Korean War Term Paper
On June 25, 1950 North Korean forces invaded South Korea. South Korea was not prepared. They were outnumbered and outgunned. Many South Koreans stayed to fight but many fled. Within the first week 44,000 South Koreans were killed, just under half of their military forces. On June 27, American President Harry S. Truman ordered American troops to defend South Korea two days after North Korea invaded. By the 28th, United States bombers and fighters left for the Korean Peninsula. This began one of the bloodiest and most infamous wars in United States history. On the South Korean side were The United States with the United Nations and on the North Korean side were the Chinese and Soviets. The Chinese and Soviet involvement is what made the war into the violent one it was.
Before World War II Japan ruled Korea as one country from 1939-1945. After World War II Korea was split into two countries. The U.S. took the side of South Korea, which was ruled by Syngman Rhee. Syngman Rhee lived March 26, 1875- July 19, 1965. He had a traditional Confucian education then went on to Methodist school where he learned English. He became a nationalist and later a Christian. When he was 21 he joined a group that’s goal was to free Korea from Japan. The club was broken apart and he was arrested from 1898-1904. He earned a PhD from Princeton, becoming the first Korean to earn a Doctorate from an American University. He returned to Korea after it was annexed from Japan. He was elected president of the Korean Provisional Government in Shanghai where he lived for a year and then moved back to Hawaii where he had been living, trying to create an international movement for his country. He remained president for 20 years before being p...
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...received help from over a dozen different nations but the Soviets still put up a good fight. If the Soviets hadn’t entered the war at all the United Nations could have defeated North Korea easily. The Soviets and the Chinese were the reason the Korean War was such a historical one.
The Korean War was a war that shaped how people live today. Because of the Soviet and Chinese involvement there are people starving in North Korea under communist rule. In the 1990s 2.5 million people died of malnutrition in North Korea because of the communist rule. Maybe if the United Nations had won the war and made Korea a constitutional democracy, Korea would be a thriving country. But because of the Soviets and Chinese the country was split in half. The well-trained, ruthless Chinese soldiers and the Soviet advice and air force were what made the Korean War a war to remember.
The Korean War changed the face of American Cold War diplomacy forever. In the midst of all the political conflict and speculation worldwide, the nation had to choose between two proposed solutions, each one hoping to ensure that communism didn?t sweep across the globe and destroy American ideals of capitalism and democracy. General Douglas MacArthur takes the pro-active stance and says that, assuming it has the capability, the U.S. should attack communism everywhere. President Harry Truman, on the other hand, believed that containing the Soviet communists from Western Europe was the best and most important course of action, and that eliminating communism in Asia was not a priority.
The Korean War , although successful in preventing the spread of communism, was one of the first tests of communism in Asia. North Korea was strictly communist while South Korea was democratic. As usual, the United States supported democratic South Korea and the Truman Doctrine was applied to the Korean situation. The North Korean forces crossed the dividing line (38th parallel) and invaded South Korea. Thus, they provoked a war over communism. With the possibility of democratic South Korea falling to the communistic North, the U.S. stepped in and supplied aid mostly through troops. The U.S. then urged the United Nations to support South Korea and fight against the communist North. Once the North Korean forces were defeated at Inchon, they eventually got pushed back to the 38th parallel. However, against President Truman’s word, American General MacArthur decided to keep pushing back the North Korean forces by crossing the dividing line. This caused more trouble because the People’s Republic of China (Communist China) now sent troops to aid the communists against the pro...
The north was supported by the Soviet Union, and the south was supported by the United States. This conflict took place from 1950-1953 and the U.S. got involved to keep the whole country from turning Communist. This was the first incident in which the United States sent military support in order to contain communism. There was not a real winner and loser in this conflict, the nations stayed divided just as they were before the fighting broke out. The war ended with an Armistice, and the United States was successful in the fight against the spread of
...nt that democracy and communism could not cooperate with one another as shown in the United Nations Security Council after the Soviet Union boycott. UN initiatives often faced a stalemate, as the Soviet Union would many times prove difficult to the other members of the Security Council because its representative would constantly veto acts that favored democracy at the expense of communism, while other powers such as the United States would veto and shut down any proposals that benefited communism. The Korean War proved that democracy and communism could and would not get along, adding fuel to the imminent Cold War. What started as a civil war in a small Asian country quickly erupted into an international division between opposing powers backed by incompatible political systems. The Korean War has left its mark on surviving Koreans as well as others around the world.
Korea ended its isolation in the mid-nineteenth-century age of imperialism, in 1882, as a defensive measure against its neighbors, signing “Treaty of Amity and Commerce” with the United States to provide “good offices if there is an external threat”. As a result of the rising Soviet-American rivalry at the end of World War II, the Korean peninsula was divided along the 38th parallel. The divide ran along the 38th parallel which is part of the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) separating North and South Korea . The Soviet Union supported North Korea with Communist-control and the United States supported South Korea in democracy. In 1953 the Armistice Agreement ended three years of fighting (starting June 25, 1950) that killed over a milli...
