One cold spring day early in the writing of this book, I stood in the midst of the main shopping thoroughfare in Bracknell and asked 62 random passers-by whether they had heard of six battles from British history, and the wars in which they were fought. The battles were Waterloo, Balaclava, the Somme, El Alamein, the Imjin River and Goose Green. All 62, a mix of old and young, male and female, recognised each of the battles, except for one, the Imjin River, fought during the Korean War. I wasn’t particularly surprised. The war which smashed into the Korean peninsula in 1950 is commonly described by many in the West as a forgotten war. This is certainly true. It certainly was never forgotten by those who fought there, though, in the UK, it was such an insignificant war in social memory that it did not even make its way onto the village memorials that dot the country, visible signs of the savage impact made on every community in the land after the two World Wars. It is interesting that a memorial statue was only unveiled in London in 2014, the gift of the government of the Republic of Korea (ROK).
But the war is certainly not forgotten in Korea, North or South, or in China. In China, the Korean War continues to be referred to as the War to Resist America and Aid Korea and is presented as a defensive response to a threatened American invasion. It is a reminder today that China and the United States have been at war before; and the Chinese remember it even if the Americans do not. In both North Korea and the ROK, memories remain visceral of the moment when the simmering tensions between both parts of the artificially-divided peninsula erupted in devasting violence on 25 June 1950, leading directly to the deaths of as many as 3 million people, most of whom were guilty of nothing more than being caught up in a country at war. Staggeringly, best estimates suggest that the ROK lost 1 million civilians and 415,000 soldiers from a population of 20 million. The North lost 1.5 million from a population of 9 million, or over 16% of its population.
The fighting was to last just over three years, but the hostility between the two sides, and between North Korea and the West in general, has remained a festering sore not merely in the region, which lives day-by-day under the continuing bellicosity of the regime in Pyongyang, but in the world. For although an armistice was signed in mid-1953 to bring the fighting to an end, a peace treaty has never subsequently been agreed, and the state of war which erupted when Kim Il-sung sent his ‘Peoples’ Army’ across the 38th Parallel into the Republic of Korea remains. This remains a purposive determination of North Korean policy. The so-called Democratic People’s Republic of Korea – DPRK – does not want to accept that its war with democracy is over; and that it lost the first and hopefully last round. And so North Korea remains at war with the world. It is also at war with itself, running a repressive, totalitarian state that has one purpose: to maintain in power the familial dictators of the Kim family, existing under a banner of communism that has never been much more than a cloak for a brand of violent autarchy. It is now 75 years since the start of this war, and so long as North Korea wishes the war to continue in its present form, no resolution remains. It has resulted in North Korea continuing its bellicose hatred of the West in general and the USA in particular by supporting wars such as the Russian one in Ukraine. North Korea continues its bizarre marriage of convenience with Russia, the successor state to the USSR, itself the successor to the Tsarist Russia which had long held Manchurian and Yellow Sea ambitions. Korea is truly a war that had deep origins, and which has never ended.
But if it has been forgotten, at least outside its borders, the war appears to the authors to have been more misunderstood than forgotten, then as now. This is because it was in actuality two wars, not one; one that was legally sanctioned (by the United Nations and with a logical premise (to reverse an injustice), and the second, a follow-on war, an attempt by the USA. to squeeze an additional political outcome from the military victory that it had achieved at the conclusion of the first. In this it failed, because in expanding beyond its original remit (the ejection of North Korea from the South, and the defeat of the North’s invasion), it decided to invade North Korea and to unite the peninsula by force. This was not the initial political purpose of military intervention in Korea, and it failed. By invading the North, the USA and the UN widened the war because this action invited such massive Chinese retaliation and intervention that the entire UN effort in turning back the North Korean invasion was very nearly entirely negated. If the first war for Korea was a response by the UN to the attack by the North on 25 June 1950 based on the principles of newly-established law and to restore the status quo ante bellum (or at least a defensive position along the rough line of the 38th Parallel), then the second war for Korea, which began with the UN’s own invasion of North Korea in mid-October 1950, precipitating the Chinese counter-reaction, was based on exactly the same premise as Kim Il-sung’s initial land grab. Thus, the UN’s invasion of North Korea suffered from precisely the same form of aggrandisement that it had charged North Korea with in its initial invasion. Even though, unlike North Korea, the UN could claim legality (the invasion of the North was authorised by the UN in response to the North’s illegal act of aggression and therefore technically legal) the question was whether it was proportionate, practically possible and politically rational. The UN could not have it both ways, and secure from a position of raw power that which it had denied to North Korea earlier in the year. It is also important to acknowledge, especially in relation to the second war for Korea, that, although fought under the auspices of a compliant UN, Korea was always an American war, with its friends and allies following along, sometimes shakily but in the main faithfully, in the American vortex.
