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There were 54,246 casualties in the Korean War. However more than 7,880 American soilders are still unaccounted for.

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M.A.S.H(Mobile Army Surgical Hospital) units were first used in the Korean War

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In North Korea the war is called, "Fatherland Liberation War".

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There were 131 medals of honor awarded during the Korean War

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Even after the Korean War, North Korea remains the most communist state in the world.

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Many soilders died before they reached the battlefield.

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The U.S army used 1500 dogs during the Korean War.

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Korean war was the 1st military action of the cold war

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The war consisted of 75,000 North Korean soilders.

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The Korean War began on June 25, 1950 at 4:30 a.m.

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www.emaze.com

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news.vice.com

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http://pacifism21.org

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www.theatlantic.com

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britannica.com

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Korean War | Combatants, Summary, Years, Map, Casualties, & Facts | Britannica

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The Korean War was a conflict (1950–53) between North Korea, aided by China, and South Korea, aided by the UN with the U.S. as the principal participant. At least 2.5 million people lost their lives in the fighting, which ended in July 1953 with Korea still divided into two hostile states separated by the 38th parallel.

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CNN.com

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Causes of the Korean War:
Under Japanese rule before and during World War II, Korea was divided into two parts after the Japanese surrender. The Soviet Union occupied the area north of the 38th parallel and the United States occupied the area south until 1948.

Two new ideologically opposite countries were established in 1948: The Republic of Korea (South Korea) and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea).

North Korea wants reunification under communist rule.

Other Facts:
The first war in which the United Nations played a role. When asked to send military aid to South Korea,16 countries sent troops and 41 sent equipment or aid. China fought on the side of North Korea, and the Soviet Union sent them military equipment.

The US sent about 90% of the troops that were sent to aid South Korea.

The first war with battles between jet aircraft.

The US spent around $67 billion on the war.

The truce talks lasted two years and 17 days.

The casualty toll had been reported as 54,246 until June 2000, when the Pentagon acknowledged that a clerical error had included deaths outside the Korean War theater in the total.

There are 7,747 American soldiers still unaccounted for from the Korean War as of June 2017.

There has never been a peace treaty, so technically, the Korean War has never ended.

US Troops Statistics:
Source: Dept. of Defense
US Deaths:
Hostile: 33,739
Non-Hostile: 2,835
Total In-Theatre: 36,574
US Wounded in Action - 103,284

Other Casualties by Country (killed and missing):
Source: Encyclopedia Britannica
South Korea - (217,000 military, 1,000,000 civilian)
North Korea - (406,000 military, 600,000 civilian)
China - (600,000 military)

November 1947 - The United Nations General Assembly approves elections to be held throughout Korea to choose a provisional government for the entire county. The Soviet Union opposes this.

May 10, 1948 - The people of South Korea elect a national assembly, setting up the government of the Republic of Korea. The north refuses to take part.

September 9, 1948 - North Korean Communists establish the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

June 25, 1950 - 135,000 soldiers from the communist North Korean People's Army (NKPA) cross the 38th parallel and invade Republic of Korea (ROK).

June 25, 1950 - The UN Security Council denounces North Korea's actions and calls for a cessation of hostilities and withdrawal of the NKPA to the 38th parallel.

June 26, 1950 - US President Harry S. Truman directs General Douglas MacArthur to evacuate American dependents from Korea and to assist the ROK Army.

June 30, 1950 - Truman orders ground troops into action.

July 1950 - In the first month of the war, US soldiers kill significant numbers of Korean civilians under a bridge, near a village called No Gun Ri. It is unclear whether the soldiers were ordered to kill civilians or acted on their own.

July 5, 1950 - For the first time since the end of World War II, US troops go into battle, at Osan, 30 miles south of Seoul. The first American casualty of the Korean War dies here, Private Kenneth Shadrick of West Virginia.

June 23, 1951 - Jacob Malik, a Soviet delegate to the UN, proposes a cease-fire.

July 10, 1951 - Truce talks begin at Kaesong.

October 25, 1951 - Truce talks are moved to Panmunjom.

November 27, 1951 - Both sides agree the existing battle lines would be the final dividing line between North and South Korea if a truce is reached in 30 days.

April 1952 - Truce talks are deadlocked over voluntary repatriation.

October 8, 1952 - Truce talks are adjourned.

April 26, 1953 - Truce talks are resumed, and the Communists agree to voluntary repatriation.

July 27, 1953 - Democratic People's Republic of Korea (north), Chinese People's Volunteers and the UN sign an armistice agreement. The Republic of Korea refuses to sign. However, hostilities cease within 12 hours. Terms of the armistice include creation of the demilitarized zone, the DMZ. Each side is 2,200 yards from a center point. The DMZ is patrolled by both sides at all times.

1990-1994 - North Korea recovers the remains it claims to belong to 208 American servicemen.

2007-present - The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency posts news releases online about recently accounted for service members' remains.

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Causes of the Korean War: Under Japanese rule before and during World War II, Korea was divided into two parts after the Japanese surrender. The Soviet Union occupied the area north of the 38th parallel and the United States occupied the area south until 1948.

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History.com

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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.
READ MORE: What Caused the Korean War and Why Did the US Get Involved?
North vs. South Korea

"If the best minds in the world had set out to find us the worst possible location in the world to fight this damnable war," U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson (1893-1971) once said, "the unanimous choice would have been Korea." The peninsula had landed in America's lap almost by accident. Since the beginning of the 20th century, Korea had been a part of the Japanese empire, and after World War II it fell to the Americans and the Soviets to decide what should be done with their enemy's imperial possessions. In August 1945, two young aides at the State Department divided the Korean peninsula in half along the 38th parallel. The Russians occupied the area north of the line and the United States occupied the area to its south.

