Korean War Case Study

Introduction
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 officials 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 officials 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.

Map of North Korea and South Korea. The red line indicates the present-day border between the two nations.
Beginning of the War
When Korea was liberated from Japanese control at the end of the Second
World War, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed temporarily to
divide Korea at the 38th parallel of latitude north of the equator. This division
resulted in the formation of two countries: communist North Korea (supported
by the Soviets) and South Korea (supported by United States). Five years
after the country’s partition, the communist leader of North Korea, Kim Il
Sung, decided to attempt to reunify Korea under his control. On June 25,
1950, Kim launched a surprise invasion of South Korea.

Believing that the Soviet Union had backed the invasion, United States
President Harry Truman and his advisers followed through on their policy of
containment, refusing to allow communism to spread anywhere in the world.
Within two days of the invasion, the United States had rallied the United
Nations Security Council to declare support for South Korea. An American-led
UN coalition deployed to South Korea. By August, North Korean forces had
swept across almost all of South Korea; American forces held only a small
defensive perimeter in the country’s southeast, near Busan. In September,
however, under the command of General Douglas MacArthur, the United
States launched a bold counter-offensive that included a daring amphibious
landing in territory held by North Korean forces at Inchon, on South Korea’s
western coast. Soon, US forces drove the North Koreans back to the border at
the 38th parallel.

Invasion and Counterinvasion (1950-1951)

In early 1949 Kim Il-sung pressed his case with Soviet leader Joseph
Stalin that the time had come for a conventional invasion of the South. Stalin
refused, concerned about the relative unpreparedness of the North Korean
armed forces and about possible U.S. involvement. In the course of the next
year, the communist leadership built the KPA into a formidable offensive force
modeled after a Soviet mechanized army. The Chinese released Korean
veterans from the People’s Liberation Army, while the Soviets provided
armaments. By 1950 the North Koreans enjoyed substantial advantages over
the South in every category of equipment. After another Kim visit to Moscow
in March–April 1950, Stalin approved an invasion.

In the predawn hours of June 25, the North Koreans struck across the 38th
parallel behind a thunderous artillery barrage. The principal offensive,
conducted by the KPA I Corps (53,000 men), drove across the Imjin River
toward Seoul. The II Corps (54,000 soldiers) attacked along two widely
separated axes, one through the cities of Ch’unch’ŏn and Inje to Hongch’ŏn
and the other down the east coast road toward Kangnŭng. The KPA entered
Seoul in the afternoon of June 28, but the North Koreans did not accomplish
their goal of a quick surrender by the Rhee government and the disintegration
of the South Korean army. Instead, remnants of the Seoul-area ROKA forces
formed a defensive line south of the Han River, and on the east coast road
ROKA units gave ground in good order. Still, if the South was to stave off
collapse, it would need help—from the U.S. armed forces. Truman’s initial
response was to order MacArthur to transfer munitions to the ROKA and to
use air cover to protect the evacuation of U.S. citizens. Instead of pressing for
a congressional declaration of war, which he regarded as too alarmist and
time-consuming when time was of the essence, Truman went to the United
Nations for sanction. Under U.S. guidance, the UN called for the invasion to
halt (June 25), then for the UN member states to provide military assistance to
the ROK (June 27). By charter the Security Council considered and passed
the resolutions, which could have been vetoed by a permanent member such
as the Soviet Union. The Soviets, however, were boycotting the Council over
the issue of admitting communist China to the UN. Congressional and public
opinion in the United States, meanwhile, supported military intervention
without significant dissent.

The 38th Parallel

As UNC troops crossed the 38th parallel, Chinese Communist Party

Chairman Mao Zedong received a plea for direct military aid from Kim Il-sung.
The chairman was willing to intervene, but he needed assurances of Soviet air
power. Stalin promised to extend China’s air defenses (manned by Soviets) to
a corridor above the Yalu, thus protecting air bases in Manchuria and
hydroelectric plants on the river, and he also promised new Soviet weapons
and armaments factories. After much debate, Mao ordered the Renmin
Zhiyuanjun, or Chinese People’s Volunteers Force (CPVF), to cross into
Korea. It was commanded by General Peng Dehuai, a veteran of 20 years
of war against the Chinese Nationalists and the Japanese.

