The Korean War of 1950–53: Forgotten Lessons and Inconvenient Truths

The date of 27 July marks another anniversary of the cessation, but not the conclusion, of the Korean War of 1950–53.

A Civil War, Not ‘Stalin’s War’

Although the Korean War is often referred to as ‘Stalin’s war,’ it was in fact a civil war, and this goes a long way towards explaining the high level of war crimes that accompanied it. The conflict was internationalised fairly early on, first on the southern side and later on the northern, but it would be a mistake to perceive it as a proxy war between the United States and the Soviet Union, even despite the fact that the Korean War was the only conflict in the realms of which Soviet and American pilots looked at one another through their gunsights.

It is important to recall that until the spring of 1950, Moscow categorically rejected North Korea’s plans for the forcible reunification of the country. In the autumn of 1949, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) turned down the proposals of the kind, despite the support they enjoyed from the DPRK leadership and the Soviet ambassador to Pyongyang, Terentii Shtykov. The USSR’s position changed only after the North Korean leadership convinced Moscow that a ‘revolutionary situation’ existed in the South. Pyongyang promised a swift blitzkrieg: following the defeat of the South Korean army and the capture of Seoul, 200,000 local communists were to launch a nationwide uprising. The instigator of these plans was not so much Kim Il-sung as the leader of the South Korean communists, Pak Hon-yong. It is likely that he counted on using military success to strengthen his own position and to oust Kim Il-sung from power – something that later culminated in the organisation of a conspiracy.

Although the official start date of the war is considered to be 25 June 1950, military action along the 38th parallel had in fact been under way for some time. For a year and a half, up to three armed clashes per day took place there – an intensity comparable to the positional warfare of the First........

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