CNN
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75 years ago this week, more than 135,000 North Korean troops invaded South Korea, claiming millions of lives, leaving scars that remain to this day.
However, the Korean War has been overshadowed forever by World War II. This is a much bigger conflict that ended five years ago. Even the US military calls South Korea a “forgotten war.”
Sixteen countries, including the United States, sent combat troops under the United Nations Command, with the assistance of South Korea. The Chinese military intervened on the North Korean side.
The war broke out on June 25, 1950, and North Korean troops were attacked in parallel, the 38th parallel, isolated from North Korea and South Korea. The armistice, signed on July 27, 1953, stopped the conflict, but the war did not officially end due to the absence of a peace treaty.
Today’s twists and turns of South Korea relations in the Northern United States shine a spotlight on the legacy of the Korean War, but it is still an overlooked conflict.
Here are six things you may not know about the Korean War:
It is almost impossible for Americans to travel to North Korea or its capital Pyongyang. US passport holders are not permitted to go there without special permission from the US Department of State.
However, for eight weeks in 1950, Pyongyang controlled the US military.
On October 19th of that year, according to US Army history, the US Army’s 1st Cavalry Division and the South Korean soldiers unit captured the North Korean capital.
History shows that the US military was quickly at home.
By October 22nd, the US military had established its headquarters in the headquarters building of North Korean leader Kim Il Sung.
Photos from the time show an American intelligence agent sitting at Kim’s desk, showing a portrait of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin hanging on the wall behind him.
However, the US military’s occupation of Pyongyang was short-lived. When the Chinese forces entered the war in late November 1950, they quickly pushed south and by December 5th they defeated the US forces from Pyongyang.
Most images of the Korean War are ground battles fought in places like Choshin Reservoir and Incheon. But much of the destruction was brought to North Korea by US forces, and was carried out in a relentless bombing campaign.
During the three years of the Korean War, US aircraft dropped 635,000 tonnes of bombs (both highly explosive and incited) on North Korea. This is more than the 500,000 tonnes of bombs that the US dropped into the Pacific Ocean throughout World War II, according to figures cited by Charles Armstrong of Asia-Pacific magazine.
Journalists, international observers and American prisoners of war in North Korea reported that almost every substantial building had been destroyed. By November 1950, North Korea had advised its citizens to dig holes in housing and shelters.
Although North Korea did not maintain official casualties figures from the bombing, information obtained from Russian archives by the Wilson Centre’s Cold War International History Project has exceeded 280,000.
General Curtis Lemey, the father of US strategic bombings and the architect of the fire raids that destroyed Japanese cities during World War II, spoke about North Korea’s American bombing.
“We went there, fought the war and eventually burned down all the towns of North Korea in some way.”
Armstrong said the North Korean bombing has had an impact to date.
“The DPRK government never forgot the lessons of North Korea’s vulnerability to American air attacks, and for half a century, after the armistice continued to strengthen reflexive defenses, constructed underground facilities, and ensured that nuclear weapons were in their position again.
North Korea persuaded the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin to launch a war
When World War II ended, the rule of the Korean Peninsula – occupied by defeated Japanese forces – was divided between the Soviet Union in the north and the US in the south.
Wilson Centre records show that North Korean leader Kim Il Sung wanted to unite the two South Koreas under communist rule and forced the permission of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.
With Kim’s request to invade first in March 1949, Stalin was cautious and did not want to be drawn into a conflict with the United States, where South Korea still had occupying forces.
However, when those troops were pulled in the summer of 1949, Stalin’s opposition softened, and by April 1950 the Soviet leader was ready to hear Kim again when the North Korean leader visited Moscow.
Stalin told Kim that the Soviet Union would support the invasion, but only if Kim also approved the communist China.
Encouraged by the 1949 victory over China’s nationalist military – in a civil war that Washington did not intervene, Chinese leader Mao Zedong agreed and offered to be the North Korean military backup unit in the finality of the US intervening.
So Kim had a green light to break in.
In 1949, communist China had gathered troops along the coast to invade Taiwan, where Chen Kai Shek and his nationalist forces had fled after losing to Mao Zedong and the Communists in the Chinese civil war.
