This week marked the 70th anniversary of the first shots fired in anger of probably the most consequential of the numerous forgotten wars in modern history – the Korean War (25th June 1950).
Prelude to the conflict
Tensions between the north and south of the Korean Peninsula can be traced back to the 1930s and the Japanese occupation of Korea. Japan’s dominance prompted a resistance movement which included future communist leader and dynasty patriarch of North Korea Kim Il-sung. Some Koreans willingly collaborated with the Japanese invaders including fighting for it against the Korean guerrillas trying to liberate the country (one such agent of the Japanese was a former South Korean president, Park Chung-hee, assassinated in 1979) [‘Collaboration with Japanese hangs over South Korea’, Taipei Times, 08-Mar-2019, www.taipeitimes.com].
(Photo: Bettman Archive/Getty Images)
At the end of WWII, Korea was divided into two zones of military occupation, north (with Kim as leader under the tutelage of the Soviet Union) and south (under US control☼ but eventually with right-wing strongman Syngman Rhee installed as president), with the demarcation line quite arbitrarily defined at the 38th Parallel (38° N) by two American officers . The leaders of both Koreas held ambitions for reunification of the peninsula but with very different kinds of political outcomes in mind. The US’ withdrawal of almost all its military forces from the South in the late 1940s decided Kim on putting the communist reunification plan into action. With USSR and China agreeing to support it, North Korean forces attacked the South in June 1950✧. The ensuing three years saw the opposing forces push each other back and forth along the peninsula (the South’s capital Seoul was captured on four separate occasions) resulting in a stalemate.
⇧ Chinese Volunteer Army crossing the Yalu River (Source: www.goodfreephotos.com)
The Korean War was both a Korean civil war and a proxy superpower war militarily pitting the US v Communist China – as well as an early chapter of Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union and America wrestling for influence over strategically-positioned Korea. The response to North Korea’s invasion was a UN-sanctioned “police action” comprising sixteen nations including Britain and Commonwealth countries but led by the US. After initial defeats and a re-consolidation of its position, the US army drove the North Korean forces back into the northern border with China—at one point the US army captured and held the communists’ capital Pyongyang for eight weeks—this prompted China to enter the conflict with a massive manpower commitment, throwing over 250,000 troops against the Americans and allies and forcing them back deep into South Korea [‘The US Army once ruled Pyongyang and 5 other things you might not know about the Korean War’, (Brad Lendon), CNN, 24-Jun-2020, www.amp.cnn.com].
⇧ MiG-15 fighter: the Korean War saw the first appearance of jet vs jet ‘dogfights’—American F-80s & F-86s fought Russian MiG-15s (manned, first by Russian, and later Chinese and North Korean pilots) with aerial combat taking place in a section of North Korea and the Yalu River that became known as “MiG Alley”
A heavy toll including civilians and MIAs
All together, somewhere between three and four million people died in the conflict. The US army lost nearly 37,000, the South Koreans nearly 138,000. The North Koreans lost up to 400,000 soldiers and the Chinese forces, over 180,000. The MIA tally (missing in action) was very high, over 300,000 from both sides combined. The toll on the civilian population was greatest – the US military unleashed a relentless bombing campaign on North Korea resulting in excess of 280,000 casualties. Virtually all of the modern buildings in North Korea were levelled by the 635,000 tons of US bombs dropped (Lendon).
⇩ Picasso’s ‘Massacre in Korea’ (1951)
A Cold Warrior blueprint from the Pentagon
The US’ involvement in Korea was a key plank in the overall strategy of containing communism in Asia – known in the Pentagon as “Forward Defence”. With the postwar map of Eastern Europe encompassed within the Soviet empire and China under communist rule, Washington saw intervention in the peninsula as fundamental and essential to prevent South Korea from becoming another fallen ‘domino’ to communist infiltration of Eurasia…the same logic that held sway a decade later when America stumbled into an infinitely harder regional conflict to disentangle itself from in Vietnam.
A “limited war”
Mindful of the risk that the Korean War might escalate into a wider Asia conflict or even into “World War III”, US president, Harry S Truman, ordered the US military not to extend it’s aircraft raids into Manchuria and Chinese territory, even though the Chinese were using its north-east provinces to amass its forces to enter the Korean war-zone. This also ruled out using atomic weapons in the conflict, Washington’s reticence to do this was sharpened by awareness of the Soviet Union’s recent demonstration of its own nuclear weapons capability [’Never Truly Forgotten: The Lethal Legacy of the Korean War’, (Rebecca Lissner), War on the Rocks, 25-Jun-2020, www.warontherocks.com].