Seoul during Korean War

The Chinese First Offensive (October 25–November 6, 1950) had the limited
objective of testing U.S.-ROK fighting qualities and slowing their advance. In
the battle of Onjŏng-Unsan along the Ch’ŏngch’ŏn River, the Chinese ruined
seven Korean and U.S. regiments—including the only Korean regiment to
reach the Yalu, cut off in the vastness of the cold northern hills near Ch’osan.
The Chinese suffered 10,000 casualties, but they were convinced that they
had found a formula for fighting UNC forces: attack at night, cut off routes of
supply and withdrawal, ambush counterattacking forces, and exploit all forms
of concealment and cover. Stunned by the suddenness of the Chinese
onslaught and almost 8,000 casualties (6,000 of them Koreans), the Eighth
Army fell back to the south bank of the Ch’ŏngch’ŏn and tightened its
overextended lines. With a harsh winter beginning and supplies in shortage,
the pause was wise. Another matter of concern to the UNC was the
appearance of MiG-15 jet fighters above North Korea. Flown by Soviet pilots
masquerading as Chinese and Koreans, the MiGs, in one week’s action
(November 1–7), stopped most of the daytime raids on North Korea. The U.S.
Air Force immediately dispatched a crack wing of F-86 Sabre jet interceptors
to Japan, and thus a two-and-a-half year battle for air superiority was joined.
Over the course of the war, the F-86s succeeded in allowing the Far East Air
Forces (FEAF) to conduct offensive air operations anywhere in North Korea,
and they also protected the Eighth Army from communist air attack. However,
they were never able to provide perfect protection for B-29s flying daylight
raids into ―MiG Alley,‖ a corridor in northwestern Korea where MiGs based
near An-tung, Manchuria (now Dandong, China), fiercely defended bridges
and dams on the Yalu River.

Map of Korean War 1950-1951

The FEAF also turned its fury on all standing structures that might
shield the Chinese from the cold; cities and towns all over North Korea
went up in flames. But the air assault did not halt the buildup for the
Chinese Second Offensive. This time Peng’s instructions to his army
commanders stressed the necessity to lure the Americans and ―puppet
troops‖ out of their defensive positions between the Ch’ŏngch’ŏn and
P’yŏngyang, giving the impression of weakness and confusion, while
Peng would surround their forward elements with his much-enlarged
force of 420,000 Chinese and North Korean regulars. MacArthur, in
what may have been his only real military mistake of the war, ordered
the Eighth Army and X Corps northward into the trap on November
24, and from November 25 to December 14 the Chinese battered them
back to South Korea. Falling upon the U.S. IX Corps and the ROK II
Corps from the east, Peng’s Thirteenth Army Group opened up a gap
to the west and almost cut off the I Corps north of the Ch’ŏngch’ŏn.
The I Corps managed to fight its way through Chinese ambushes back
to P’yŏngyang. In the eastern sector the Chinese Ninth Army Group
sent two armies against the 1st Marine Division near the Changjin
Reservoir (known to the Americans by its Japanese name, Chosin).
Under the worst possible weather conditions, the marines turned and
fought their way south, destroying seven Chinese divisions before
reaching sanctuary at the port of Hŭngnam on December 11.
At the height of the crisis, MacArthur conferred with Walker and
Almond, and they agreed that their forces would try to establish
enclaves in North Korea, thus preserving the option of holding the
P’yŏngyang-Wŏnsan line. In reality, Walker had finally reached the
limits of his disgust with MacArthur’s meddling and posturing, and he
started his men south. By December 6 the Eighth Army had destroyed
everything it could not carry and had taken the road for Seoul.
Walker’s initiative may have saved his army, but it also meant that
much of the rest of the war would be fought as a UNC effort to
recapture ground surrendered with little effort in December 1950.
Walker himself died in a traffic accident just north of Seoul on
December 23 and was succeeded by Lieutenant General Matthew B.
Ridgway.
Heartened by the ease with which the CPVF had driven the UNC out of
North Korea, Mao Zedong expanded his war aims to demand that the
Chinese army unify all of Korea and drive the Americans and puppets
off the peninsula. His enthusiasm increased when the Chinese Third
Offensive (December 31, 1950–January 5, 1951) retook Seoul. The
Chinese attacks centred on ROKA divisions, which were showing signs
of defeatism and ineptness. Ridgway, therefore, had to rely in the
short term upon his U.S. divisions, many of which had now gained
units from other UN participants. In addition to two
British Commonwealth brigades, there were units
from Turkey, France, Belgium, The Netherlands,
Greece, Colombia, Thailand, Ethiopia, and the Philippines. Pulling his
multinational force together, Ridgway pushed back to the Han
River valley in January 1951.
The Chinese, now reinforced by a reborn North Korean army,
launched their Fourth Offensive on February 11, 1951. Again the initial
attacks struck ill-prepared South Korean divisions, and again the UNC
gave ground. Again the Eighth Army fought back methodically,
crossing the 38th parallel after two months. At that point Peng began
the Fifth Offensive (First Phase) with 11 Chinese armies and two North
Korean corps. The attacks came at an awkward moment for the Eighth
Army. On April 11 Truman, having reached the opinion that
MacArthur’s independence amounted to insubordination, had relieved
the general of all his commands and recalled him to the United States.
The change elevated Ridgway to commander in chief, FECOM and
UNC, and brought Lieutenant General James A. Van Fleet to
command the Eighth Army. Like Ridgway, Van Fleet had earned wide
respect as a division and corps commander against the Germans in
1944–45.
Before Van Fleet could re-form the ROK Army and redeploy his own
divisions, the Chinese struck. At a low point in Korean military history,
the battered ROKA II Corps gave way, and U.S. divisions peeled back
to protect their flanks and rear until Van Fleet could commit five more
U.S. and Korean divisions and a British brigade to halt the Chinese
armies on April 28. Mao refused to accept Peng’s report that the CPVF
could no longer hold the initiative, and he ordered the Second Phase of
the offensive, which began on May 16 and lasted another bloody week.
Once again allied air power and heavy artillery stiffened the resistance,
and once again the UNC crossed the 38th parallel in pursuit of a
battered (but not beaten) Chinese expeditionary force.

