A Peninsula Divided

Even as it raged, some called it the “forgotten war.” But the legacy of the Korean War is not forgotten. It is a prosperous, innovative, and democratic state: the Republic of Korea. Think of Hyundai vehicles, Samsung laptops and smartphones, LG household appliances, the cultural effusion of K‑pop, or the penetrating big- and small-screen sensations of Parasite and Squid Game. Less visible to the typical eye are the peaceful and successive changes of democratic government in South Korea since 1990. None of the above would form part of today’s economic, cultural, or geopolitical landscape if North Korean Communists had succeeded in seizing all of Korea when they swept through in 1950. For a time, they managed to occupy the entire peninsula, save the coastal city of Busan. Then United Nations forces, led by the United States, landed an army at Incheon, midway up the peninsula, and pushed back the North Koreans and a much larger Communist Chinese force.

The war ended in July 1953, with the negotiated armistice dividing Korea along the arbitrarily chosen thirty-eighth parallel. South Korea’s success after that was not a foregone conclusion. The country endured decades of economic struggle and its own authoritarian leadership before emerging as a strong market-oriented democracy. Its success stands in powerful contrast to that of North Korea, whose citizens remain impoverished after years of the Kim family’s dynastic rule. The closed, nuclear-armed state is well entrenched, and its threat to international security is almost impossible to defuse.

During the war, more than three million troops went into battle on each side of the conflict. The fight exacted a terrible cost: roughly 400,000 Koreans, 300,000 Chinese, and 40,000 Americans lost their lives, according to some estimates. The historian Michael J. Seth has noted that more American bombs were dropped on North Korea than all those “the allies had dropped on either Germany or the Japanese Empire in World War II.” Canada contributed 30,000 troops to the officially designated UN action, and the contributors to Canada and the Korean War show how this compact force of soldiers, sailors, and airmen, of whom 516 died and 1,200 were wounded, played an outsize role in the final outcome.

As Ryan M. Touhey, a professor at St. Jerome’s University, University of Waterloo, observes in his essay “Canadian Political Leadership and the Korean War,” some cabinet ministers were initially leery of joining the campaign, despite heavy pressure from the United States to do so. Once committed, Ottawa strongly marshalled its resources. “Within approximately eighteen months, defence spending went from 2.75 percent of Canada’s GDP in 1950 to 8 percent in 1952,” he writes. “At its peak in the early 1950s, the armed forces consumed more than 50 percent of the total federal budget.” Those are remarkable figures, considering what has become the perpetual criticism in more recent times of Canadian governments for not fulfilling their NATO commitments to spend the equivalent of 2 percent of GDP on defence. It is quite indicative of the era that the Liberal government of Louis St-Laurent, overseeing such a massive expenditure, coasted to victory in the 1953 election.

The impact of the Canadian force in combat was particularly evident in the battles of Chip’yong-ni and Kap’yong Valley. “The 2nd Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry (2 PPCLI), swept aside Chinese rearguard positions” at Chip’yong-ni, notes the University of Central Oklahoma historian Xiaobing Li (intriguingly, a former member of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army). “Facing attrition from the withering battle, the Chinese could not organize another effective attack.”

At Kap’yong, PPCLI soldiers fended off a Chinese thrust that tried to open the way to the South Korean capital of Seoul. This battle proved pivotal and stopped China’s last attempt to break through UN lines to again occupy the South. The spring offensive “was the longest Communist operation of the war and the largest battle since the Second World War,” Li explains. “Thereafter, Communist forces never came close to Seoul or launched another major incursion southward. [This] failure forced Mao [Zedong] to reconsider both his political and military goals in Korea, and Beijing looked to a negotiated settlement rather than a victory that would reunite Korea under North Korean rule.”

Two essays by the former Department of National Defence historian William Johnston detail the exploits of the Royal 22^e Régiment and the Royal Canadian Regiment, which cooperated with the loosely structured Commonwealth Division, including forces from the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. Johnston provides further evidence of the critical contribution made by Canadian soldiers, at first holding the line against North Korean and Chinese aggression and then waging a defensive war to keep hard-won ground during the drawn-out negotiations that led to the armistice.

Although determined and successful in many ways, the Canadian command did not always distinguish itself. The initial combatants, a special force comprising many veterans of the Second World War, volunteered for service. Leaving behind their new lives as civilians, these soldiers were at the forefront of the early actions in Korea, including at Kap’yong. Later arrivals at the front were cadres from the regular army, many of whom had stayed on after the Second World War to serve in the peacetime ranks. “A posting in Korea was simply part of their general service and did not necessarily stem from any desire to see more fighting at that stage of their career,” Johnston writes. The ground war reached a stalemate around static positions, but military doctrine posited that platoons regularly probe enemy positions to provoke fear and gather intelligence. Some commanders were faulted for not regularly pursuing such harassment and surveillance.