Korea’s Cold War reverberations for America
An armistice in 1953 brought an end to the hostilities on the peninsula but left the issue unresolved. A demilitarised zone (DMZ) was set up between the two Koreas – a ‘contained’ hotspot which threatens periodically to spill over and reignite hostilities. The conflict in Korea prompted a radical transformation in US defence thinking. To secure its regional forward defence perimeters the US in the early Fifties forged defence alliances with the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan. And with this came a diverse mushrooming of US overseas military postings and bases in the Asia-Pacific region. Most significantly, the war reversed an earlier contraction of US defence spending, by 1951 it’s spending skyrocketed to $48.2 Bn, setting a pattern for future US military expenditure, including a large standing army in peacetime and an increasingly-funded CIA which expanded its surveillance activities across the globe (Lissner; Cummings).
⇩ a US M-24 tank crew, Nakdong River, 1950
Out of sight …
Why was the Korean War consigned to history’s back pages so swiftly? Timing is part of the answer. WWII ended less than five years earlier, it was still fresh in people’s minds and they had had enough of war. The Korean War, when it came, was an unpleasant reminder of that world-shattering, traumatic episode [Eric McGeer, quoted in Toronto Sun, 21-Jun-2020]. Korea was “overshadowed by the global conflagration that preceded it and the nation-rending counter-insurgency campaign in Vietnam that followed it” (Lissner). But the Korean War’s unresolved conclusion has “kept it alive as a major influence on Asian affairs” [Shiela Miyoshi Jager, “5 US Wars Rarely Found in History Books’, ( Jessica Pearce Rotondi), History, 11-May-2020, www.history.com]. Since the ceasefire in 1953 the peninsula has remained a potential world hotspot, a state of tension persisting to the present thanks largely to the periodical bellicose threats of North Korea’s communist dictator Kim Jong-un to use nuclear warfare against South Korea and the US.
End-note: Perpetual state of war
Though hostilities ceased on July 27, 1953, technically the Korean War has never ended as no peace treaty between the combatants was ever signed.
PostScript: A reprieve for Taiwan 🇹🇼
The outbreak of war on the Korean peninsula presaged a change of fate for Taiwan. In 1949, Mao Zedong, having emerged triumphant from the Chinese Civil War against Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT, had amassed a force of troops on the mainland ready to invade and “take back” Taiwan. Korea turned that seeming fait accompli on its head! With fighting starting, Truman, fearful of the war spreading across east Asia, positioned the US 7th Fleet in the Taiwan Strait. Stymied, Peking jettisoned its plans to invade Taiwan and relocated the formation of soldiers to the Korean front (Lendon).
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☼ during the three years of direct US military administration of South Korea to 1948, the US injudiciously misread the political situation and employed despised Korean officers of the former Japanese colonial police to impose security – leading to an open revolt in the country (Cumings).
✧ although the conventional view is that Pyongyang was the aggressor and initiated the fighting by invading the South, some observers have noted that in earlier encounters on the border in 1949, South Korea arguably initiated the bulk of the fighting (Cumings)
The Universal Postal Union (UPU), (French: Union Postale Universelle), originally the “General Postal Union”, was established in 1874 with the task of laying down regulations and bringing uniformity to the setting of tariffs (including the transit costs) for mail exchanges between countries. Prior to it’s inception, a complicated, loose bilateral system prevailed where an individual country would have to establish postal treaties separately with each other country it wished to correspond with. Sometimes this involved calculating postage for each leg of the journey and finding mail forwarders in a third country if there was no direct delivery to the country of destination [‘Universal Postal Union’, 
The initial mid-19th century impetus to create such a global entity came from American frustrations at postal communication with Europe, especially with France, but the decisive thrust came from Heinrich von Stephan, a senior Prussian postal official from the North German Confederation (and later the Reichspost), whose advocacy prompted the Swiss government to host the inaugural international postal conference leading to the formation of the UPU.
UPU’s role also includes the resolving of any polemical issues that may arise between member nations. The great explosion in E-commerce trade has tended to exacerbate cost anomalies in postage tariffs. In 2018 US companies were paying twice as much to mail an item to a US customer than it cost China (and other subsidised Asian countries) to send items to the same US customer (
This issue aside, the habitually low-profile UPU has been largely free of controversy✶, but one other minor discordant note occurred in 1964 when the Fifteenth Congress of UPU voted by a large majority to expel South Africa from membership. This was controversial because several country delegates raised the objection that the action was unconstitutional, arguing that a member could only be expelled for violating UPU’s regulations. The South African delegate initially refused to budge but did so after other African delegates demanded his expulsion [“Universal Postal Union.” International Organization, vol. 20, no. 4, 1966, pp. 834–842. JSTOR,
The UPU has gone from a largely Eurocentric organisation in 1874 to a truly universal one today with about 192 countries of the world (plus territories) signed up۞. A number of other non-member states and territories get their mail routed through a third (member) country including Andorra (through France and Spain), Taiwan (through Japan and US), Kosovo (through Serbia), Northern Cyprus (through Turkey), Micronesia (through the US) and Somaliland (through Ethiopia) [‘List of members of the Universal Postal Union’, Wikipedia, 