The attack by UN forces into North Korea also opened itself up to the law of unintended consequence, the bane of any strategist, for whom prediction and analysis are often finely balanced, based on assumptions and intelligence about what might happen (or, more accurately, what they would like to happen), not real events. These of course, can only be assessed after the event. But they can be predicted, if done so carefully and honestly. In dismissing the possibility of Chinese intervention in June 1950 the UN – led by the USA – was as guilty of the same grotesque miscalculation made earlier in the year by Kim Il-sung when he assumed that the United States would have no interest in getting involved in his war. One would have thought that the UN and the USA would have learned that lesson, but, in the excitement of victory in October 1950, the purpose and consequences of an invasion of North Korea were not as rationally considered as they ought to have been. Hubris can afflict every politician in war, and every careless soldier, no matter what uniform they wear. Real events, in this case, proved to be very different to those imagined by President Truman and General Douglas MacArthur when they determined to follow through their defeat of the North Koreans in mid-October 1950 with the wholesale subjugation of the entire country. For the UN, therefore, the first war for Korea was a war fought for a righteous cause and was a war first of defensive and then offensive manoeuvre, designed to correct a manifest injustice. The second war for Korea was a war first of conquest followed by one of defensive attrition and the resultant political jockeying necessary to bring an unwinnable imbroglio to an acceptable end. That the ultimate end to this war was roughly the status quo ante bellum – i.e. the position of both parties as they stood before the invasion of 25 June 1950 – constitutes the essential tragedy of this conflict. It is not hard to see in the decision during the Vietnam War not to transgress the border of North Vietnam (while nevertheless bombing its territory intensively), and the 1990 decision not to invade Iraq following the successful ejection of Iraqi forces from Kuwait, the shadow of a different decision being made in October 1950.
For this reason General Lord Dannatt and I argue that, while the Korean War has certainly been forgotten, as well as misunderstood, even more importantly, part of it was unnecessary. Kim Il-sung’s miscalculation in initiating the war started the ball rolling in a war the North could never win in the context of the rapidly-evolving Cold War. Then, the USA’s miscalculation in extending the war beyond the status quo ante bellum on 16 October 1950 compounded the disaster. It was absolutely necessary for the UN to respond to the North’s aggression as it did – war does have utility in certain circumstances – but, in its conduct of the war, the USA led the UN into a situation which unnecessarily extended the pain beyond that which was necessary to correct the initial injustice, namely to end the war and bring about a sustainable and negotiated peace. In attempting to make use of the North’s humiliation and thus achieve a new set of war aims – the conquest of the North and the unification of Korea by force, which is what Kim Il-sung had attempted to do in the first instance, and the entire rationale of why he was being opposed by the UN in the first place – the UN extended the fighting for two and a half additional years at huge cost in lives and treasure, many of these being those of innocent Koreans, with no practical material, physical or political gain. The war started and ended on the 38th Parallel. That it could have ended much earlier than it did, with the same political outcome, was the war’s greatest tragedy.
Robert Lyman is a historian and the co-author, alongside Richard Dannatt, of Korea: War Without End.
