers’ Party. Kim further exploited the rivalry between Moscow and Beijing by playing the two communist powers off one another to secure aid for the North’s increasingly stagnant economy.
 
To this day, the impoverished regime continues to invoke the destruction wrought by the Americans as its raison d’être — while steadfastly concealing its own role in igniting the war.
 

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Meanwhile, the threat of renewed aggression from the North became a defining feature of South Korean politics and society. For decades, authoritarian leaders in Seoul invoked the trauma of the war to justify repression and curtailing civil liberties in the name of national security.
 
At the same time, the war forged enduring international bonds — most notably the mutual defense treaty with the United States, and the continued presence of the UNC. These institutions gave South Korea tangible guarantees against further attacks, enabling it to pursue rapid economic development and eventually become a vibrant democracy. 
 
The country today is not only a testament to what emerged from the devastation, but also a reminder of the immense price paid.

BY MICHAEL LEE [lee.junhyuk@joongang.co.kr]