Korean War (1948): Two republics

The front raced the length of the peninsula: the Pusan Perimeter, the 15 September 1950 Inchon landing, the UN drive to the Yalu, and Chinese People's Volunteer intervention from October 1950. Seoul changed hands four times. An armistice signed at Panmunjom on 27 July 1953 created the DMZ near the 38th parallel -- and no peace treaty has followed.

Scholarly estimates put Korean civilian deaths in a band of about 2-3 million, with ROK military deaths around 137,000 and US military deaths about 36,000; Chinese military deaths are often given in a wide 180,000-400,000 range. For Koreans it is 6-25, not a "forgotten war." For US, British, Australian, Canadian and other UN veterans it became the war between 1945 and Vietnam -- under-taught, heavily memorialised only later.

A civil war that became a coalition war Korea in 1950-53 was at once a Korean civil war, a UN police action, and the first hot war of the Cold War, fought to a draw that still defines the peninsula. Border raids and the 1948-49 guerrilla war on Jeju and in the southern mountains were already killing Koreans before the conventional invasion of June 1950. Kim Il-sung obtained Stalin's and Mao's assent after months of lobbying.