The Korean War was a turning point in history. Sandwiched between the global scale of World War 2 and the nightmare of Vietnam, Korea is sometimes referred to as the “Forgotten War”. Korea might not be at the forefront of the public’s psyche, but it set in motion events that changed the world. Without Korea, history would have been very different. Korea forced the United States to develop a coherent policy to deal with the perceived communist threat.
In 1948, the American backed, anti-communist southern administration, based in Seoul, declared itself the Republic of Korea (ROK). It was lead by Syngman Rhee, who lived in exile in the united starts for many years and was appointed as the south Korean Leader by the Office of Strategic Services. Soon after, the Soviet-backed the communist northern administration, which was based in Pyongyang, declared itself the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. They appointed Kim II-sung, who fought alongside communist forces during the chinese civil war.
On 26 June, one day after 90,000 North Korean troops, armed with Soviet weapons, crossed the 38th parallel to invade South Korea, President Harry Truman directed U.S. military forces to assist South Korea. This began the Korean War, which came at a time when America was becoming more and more fearful of Communism. The fact that Communist China and the Soviet Union were backing the North Koreans added to American fears of a "Communist Takeover" of the world. Led by General Douglas MacArthur, American troops spent three years fighting in Korea. The war ended in stalemate in 1953 with the North Koreans north of the 38th parallel, a border that still separates North and South Korea.
Although the Korean War is always regarded as a conflict between the U.S. and China in support of South and North Korea respectively, the U.S. Armed Forces actually intervened in this war on behalf of the UN. American generals in Korea sometimes commanded troops from several countries in one battle. The UN and the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea (DPRK) were the only signatories in the Korean
Born in April 18, 1875 - died July 19, 1965. Syngman Rhee was a South Korean politician and then later became the first president of South Korea. In 1919 Rhee was elected president of the Korean Provisional Government. He returned to Hawaii in 1925 but remained president of the Government for 20 years. Rhee relocated to Washington, D.C., and spent WWII trying to secure the Allied promises of Korean independence. After the war Rhee returned to Korea and began his political campaign and later became president of South Korea.
Lastly, in 1950 the USSR began aiding the North Korean People’s Army invasion of U.S. supported South Korea commencing the Korean War and the first proxy war among the U.S. and the USSR (Campbell,
The Korean War started with North Korea’s invasion to the Pusan Perimeter, on June 25, 1950. North Korea's invasion was the first of four stages of the Korean war. The North Koreans called their invasion a violation of peace. When the invasion happened, the North had 135,000 soldiers. Since the South wasn’t prepared for war, troops from sixteen different countries fought alongside the South. Forty-one more countries got involved in the war by supplying the South with weapons and food.
The korean war caused a widespread of suffering among soldiers as well as civilians.No place was safe, families abandoned their homes;schools,hospitals and houses were bombed.Food supplies were destroyed and those left often did not reach the neediest koreans.Thousands of people were killed during battle.Diseases swept through cities killing many.Family members were separated by the war, and some are still separated today.The war created the world's most heavily fortified border.
Events that took before the war were what had initially sparked the rancor between both nations of Korea. Despite the fact that World War 2 just ended, tension between North and South Korea remained heated. Causes of the Korean War can mainly be broken down into two different categories; ideological and political reasoning. The Soviet Union, China and North Korea, the communist side, ideologically wanted to secure the Korean peninsula and incorporate it in a communist bloc. This “domino effect” feared individuals such as Harriet Truman due to the fact that the potential danger of other countries such as Japan and Korea becoming a communist bloc was definitely not something Truman had hoped for. Politically, the Soviet Union considered the Korean peninsula as a springboard to attack Russia and asserted that the Korean government should be “loyal” to the Soviet Union, this was where the United States stepped in, realizing that they were in a competition for world...
South Korea, badly outnumbered and outgunned, began to retreat southward. Seoul, South Korea’s capital, fell in a matter of days. (Heritage, 2010). Taken by surprise, America wasted no time in sending reinforcements to help crippled South Korea. This began a costly and bloody three year war. In 1950 china intervened when the United Nations forces are deemed to overthrow North Korean forces. This move prolonged the war and made a wider war possible. It also marked the only time that Western forces directly battled a communist power (Heritage, 2010). At the end of the war in july of 1953, no peace treaty was signed. The conflict between North and South Korea lives on today, showing the impact of the Cold War across the globe even in present day. The Korean War was a huge turning point in the Cold War. It introduced the concept of limited war as a way to prevent an escalation to a nuclear war.