Battling Over Prisoners of War (POW) & Geneva

Convention:-
As another bitterly cold Korean winter congealed operations on the
ground, repatriation of prisoners of war (POWs) became the most
intractable issue at P’anmunjŏm. The initial assumption by the
negotiators was that they would follow the revised Geneva
Convention of 1949, which required any ―detaining authority‖ that
held POWs to return all of them to their homelands as rapidly as
possible when a war ended. This ―all for all‖ policy of a complete—even
forced—exchange of prisoners was certainly favoured by the U.S.
military, which was alarmed by early reports from Korea of atrocities
against allied POWs. The South Korean government, on the other
hand, was adamantly opposed to complete and involuntary
repatriation, since it knew that thousands of detainees in the South
were actually South Korean citizens who had been forced to fight with
the KPA. Indeed, the North Koreans knew that they had much to
answer for regarding their impressment, murder, and kidnapping of
South Koreans. The Chinese army leaders, meanwhile, knew that some
of their soldiers, impressed from the ranks of the Nationalist army,
would refuse repatriation if it was not made mandatory.
Geneva Conventions, a series of international treaties concluded
in Geneva between 1864 and 1949 for the purpose of ameliorating the
effects of war on soldiers and civilians. Two additional protocols to the
1949 agreement were approved in 1977. This Convention provided for-
1. The immunity from capture and destruction of all establishments
for the treatment of wounded and sick soldiers and their personnel,
2. The impartial reception and treatment of all combatants,
3. The protection of civilians providing aid to the wounded, and
4. The recognition of the Red Cross symbol as a means of identifying
persons and equipment covered by the agreement.

