KOREAN WAR

Following the defeat of Japan in 1945, the Soviet Union and the United States jointly occupied Korea, which had been ruled by Japan for four decades. After the United States and USSR failed to agree on the composition of a government for the country, separate states were established in 1948 in the two occupation zones, each aspiring to extend its rule over the remainder of the country. In 1949 North and South Korea engaged in serious fighting along their border, and on June 25, 1950, the North Korean army launched a massive conventional assault on South Korea, led by Soviet-made tanks.

Because North Korea was closely controlled by the Soviet Union and heavily dependent on Soviet assistance, Western leaders unanimously viewed the attack on South Korea as an act of Soviet aggression. Fearing that a failure to repel such aggression would encourage Moscow to mount similar invasions elsewhere, leading possibly to a third world war, the United Nations (UN) for the first time in its history authorized the creation of a multinational force to defend South Korea. The United States commanded the UN forces and contributed the overwhelming majority of troops, supplemented by units from Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Greece, Turkey, Ethiopia, South Africa, Thailand, Australia, the Philippines, New Zealand, and Colombia.

The invasion of South Korea also prompted the United States to take a series of actions that shaped the Cold War for the remainder of the USSR's existence. The United States sent naval forces to protect Taiwan from an attack from the mainland, strengthened its support for the French in Indochina, solidified NATO, moved toward the rearmament of Germany, signed a separate peace treaty with Japan, tripled its military spending, and began to station troops overseas indefinitely.

After UN forces advanced into North Korean territory in October 1950, the People's Republic of China sent massive numbers of troops to prevent a North Korean defeat. The Soviet Air Force also intervened, thinly disguised as Chinese, beginning an undeclared air war with the United States that was the only sustained military engagement between the two superpowers. By the spring of 1951 the war had become a stalemate along a front roughly following the prewar border. Negotiations for an armistice began in the summer of 1951, but the war was prolonged another two years, at the cost of massive casualties and intensification of the East-West conflict worldwide. The armistice signed in July 1953 left intensely hostile states on the Korean peninsula, the North backed by the Soviet Union and China, and the South by the United States and its allies.

Russian archival documents made available in the 1990s show that Western leaders were correct in assuming that the decision to attack South Korea was made by Josef Stalin. His chief aim was to prevent a Japanese attack on the Soviet Union through the Korean peninsula, and he concluded that the U.S. failure to prevent a communist victory in China indicated that it would not intervene to prevent a similar victory in Korea. He was never willing to commit Soviet ground forces but urged the Chinese and North Koreans to keep fighting. Immediately after Stalin's death the new leadership in Moscow decided to bring the war to an end.

See also: china, relations with; cold war; koreans; korea, relations with; united nations; united states, relations with

bibliography

Stueck, William. (1995). The Korean War: An International History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Weathersby, Kathryn. (1995). "To Attack, or Not to Attack? Stalin, Kim Il Sung and the Prelude to War." Cold War International History Project Bulletin 5:1–9.

Weathersby, Kathryn. (1995–1996). "New Russian Documents on the Korean War." Cold War International History Project Bulletin 6–7:30–84.

Weathersby, Kathryn. (1998). "Stalin, Mao, and the End of the Korean War." In Brothers in Arms: The Rise and Fall of the Sino-Soviet Alliance, 1945–1963, ed. Odd Arne Westad. Washington, DC, and Stanford, CA: Woodrow Wilson Center Press/Stanford University Press.

Kathryn Weathersby