Korean civilians
About 2-3 million dead, scholarly range -- the central human cost.
Korean civilians paid the largest bill: about 2-3 million dead, scholarly range, from combat, massacre, flight and winter. Both Korean states killed suspected political enemies in the war's first year.
Seoul, Pyongyang and countless towns were wrecked. US bombing of the north was among the most intensive of the early jet age. Land-mine and unexploded-ordnance contamination lasted for decades.
Bands
ROK military
About 137,000 dead; wounded and missing far higher.
US and UN
About 36,000 US dead; other UN dead in the thousands (UK, Turkey, Australia, Canada among them).
Chinese / DPRK military
Chinese often 180-400 thousand dead in published ranges; DPRK military uncertain.
Unaccounted
MIAs and unrepatriated remains still recovered from both sides of the DMZ.
Regions
Seoul basin
Capital taken and retaken four times; political and symbolic hinge.
Southeast (Pusan)
Last pocket of 1950; later UN cemetery and port of entry for aid.
North / Yalu
UN high-water and Chinese crossing zone; cities heavily bombed thereafter.
Central ridges
1951-53 static war -- the "forgotten" landscape of English memoirs.
Koje-do and POW camps
Island camps, riots, and the repatriation dispute.
Rear Japan
Logistic and hospital base; Japanese economy received a wartime procurement jolt.
Key numbers
Armistice27 Jul 1953
Korean civilian deadabout 2-3 million
US military deadabout 36,000
Peace treatynone
Makers
US Eighth Army / Far East Command
The operational core of UN Command.
ROK Army rebuild
US equipment tables and Korean manpower -- a wartime factory of a national army.
Chinese PVA logistics
Night movement and porterage over the Yalu -- historically described, not instructed.
UN medical units
Sweden, India and others as non-combat contributors still buried or remembered in Busan.
Soviet aircraft supply
MiGs and pilots as deniable aid -- a Cold War pattern.
UNKRA / aid agencies
Reconstruction as a second campaign after 1953.
POWs were the last diplomatic knot: voluntary repatriation versus all-for-all. Thousands of Chinese and North Korean prisoners refused return; some UN prisoners remain unaccounted for.
The economic "miracle" of later South Korea began from this rubble and from a security subsidy -- not from a peaceful 1948 baseline.