Did you know? Unlike World War II and Vietnam, the Korean War did not get much media attention in the United States. The most famous representation of the war in popular culture is the television series "M*A*S*H," which was set in a field hospital in South Korea. The series ran from 1972 until 1983, and its final episode was the most-watched in television history.

By the end of the decade, two new states had formed on the peninsula. In the south, the anti-communist dictator Syngman Rhee (1875-1965) enjoyed the reluctant support of the American government; in the north, the communist dictator Kim Il Sung (1912-1994) enjoyed the slightly more enthusiastic support of the Soviets. Neither dictator was content to remain on his side of the 38th parallel, however, and border skirmishes were common. Nearly 10,000 North and South Korean soldiers were killed in battle before the war even began.

The Korean War and the Cold War

Even so, the North Korean invasion came as an alarming surprise to American officials. As far as they were concerned, this was not simply a border dispute between two unstable dictatorships on the other side of the globe. Instead, many feared it was the first step in a communist campaign to take over the world. For this reason, nonintervention was not considered an option by many top decision makers. (In fact, in April 1950, a National Security Council report known as NSC-68 had recommended that the United States use military force to "contain" communist expansionism anywhere it seemed to be occurring, "regardless of the intrinsic strategic or economic value of the lands in question.")

"If we let Korea down," President Harry Truman (1884-1972) said, "the Soviet[s] will keep right on going and swallow up one [place] after another." The fight on the Korean peninsula was a symbol of the global struggle between east and west, good and evil, in the Cold War. As the North Korean army pushed into Seoul, the South Korean capital, the United States readied its troops for a war against communism itself.

At first, the war was a defensive one to get the communists out of South Korea, and it went badly for the Allies. The North Korean army was well-disciplined, well-trained and well-equipped; Rhee's forces in the South Korean army, by contrast, were frightened, confused and seemed inclined to flee the battlefield at any provocation. Also, it was one of the hottest and driest summers on record, and desperately thirsty American soldiers were often forced to drink water from rice paddies that had been fertilized with human waste. As a result, dangerous intestinal diseases and other illnesses were a constant threat.

By the end of the summer, President Truman and General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964), the commander in charge of the Asian theater, had decided on a new set of war aims. Now, for the Allies, the Korean War was an offensive one: It was a war to "liberate" the North from the communists.

Initially, this new strategy was a success. The Inch'on Landing, an amphibious assault at Inch'on, pushed the North Koreans out of Seoul and back to their side of the 38th parallel. But as American troops crossed the boundary and headed north toward the Yalu River, the border between North Korea and Communist China, the Chinese started to worry about protecting themselves from what they called "armed aggression against Chinese territory." Chinese leader Mao Zedong (1893-1976) sent troops to North Korea and warned the United States to keep away from the Yalu boundary unless it wanted full-scale war.

"No Substitute for Victory"

This was something that President Truman and his advisers decidedly did not want: They were sure that such a war would lead to Soviet aggression in Europe, the deployment of atomic weapons and millions of senseless deaths. To General MacArthur, however, anything short of this wider war represented "appeasement," an unacceptable knuckling under to the communists.

As President Truman looked for a way to prevent war with the Chinese, MacArthur did all he could to provoke it. Finally, in March 1951, he sent a letter to Joseph Martin, a House Republican leader who shared MacArthur's support for declaring all-out war on China-and who could be counted upon to leak the letter to the press. "There is," MacArthur wrote, "no substitute for victory" against international communism.

For Truman, this letter was the last straw. On April 11, the president fired the general for insubordination.

The Korean War Reaches a Stalemate

In July 1951, President Truman and his new military commanders started peace talks at Panmunjom. Still, the fighting continued along the 38th parallel as negotiations stalled. Both sides were willing to accept a ceasefire that maintained the 38th parallel boundary, but they could not agree on whether prisoners of war should be forcibly "repatriated." (The Chinese and the North Koreans said yes; the United States said no.) Finally, after more than two years of negotiations, the adversaries signed an armistice on July 27, 1953. The agreement allowed the POWs to stay where they liked; drew a new boundary near the 38th parallel that gave South Korea an extra 1,500 square miles of territory; and created a 2-mile-wide "demilitarized zone" that still exists today.

Korean War Casualties

The Korean War was relatively short but exceptionally bloody. Nearly 5 million people died. More than half of these-about 10 percent of Korea's prewar population-were civilians. (This rate of civilian casualties was higher than World War II's and the Vietnam War's.) Almost 40,000 Americans died in action in Korea, and more than 100,000 were wounded. Today, they are remembered at the Korean War Veterans Memorial near the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., a series of 19 steel statues of servicemen, and the Korean War memorial in Fullerton, California, the first on the West Coast to include the names of the more than 30,000 Americans who died in the war.

PHOTO GALLERIES

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On June 25, 1950, the Korean War began 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. Explore the war's causes, timeline, facts and end.

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youtube.com

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youtube.com

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Combat footage, Korean war - newsreel (1950)

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News Magazine of the Screen, April] (ca. 1950) Audio/Visual: Sd, B&W Creative Commons license: Public Domain Korea Korean war gun battle firefight rifle army military US United states UN United Nations Asia history news newsreel battlefield troops Seoul front line combat footage

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uploads.knightlab.com