Spot the difference! Map of the first month and last month of the Korean War taken in screenshots and placed together in collage by me from an animated series of maps through the war by Leomonaci98 for Wikipedia “Korean War” under licence https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

(19) KOREAN WAR

(1945-1953)

“Korea became a powder keg with the Russians and Americans entangled in its north and south.”

The Korean War may have been its own distinct war, but it directly arose from the circumstances of the Second World War before it, overlaid by the new Cold War of which it was part (and for which it was the first major conflict).

The primary circumstance which gave rise to the Korean War was the occupation of the northern and southern halves of Korea by the Soviet Union and the United States respectively – similarly to the eastern and western halves of Germany in Europe.

Ironically, Japan itself was fortunate to avoid the division of Germany into Europe, because of its sole occupation by the United States (and selected western allies), but its former imperial territory of Korea was not. Indeed, Korea was doubly unfortunate in that, unlike Germany, war was fought along the lines of that division.

Of course, the key distinction between Korea and Germany was that any war along the lines of division in Germany would have involved war directly between the United States and the Soviet Union – the very thing that they sought to avoid in the Cold War, with its potential escalation to nuclear war after 1949.

In Korea, however, the Soviet Union could wage war by proxy – firstly the North Korean communist regime that was already fighting low-level warfare across the border with its non-communist counterpart in South Korea from 1945 onwards, and secondly the new communist government in China on North Korea’s behalf.

The Korean War was also “largely fought by the same commanders and with the same doctrines, weapons, and equipment as the Second World War” – including strategic bombing on the same scale, dropping more bombs than in the whole Pacific War, ranking North Korea as one of the most heavily bombed countries in history.

Some of those weapons were developed from their versions introduced or tested in the last days of the Second World War. Notably, jet aircraft – while the Allies had eschewed replacing their propellor-driven prop counterparts in service at that late stage of the Second World War, they came into their own in the Korean War. Jet aircraft confronted each other in air-to air combat for the first time in history and it was the first war in which jets played the central role in air combat. Similarly, the Korean War also featured the first large-scale deployment of helicopters, which had been developed during the Second World War.

It was also the closest the United States came to using nuclear weapons against an adversary in war since the Second World War, actively contemplating or planning their use against China, or North Korean and Chinese forces.

The Korean War also featured General Macarthur’s daring amphibious invasion behind enemy lines for the Battle of Inchon as the closest comparison to Normandy since the Second World War. The Battle of Inchon has commonly been considered among historians and military scholars as a strategic masterpiece or one of the most decisive military operations in modern warfare, a particularly distinctive accolade for an amphibious operation – “a brilliant success, almost flawlessly executed,” which remained “the only unambiguously successful, large-scale US combat operation” for the next 40 years.

That said, but for its first year which did resemble the more mobile warfare of the Second World War, the Korean War mostly resembled the First World War and the conventional static stalemate of the Western Front, albeit crammed into the narrower space of the Korean peninsula.

Ironically enough, the war stabilized at or close to the original border between South and North Korea. That is where the fighting largely stayed for the next two years – and also where it ended at ceasefire.

In this the Korean War again more closely resembled the First World War than the Second, with their inconclusive armistices or ceasefires that are far more typical of modern war than the Second World War with its decisive victories. The Korean War is still very much with us – with the ceasefire division of the Korean peninsula into opposing North and South Korea, still technically at war with each other, in a frozen conflict like bugs preserved in some strange Cold War amber.

RATING: 4 STARS****

X-TIER (WILD TIER)