The Korean War begins
June 25, 1950

In June 1950, a conflict began between the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) and the Republic of Korea (South Korea), which resulted in an estimated 4,000,000 casualties, including civilians. The United Nations, with the United States as the principal participant, joined the war on the side of the South Koreans, and the People's Republic of China eventually came to North Korea's aid. After exceptional vicissitudes, the war was ended inconclusively in July 1953; it established a precedent for United States intervention to contain communist expansion.

At the end of World War II, the Allies agreed that Soviet forces would accept the surrender of Japanese troops in Korea north of the 38th degree of latitude, while American troops would accept the Japanese surrender south of that line. In 1947, after the failure of negotiations to achieve the unification of the two separate Korean states that had thus been created, the United States turned the problem over to the United Nations. The Soviet Union refused to cooperate with UN plans to hold general elections in the two Koreas, and, as a result, a communist state was permanently established under Soviet auspices in the north and a pro-Western state was set up in the south. By 1949 both the United States and the Soviet Union had withdrawn the majority of their troops from the Korean Peninsula.

On June 25, 1950, the North Koreans, with the tacit approval of the Soviet Union, unleashed a carefully planned attack southward across the 38th parallel. The United Nations Security Council met in emergency session and passed a resolution calling for the assistance of all UN members in halting the North Korean invasion. (The Soviet delegate, who was absent from the Security Council in protest against the UN's failure to admit the People's Republic of China, was not present to veto the council's decision.) On June 27, U.S. President Harry S. Truman, without asking Congress to declare war, ordered United States forces to come to the assistance of South Korea as part of the UN “police action.”

The Korean War resulted in the deaths of about 1,300,000 South Koreans, many of whom were civilians, 1,000,000 Chinese, 500,000 North Koreans, and about 37,000 Americans (the original figure of more than 54,000 was revised in 2000 after it was discovered that a clerk had incorrectly included noncombatant military deaths worldwide), with much smaller numbers of British, Australian, and Turkish casualties on the Allied side. Several million Koreans temporarily became refugees, and much of South Korea's industrial plant was damaged, while North Korea was utterly devastated by American bombing campaigns.

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