Key Events & Decisions of the Korean War

Background and Causes of the Conflict

For more than a century, the fate of the Korean peninsula has been largely shaped by rivalries among great powers with interests in the Far East. By winning the Sino-Japanese War of 1893-4 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, Japan obtained control of Korea. Hastings said that until 1945, "the Japanese maintained their ruthless, detested rule in Korea" (25). After Japan's defeat, Korea was temporarily divided along the 38th parallel between invading Soviet and arriving American occupation forces. In 1946-1948, the Soviet Union and the West failed to agree on the peaceful unification of Korea. In the North, the Soviets and Kim Il Sung, a communist and nationalist guerrilla leader in the 1930s and 1940s, "established a totalitarian police state," known after August 1949 as the People's Democratic Republic (Whelan 33). In the South, the American military government spurned Korean nationalists with left-wing supporters and helped conservative (and anti-communist) factions led by Dr. Syngman Rhee gain power. According to Whelan, "violence and repression rather than democratic freedom . . . determined the outcome" of the spring 1948 election won by Rhee and his followers (46).

Causes of the War. Soviet forces were withdrawn from North Korea by December 1948 and American forces

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PRC and Russia would, in effect, prevail upon North Korea to withdraw its forces from South Korea in return for international recognition of the PRC and its admission to the UN. No American government under the political circumstances of the time could have accepted such terms, certainly not at the point of a gun. Scoundrels and Heroes The leading candidate for scoundrel is Kim Il Sung, who ran for many decades what remains today one of the last and most despicable Stalinist regimes in the world and which had principal responsibility for launching the Korean War which cost the lives of more than four million people, including over one million civilians killed, over 1.5 million North Korean and Chinese casualties, 850,000 ROK casualties, including 415,000 killed, 142,091 American casualties, including 33,629 killed and 40,000 casualties among other UN troops (from 14 nations) (Hastings 329; Whelan 372; and Goulden 646). Stalin also bore a heavy responsibility for starting the war, but he was careful to keep it from spreading into a world war. Mao and the top Chinese military leaders condemned hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops to their deaths by ordering senseless 'human wave' assaults on fortified American positions in 195
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 3204
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)

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