The Korean War began on June 25, 1950, when North Korea (officially the Democratic People's Republic of Korea) launched a surprise attack on neighboring South Korea (officially the Republic of Korea). The antagonisms that precipitated the war between the communist north and non-communist south were present at the creation of the two separate states in 1948. Although skirmishes at the 155-mile-long by 2.5-mile-wide border known as the 38th Parallel (see map on panel to the right), preceded the Korean War, the South Koreans and their supporters in the United Nations were stunned by the scale and speed of the June 1950 attack. With the immediate pre-war support of the Soviet Union the North Koreans marshaled some 200 tanks for the assault. In some 40 days the North Korean assault force had driven U.S. and allied forces into an enclave around the southeastern South Korean port city of Pusan.

Against the expectations of the North Koreans and the Soviet Union, the United States immediately provided military support to South Korea, and the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution (UNSC Resolution 82) demanding a North Korean withdrawal to the 38th Parallel. Within days of the initial assault, U.N. forces under the leadership of General Douglas MacArthur began planning a large-scale counterassault, culminating in the Landing at Inchon behind enemy lines in September 1950.

In the months following the invasion at Inchon, U.N. troops forced the North Korean Army to retreat, capturing Pyongyang and reaching North Korea's northernmost border at the Yalu River. China's People's Liberation Army began entering Korea in October, building up to 300,000 troops by late November 1950. With secret backing from Moscow and the support of hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops, the reconstituted North Korean army forced the South Korean and U.N. troops to retreat. By the summer of 1951, the conflict on the ground stabilized. While aerial bombing of North Korea and localized battles and skirmishes continued, the two sides exchanged little territory over the next two years.

The conflict ended with the signing of an armistice on July 27, 1953. The armistice did not reduce tensions on the Peninsula, however. It preserved the prewar geographic division of Korea, keeping troops on active alert on opposite sides of the Demilitarized Zone for nearly 60 years. A significant factor in the heightening of Cold War tensions in the early 1950s, North Korean bellicosity remains a major international concern nearly two decades after the end of the Cold War.

In May 1996, talks held in New York City opened the door to JFAs. Between July 1996 and May 2005, the Central Identification Laboratory Hawaii (CILHI), which is now part of JPAC, conducted 33 JFAs in North Korea. The U.S. government temporarily suspended JFAs in North Korea on May 25, 2005.

Although the Army Graves Registrations teams searched the battlefields in Republic of Korea from 1951 to 1956 and were extremely thorough, reports of possible U.S. remains in South Korea continue to surface. JPAC investigates these reports, and with the assistance of U.S. Forces in Korea and the Republic of Korea (ROK) government, conducts investigative and recovery operations in the ROK.

http://www.dtic.mil/dpmo/koreanwar/korean_history.htm

BACKGROUND

The Korean War provided the first confrontation between two nuclear powers. And as the war progressed the conflict demonstrated how difficult it would be for either side to use atomic bombs decisively in battle.

The war broke out on June 25, 1950 when North Korean troops crossed the 38th parallel, invading South Korea. North Korean leader Kim Il-sung launched the attack once he had received a promise of support from Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. In January 1950, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson had delivered a speech in which he said South Korea and Taiwan were not part of the American "defensive perimeter," which seemed to indicate the U.S. would keep out of a Korean conflict. And it's clear that Stalin only agreed to support the invasion after being convinced the U.S. would not get involved.

However, Acheson's comments were misleading. The United States reacted to the news of the invasion by immediately taking steps to convene the United Nations Security Council. On June 27th the Security Council asked UN members to provide military assistance to help South Korea repel the invasion. U.S. forces went in on June 30th, by which time the North Koreans had taken the South Korean capital of Seoul. On September 15th, a UN force landed at Inchon and by September 29th, the UN troops had returned Seoul to the South Korean President. But by the end of the year the Chinese had intervened on behalf of the North Koreans halting the UN advance.

While the U.S. Strategic Air Command was well prepared to launch an all-out attack against the Soviet Union, it was less clear how it could use atomic weapons in a limited conflict like Korea. On August 1, 1950, the "decision was made to send the 9th Bomb Wing to Guam as an atomic task force immediately." Ten B-29s, loaded with unarmed atomic bombs, set out for the Pacific. On August 5, one of the planes crashed during take off from Fairfield-Suisun Air Force base near San Francisco, killing a dozen people and scattering the mildly radioactive uranium of the bomb's tamper around the airfield. The other planes reached Guam where they went on standby duty.

