75 Years: The American Legacy of the Korean War

This year marks an important anniversary of the Cold War’s first military conflict and the unmitigated success it became.

A mother shows her daughter photos of the horrors of the Korean War, which began June 25, 1950, at the Korean War Photo Exhibition in downtown Seoul, South Korea on Nov. 12, 2011. Courtesy of Ahn Jae-chul, president of The World Peace Freedom United

In Fulton, Missouri, the great British statesman Winston Churchill stood before a large American audience inside Westminster College. It was March 5, 1946, and it had been less than a year since the end of World War II. The German Nazis and the Imperial Japanese had been defeated. But Churchill arrived in the United States with a dire warning: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”

Churchill was referencing the Soviet Union—the former ally yet familiar foe. Europe was in rubble. Germany was divided in four parts among the Americans, British, French, and Soviets. Before the end of the war, and before that iron curtain had officially cordoned off eastern Europe, another curtain was drawn, but this one was drawn by the Americans.

To the Victor Go the Spoils

On the night of Aug. 10, 1945—a day after the Nagasaki bombing and five days before Japan surrendered—officers of the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee made the hasty decision to split Korea along the 38th Parallel. The north would be occupied by the Soviets and the south by the Americans. The Red Army had been storming through Manchuria on their way to the peninsula. To the relief of the Americans, the Soviets agreed to the arrangement. Offering a preemptive arrangement now was far better than attempting to force the Russians out later.