Korean War Essay -- History

Throughout history the United States has fought in many wars. Whether the fighting took place in Europe such as WWI or in our own land like the civil war. The one war many people seem to forget is the Korean War. The Korean War also known as the â€Å"forgotten war† was a war between North Korea, South Korea and the US together with the South Koreans to help. The Korean War was fought on sea, land, and in the air over and near the Korean peninsula (Brown, p.2). On June 25, 1950, the North Koreans rumbled across the thirty-eighth parallel. The invasion was successful because the south was not expecting or even prepare for a war. The invasion was so successful that they pushed the south to a tiny defensive area around Pusan. That’s when President Truman steps in real quick to halt the invasion of the North Koreans. Truman ordered American armed forces under General Douglas MacArthur to support South Korea. The Korean War was a clash between Communist forces and Free World (Brown, p.2). On June 25th, 1950 at 4 a.m. the North Korean People’s Army (KPA) attacked across the 38th parallel, implementing a well-developed invasion plan (Lewis p.1). The KPA had a huge number of military men compare to the South Koreans. It had about 135,000 soldiers in 10 divisions, five separate infantry brigades, and one armor brigade with 120 soviet-made-T-34 tanks (Lewis p.1). The Republic of Korea (ROK) was taken by surprise and was not fully equipped with weapons like the KPA (Lewis p.1). So for that matter the ROK could not halt the invasion. But if the South Koreans would have had heavy artillery like the KPA then maybe the KPA’s invasion plan would had been a failure. The United Nations Security Council approved a US sponsored resolution that called fo... ...t (Brown, p.17). On October 7 the UN General Assembly passed a resolution calling for unification of Korea and authorized MacArthur to send his forces into North Korea. The North Korean capital of Pyongyang fell on October 19, and the allied UN troops flooded north effectively unopposed. They pushed the North Korean forces to the Yalu River, which formed the North Korean border with the region of China. The war left marks on the Korean peninsula and the world around it. Even though the Korean War was fairly short, no one knows the exact numbers of deaths. According to the history channel website, â€Å"nearly 5 million people died and almost 40,000 Americans died in action along with more than 100,000 wounded.† (Korean War, p.1) Every war is going to have its cost. The total approximation fot the United States involvement in Korea was about 67 billion (Calore, p.2).