Korean War
North Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel on 25 June 1950 and the war ended three years later within a few kilometres of the same line. The parallel had been chosen in 1945 by two American colonels with a National Geographic map, in half an hour, to divide the Japanese surrender. Kim Il Sung had asked Stalin for permission to invade repeatedly and received it in 1950 after the Soviet atomic test and the communist victory in China, on the assumption that the Americans would not intervene — which the American secretary of state had implied in a speech about a defensive perimeter that omitted Korea. The Security Council authorised a response because the Soviet delegate was boycotting it over Chinese representation. The war then went the length of the peninsula three times. The North took everything but a perimeter around Pusan; MacArthur landed at Inchon in September and pushed to the Yalu; some 300,000 Chinese troops crossed in November and drove the United Nations forces back below Seoul; and the line stabilised near the parallel by mid-1951. Two more years were spent fighting over hills while the armistice talks argued about prisoner repatriation. Some three million people died, most of them Korean civilians, and the American bombing destroyed most of the North's towns. The armistice of July 1953 was signed by the military commanders and not by South Korea. No peace treaty has ever been concluded. The war also made the Cold War global and permanent. American defence spending tripled, NATO acquired an integrated command and German rearmament, and the assumption that communist advances anywhere were directed from Moscow governed western policy for the next twenty years.
- Year: 1950 CE
- Category: Military