The public’s attention shifted quickly away from the conflict as economic prosperity grew in the ’50s. There was an underlying weariness after so many years of wrenching global bloodshed. The latest Chevrolet Bel Air, Westinghouse washing machine, or ranch-style bungalow was more exciting to contemplate than a foreign fight a vast ocean away. In a moving essay, “Returning Home: The Canadian Veterans’ Experience,” the journalist and historian Ted Barris shows that Korean War veterans were not only forgotten but often disparaged by their fellow Canadians. In one of many biting anecdotes, Barris shares the story of Bill Jackson, recently demobilized and visiting the Legion Hall in Brooks, Alberta. When a member learned Jackson was just back from Korea, he asked him to address the room. “Jackson slowly got to his feet,” Barris writes. “But before he could utter a word, a voice boomed from the back of the hall, ‘Sit down, you asshole. You were in Korea. So what?’ ”

Some uncharitable observers maintained that Korea was not a “real war,” its terrible destruction notwithstanding. It was called a police action, uniquely authorized by the fledgling UN. Somehow, an internationally sanctioned act of war was seen as less fearsome and less dangerous for its participants, in defiance of all evidence to the contrary. The circumstances surrounding the authorization were unusual. The Security Council voted for the intervention while the Soviet Union was boycotting its own permanent seat — because the People’s Republic of China had not been granted UN membership. China’s council seat was held by Chiang Kai-shek’s regime in exile in Taiwan. Oddly, this strange drama — including what would seem an “own goal” by Joseph Stalin — is not addressed in this essay collection. But the matter was indeed important for Canada, as the UN endorsement of all necessary measures to oppose North Korean aggression provided cabinet with the justification to join the effort. That set a precedent that has influenced, if not governed, Canadian international interventions ever since.

The editors of Canada and the Korean War, Andrew Burtch and Tim Cook, both historians at the Canadian War Museum, want Canada and its veterans to get the recognition they are owed. In “Canada’s Korean War Dead,” Burtch carefully counts the fallen and provides touching and sometimes graphic detail about the way many soldiers died in direct combat, as well as by accident, suicide, and disease. The attention paid to the specific circumstances of their deaths testifies to the respect Burtch believes is due to each individual recruit.

Cook, the museum’s chief historian and director of research, who has published numerous acclaimed books on Canadian war history, joins Burtch in recounting how official commemoration of the Korean War has evolved over the past seven decades. For years, the federal government resisted formal acknowledgements of the contribution of Canadian veterans. The name “Korea” and the dates of the war were not inscribed on the National War Memorial, in the centre of Ottawa, until 1982. The next year was the first in which the Silver Cross Mother chosen to lay a wreath at the cenotaph on behalf of all war-bereaved mothers was the mother of a soldier who died in Korea.

Historically, Korean veterans, rather than the Canadian government, have been at the forefront of commemorative efforts. “One of the ways that veterans made meaning of the war was to reflect on the success of South Korea and its people since the armistice,” Cook and Burtch explain. They quote the writer and former artillery intelligence officer Andrew C. Moffat, who once described veterans visiting South Korea with “lumps in our throats and tears in our eyes.” People in the large, cheering crowds that greeted them said, “Thank you for saving my Country.”

Elsewhere, Tina J. Park, the executive director of the Canadian Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, at the University of Toronto, underlines South Korea’s importance as an international partner for Canada. As of 2023, the country was Canada’s seventh-largest merchandise trading partner and export market. Bilateral merchandise trade totalled $16.7 billion in 2021. Trade initially accelerated in the mid-’70s with the sale of one of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited’s CANDU nuclear reactors. While that deal ran against the grain of some public opinion, since it was negotiated with the dictatorial president Park Chung Hee (who was assassinated by his own intelligence chief in 1979), it established a foundation for trade and technological cooperation that flourished under subsequent democratic administrations. Such cooperation continues in Canada’s efforts to strengthen the “green” economy through providing critical minerals to support South Korean investments in batteries and electric vehicles.

A dogmatic materialist would argue that all events in history are inevitable. Most others will admit outcomes are governed by choice, at least to some degree. Other policy choices in the early ’50s would have produced a different outcome in Korea. In The Hidden History of the Korean War, the crusading American journalist I. F. Stone explored Harry Truman’s discomfort with confronting China and the Soviet Union over Korea. There was a line of thinking — especially among some Democrats and even including the secretary of state Dean Acheson and the Texas senator Tom Connally — that a takeover of the Korean peninsula by the North was not worth defending against. Alliances with Japan and the Philippines represented adequate extensions of Washington’s sphere of influence, and South Korea was of minor consequence. Had the president been persuaded by such arguments, all of Korea no doubt would have been absorbed by Communism. As was seen twenty years later, in what became the quagmire of Vietnam, a victory in Korea by the powerfully armed United States and its allies was not inevitable. Still, if these forces had not taken the risk in 1950 to stand up to North Korea and China, there would be no Hyundai, no K-pop hits, no Squid Game — and no thriving bilateral relationship between Canada and South Korea.

It took more than three generations for South Korea to become what it is today. That partly explains the lagging recognition of the war’s positive legacy, both here and elsewhere. Barack Obama captured this reality when he spoke to American veterans in 2013, on the sixtieth anniversary of the armistice agreement. “Here, today, we can say with confidence that war was no tie,” the president said on the National Mall, in Washington. “Korea was a victory. When 50 million South Koreans live in freedom — a vibrant democracy, one of the world’s most dynamic economies, in stark contrast to the repression and poverty of the North — that’s a victory.”