Often considered the forgotten war in American history, the Korean War arose amidst fears of the spread of communism and the loss of China. It was called a “police action,” undertaken under the auspices of the United Nations, without a formal declaration of war.

As such it was a prototype of the kinds of wars later engaged in by the United States and/or NATO against Iraq and Yugoslavia, though with considerably less success.

At the end of the Second World War, Korea had been divided across the middle at the 38th parallel, with the Soviet Union controlling the North, and the United States controlling the South. The conflict began on June 24, 1950, when North Korea surprised Americans by invading the South. Although the Truman administration had recognized Syngman Rhee’s nationalist regime in the South, it had only made public its intention to defend the Philippines and Japan, thereby seeming to indicate that South Korea would be left to fend for itself. But when the invasion occurred, Truman quickly responded by sending the Seventh Fleet to the region and ordering General Douglas MacArthur to prepare his forces for combat. Truman sought and received international support from the western European states (many of whom were hoping for American funding to aid rebuilding their economies), the British Commonwealth and both the Philippines and Thailand. With the Soviet Union boycotting the United Nations in support of China, the world body passed a resolution committing troops to repel the North Koreans.

In September, after the fall of Seoul, General MacArthur began his counteroffensive, landing troops at Inchon and cutting off communist forces in South Korea. The American strategy was an unqualified success and within a month the North Korean army was all but destroyed, leaving UN forces in possession of the entire region south of the 38th parallel.

Now convinced he was infallible, MacArthur decided to reunite Korea by continuing north-wards. Truman and the State Department hesitated to support this, knowing that the Chinese had promised to intervene if the Americans moved beyond the 38th parallel, but McArthur assured them that the Chinese would not be able to cross the Yalu River. The wave of 200,000 Chinese soldiers quickly proved him wrong and drove his UN forces back into South Korea.

At this point, the Soviets proposed a truce to a receptive Truman, but MacArthur wanted to escalate the conflict to blockade Chinese ports and bomb military installations across the Yalu River. Determined to force the issue, MacArthur was publicly insubordinate to his commander-in-chief, threatening to destroy China if it did not concede defeat. For this he was relieved of command on April 12, 1951, returning to the United States to a hero’s welcome of ticker-tape parades. Truman’s action incensed his foes and further contributed to the anti-communist hysteria, with senators like Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy claiming that the State Department was in the hands of communists.

In 1952 an armistice was signed, but the fighting continued. While negotiations bogged down over the issue of prisoner exchange and the territorial integrity of North Korea, a new president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, pushed for the war to be won, or at least for peace with honor. The new vice-president, Nixon, advocated the use of the nuclear option, and nuclear brinkmanship became part of American strategy to keep the Soviet Union out of the conflict and to force Koreans to the bargaining table on American terms. Not until July 1953 was a final settlement reached, ending with the lines that had been drawn prior to the beginning of the conflict.

The impact of the war on American society and culture was considerable. The increase in tensions between the two major superpowers contributed to the rise of McCarthyism, exacerbating fears of communism already heightened by the “loss” of China and the Soviet Union’s development of an atomic bomb. In addition, the fact that North Korea had been under the control of the Soviet Union prior to its invasion of South Korea, and that it was China who came to its defense once MacArthur moved north of the 38th parallel, cemented the idea of an indivisible communist bloc. This image of communism as a single political entity would stymie American foreign policy long after the tensions between the Soviet Union and communist China, which were becoming manifest during the Korean conflict itself, were evident, with particularly tragic consequences in Vietnam.

The failure in Korea also led to new foreign policy initiatives. Tainted by his inability to bring about a victory in Korea, leading John F. Kennedy to paint him as someone who was tied to the “containment” strategy Eisenhower began actively to encourage nations to combat communism around the world. The “Eisenhower doctrine” offering support to countries in the Middle East was one part of this approach, as was his employment of the CIA in Iran and Guatemala. Moreover, the attempt to dislodge Castro in Cuba, which would come to be known as the Bay of Pigs, was begun under Eisenhower, though it was left to Kennedy to engineer the debacle.

The stalemate in Korea, however, limited American commitment to such cavalier initiatives (even during the Kennedy administration’s celebration of counter-insurgency) and increased the nation’s reliance on what John Foster called a “new-look” policy contained in the threat of nuclear weapons and “massive retaliation.” The war in Korea had accelerated work on the hydrogen bomb, and its completion facilitated a shift from costly conventional forces to the relatively cheap nuclear stockpile.

The war also had a considerable impact on the domestic front. Over 5½ million Americans served in the war (for the first time in integrated units). Many returned after experiencing North Korean POW camps, and 103,284 came back wounded. The deaths of nearly 37,000 Americans were also devastating for all families losing relations. Yet, unlike in the case of the Vietnam War in the next decade, the war did not create vocal, widespread opposition. In part this was because of the anticommunist hysteria brought on by Truman’s Cold War policies and by Senator Joe McCarthy’s campaign. In addition, the economy, fuelled by the war expenditures, was booming. What Eisenhower would call the “military-industrial complex” was established during the Korean War. The need for armaments and military installations acted in a way similar to deficit spending in the Keynesian model. With GIs and defense-industry workers securing good wages and having plenty to spend them on, such as new housing development and automobiles, the economy could expand without the problem of inflation.

As “a forgotten war,” the Korean conflict received little of the kind of attention from movies and television that other wars received. No major Korean War monument was built comparable to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC. Pork Chop Hill (1959) was one of the rare movies made soon after the conflict, while The Manchurian Candidate (1962), which began with the conflict, was not shown for many years owing to its association with assassination. M*A*S*H, the popular movie (1970) and television series (CBS, 1972–83), which focused on a doctors’ unit during the war, was shaped in part by a sensibility derived from the Vietnam War, though the sense of futility involved in a war marked by stalemate and diplomatic stumbling was also a constant feature of the Korean conflict.