At a press conference on November 30, President Truman confirmed that he had been actively considering using atomic bombs in Korea since the beginning of the war. The comments provoked worldwide reaction and British Prime Minister Clement Attlee rushed to Washington to express his concern. Truman reluctantly reassured him that the U.S. had "no intention" of using atomic weapons in Korea except to prevent a "major military disaster."

So while President Truman tried to use his atomic superiority to the United States' advantage in North Korea he was never able to. Ultimately, it was not even clear that atomic bombing in a war against peasant armies would produce decisive results. If the Americans used the bomb and the Chinese forces kept on coming, it would demonstrate the bomb's ineffectiveness and reduce its deterrent effect in other arenas.

The war ended up being a see-saw affair that saw the UN forces retreat from North Korea to the Pusan perimeter in southeastern Korean and then forge forward again across the 38th parallel only to be driven south once more by the Chinese forces. In July 1951 after 13 months of fighting the two sides began armistice talks, which dragged on for more than two years. After Stalin's death in March 1953, the new leadership in Moscow moved more rapidly towards reaching an agreement. The cease-fire was ultimately signed on July 27, 1953.

The human cost of the war was catastrophic. In the first month of their operation alone, the Strategic Air Command groups dropped 4,000 tons of bombs. Besides high explosives, the bombers used napalm. In retirement, Curtis LeMay described the devastation saying, "we eventually burned down every town in North Korea... and some in South Korea too. We even burned down [the South Korean city of] Pusan -- an accident, but we burned it down anyway." Estimates of the casualties vary widely, but there is reason to believe that besides the three and a half million military dead, wounded and missing on both sides, more than two million civilians died in North Korea. In the end the border dividing the two countries remained exactly where it had been before the North Korean invasion.

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CHRONOLOGY

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DPMO ACCOUNTING HISTORY

The three years of war killed an estimated 3 million Koreans, most of them civilians, and made an estimated 5 million refugees. Losses to foreign forces were also immense: nearly 1 million Chinese troops, 33,700 U.S. troops, and a few thousand troops from 15 U.N. member-states died in the fighting.

There are still many missing service personnel from the Korean War. It is thought that 13,000 South Korean soldiers and over 1,100 U.S. soldiers are buried in the Korean Demilitarized Zone. There may be as many as 2,500 that can be recovered from North Korea alone. Both U.S. and South Korean defense departments are actively involved in trying to locate and identify remains of both countries' personnel. In the United States armed forces, more than 8,000 service members listed as missing in action constituted over 15 percent of the total killed in the conflict.

The Korean War accounting effort remains a high priority for the U.S. Government. DPMO aggressively pursues any opportunity to gain access to actual loss sites within North Korea. Joint Field Activities (JFAs) conducted between 1996 and 2005 yielded over 220 sets of remains that are currently being processed for identification.

DPMO provides policy oversight and control of all personnel accounting activities and leads the effort to negotiate access to North Korea. DPMO also updates files to assist in refining investigative work. More than 8,100 Americans remain unaccounted for from this war.

During Operation GLORY in 1954, North Korea returned the remains of over 2,000 Americans. Concurrently, U.S. "graves registration" teams searched for and recovered remains on South Korean battlefields. The U.S. identified thousands of these remains. Those that could not be identified and other unknowns from South Korea, a total of 848, were buried in 1956. 19 unknowns were added later as identification work progressed and interred in Hawaii in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, also known as "The Punchbowl." One of the unknowns was selected and interred in the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington, Virginia.

Between 1954 and 1990, the U.S. was not successful in convincing North Korea to search for and return additional U.S. remains. However, from 1990 to 1994, North Korea exhumed and returned what they claimed were 208 sets of remains. Unfortunately, their records and recovery methods have hampered U.S. efforts to identify most of these. The North Koreans co-mingled the remains and the associated personal effects. These difficulties underscored clearly the need for joint field activities in which U.S. expertise would guide the recovery process and improve the identification results.

The 1991–1993 United States Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs investigated some outstanding issues and reports related to the fate of U.S. service personnel still missing from the Korean War. In 1996 the Department's accounting community was allowed access to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) to conduct recoveries at two sites, Unsan County and east of the Chosin Reservoir. When this effort was halted in 2005, it had successfully recovered the remains of 229 service members. Since 1982, a total of 130 servicemen from the Korean War have been recovered and identified, including those from operations in North and South Korea, from DPRK unilateral turnovers, and from identification of unknowns in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific (Punchbowl). According to the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO), as of May 15, 2010, there were still 8,026 U.S. servicemen still unaccounted-for from the Korean War.

http://www.dtic.mil/dpmo/koreanwar/korean_history.htm