However, the outbreak of the Korean War caused it to get in the way of the US Navy, a communist Chinese plan. Fearing the South Korean battles spread across East Asia, President Harry Truman sent US warships to the seas between China and Taiwan.
The US State Department is now telling how close Taiwan is, the autonomous protest that Beijing still claims as part of China.
“In late 1949 and early 1950, American officials were prepared for Chinese (People’s Republic of China) forces to cross the strait to defeat Chen, but after the Korean War broke out in June 1950, the US sent a seventh fleet into the Taiwan Strait to prevent the Korean conflict from spreading south.”
“The appearance of the seventh fleet angered Chinese communists who had transported troops poised to invade Taiwan’s invasions on the South Korean front.”
By October 19, 1950, 12 Communist Chinese military divisions were in North Korea, according to Brookings Institutional accounts.
These Chinese forces brought terrible losses to the US and South Korean forces they faced, and were eventually driven out of North Korea entirely.
However, China also suffered massive losses. More than 180,000 troops were killed.
The Jet Fighters entered military service in World War II with the introduction of the German Messerschmitt 262. However, the jet’s fighter did not go head-on in a “Top Gun” style dogfight until the Korean War.
Records appear to agree that the first dog battle took place on November 8, 1950, near the Yaru River, near the Yaru River, near the Yaru River, and across the border with China. Flying the American F-80 shooting star jet was probably facing a Soviet-made jet, piloted by a Soviet pilot from a Chinese base.
According to a report from the US Air Force’s 51st fighter jet historian, 8-12 MIGs came after the American flights of four F-80s that day. In a 60-second encounter with one of these MIGs, Air Force’s 1st Annual Lt. Colonel Russell Brown became the first jet fighter pilot to hit a MIG-15 in a fire from a jet’s cannon, exploded in flames and earn a kill in a dogfight.
However, others have challenged the account, and in a report from the US Navy Institute (USNI), which states that Soviet records show that MIG was not lost that day.
What is certain is that the following day, November 9, 1950, U.S. Navy Lieutenant Colonel CMDR. William Amen, flying the F9F fighter from the aircraft carrier USS Philippine Sea, fired down the MIG-15 during an airstrike on the Yaru River bridge.
Soviet records confirm the loss of the MIG-15 that day, according to a USNI report.
Later in the war, the US introduced the F-86 jet into the South Korean conflict. The plane, known as “Mig Alley,” along the South Korean-China border, where Soviet pilots leapt out of their Chinese bases, gained fame in their battle with the Mig-15.
The US Air Force Museum in Ohio describes Mig Alley in this way.
“A large amount of MIGS is to wait on the Manchuria side of the border. When UN aircraft enters MIG’s alleys, these MIGs will dive from high altitude and attack. If MIGS is in trouble, they will try to escape to communist China. The US Air Force Saber Pilot, who has earned a kill rate of about 8:1 against the MIG.”
Millions of lives were lost during the battles on the Korean Peninsula between 1950 and 1953, but they were technically victims of what they called “police actions.”
Under the US Constitution, only the US Congress can declare war with another country. But that hasn’t been done since World War II.
When North Korea invaded the South in 1950, US President Harry Truman intervened to intervene in the US military as part of a total effort approved by the UN Security Council.
“Fifteen other countries also sent troops under the UN Command. Truman did not seek a formal declaration of war from Congress. Officially, America’s presence in South Korea was nothing more than a “police action.”
And those police actions have since become the norm for US military intervention. According to the website of the US House of Representatives, the Vietnam War, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo have all seen them join combat under Congress’ permission for the use of military force (AUMF).
Although the AUMF has been around since the beginning of the Republic, “after World War II… AUMFS is much broader and often allows the president to sweep the authority to engage with the US military around the world,” the US home website says.
“War was the first massive foreign US conflict without a declaration of war, setting a precedent for the one-sided presidential forces exercised today,” Emory University law professor Mary DeJacques wrote in a 2019 opinion column for the Washington Post.
“The Korean War helped to make the eternal war possible of this century,” Doziack wrote.