End of War:-

The battle of the Kŭmsong salient ended the shooting war. On May 25
the P’anmunjŏm negotiators had worked out the details of
the POW exchange, making provisions for ―neutral nation‖
management of the repatriation process. They began to plan for an
armistice signing. Then, on June 18–19, Syngman Rhee arranged for
his military police to allow 27,000 Korean internees in their custody to
―escape.‖ Enraged, the Chinese ordered further attacks on the ROKA.
The Americans shared their fury but, in the interest of compromise,
convinced Rhee that the United States would meet all his
preconditions for an armistice. On July 9 Rhee agreed to accept the
armistice, though no representative of the ROK ever signed it. On July
27 Mark W. Clark for the UNC, Peng Dehuai for the Chinese, and Kim
Il-sung for the North Koreans signed the agreement. That same day
the shooting stopped (more or less), and the armies began the
awkward process of disengagement across what became a 4-km- (2.5-
mile-) wide DMZ.
Supervision of the armistice actions fell to a Military Armistice
Commission (10 officers representing the belligerents), a Neutral
Nations Supervisory Commission (Sweden, Switzerland, Poland, and
Czechoslovakia), and a Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission (the
same four states, plus India as the custodian of the POWs).
From August 5 to September 6, a total of 75,823 communist soldiers
and civilians (all but 5,640 of them Koreans) returned to their most-
favoured regime, and 7,862 ROK soldiers, 3,597 U.S. servicemen, and
1,377 persons of other nationalities (including some civilians) returned
to UNC control. The swap became a media event of potent
possibilities: the communist POWs stripped off their hated capitalist
prison uniforms and marched off singing party-approved songs.
The handling of those who refused repatriation turned into a
nightmare, as agents among the communist POWs and interrogators
made life miserable for the Indians. By the time the Neutral Nations
Repatriation Commission gave up the screening process in February
1954, only 628 Chinese and Koreans had changed their minds and
gone north, and 21,839 had returned to UNC control. Most of the
nonrepatriates were eventually settled in South Korea and Taiwan.

As provided for in the armistice agreement, the United States

organized an international conference in Geneva for all
the belligerents to discuss the political future of Korea. The actual
meetings produced no agreement. The Korean peninsula would
continue to be caught in the coils of Cold War rivalry, but the survival
of the Republic of Korea kept alive the hope of civil
liberties, democracy, economic development, and eventual
unification—even if their fulfillment might require another 50 years or
more.

Conclusion
After three years of a bloody and frustrating war, the United States, the
People’s Republic of China, North Korea, and South Korea agree to an
armistice, bringing the Korean War to an end. The armistice ended
America’s first experiment with the Cold War concept of ―limited war.‖

The Korean War began on June 25, 1950, when communist North
Korea invaded South Korea. Almost immediately, the United States
secured a resolution from the United Nations calling for the military
defense of South Korea against the North Korean aggression. In a
matter of days, U.S. land, air, and sea forces had joined the battle. The
U.S. intervention turned the tide of the war, and soon the U.S. and
South Korean forces were pushing into North Korea and toward that
nation’s border with China. In November and December 1951,
hundreds of thousands of troops from the People’s Republic of China
began heavy assaults against the American and South Korea forces.
The war eventually bogged down into a battle of attrition. In the U.S.
presidential election of 1952, Republican candidate Dwight D.
Eisenhower strongly criticized President Harry S. Truman’s handling of
the war. After his victory, Eisenhower adhered to his promise to ―go to
Korea.‖ His trip convinced him that something new was needed to
break the diplomatic logjam at the peace talks that had begun in July
1951. Eisenhower began to publicly hint that the United States might
make use of its nuclear arsenal to break the military stalemate in
Korea. He allowed the Nationalist Chinese government on Taiwan to
begin harassing air raids on mainland China. The president also put
pressure on his South Korean ally to drop some of its demands in
order to speed the peace process.

Whether or not Eisenhower’s threats of nuclear attacks helped, by July

1953 all sides involved in the conflict were ready to sign an agreement
ending the bloodshed. The armistice, signed on July 27, established a
committee of representatives from neutral countries to decide the fate
of the thousands of prisoners of war on both sides. It was eventually
decided that the POWs could choose their own fate–stay where they
were or return to their homelands. A new border between North and
South Korea was drawn, which gave South Korea some additional
territory and demilitarized the zone between the two nations. The war
cost the lives of millions of Koreans and Chinese, as well as over
50,000 Americans. It had been a frustrating war for Americans, who
were used to forcing the unconditional surrender of their enemies.
Many also could not understand why the United States had not
expanded the war into China or used its nuclear arsenal. As
government officials were well aware, however, such actions would
likely have prompted World War III.