97 Fun Facts About Korean War

South Koreans commonly call the Korean War 'yugio', or 6·25, after what?

The date the North invaded was 25 June 1950, written 6·25 in Korean style. The attack came before dawn, and Seoul fell just three days later.

Korea was divided in 1945 into Soviet and American occupation zones along which line of latitude?

The 38th parallel was picked in a hurry by two US colonels working from a National Geographic map, because it kept Seoul in the American zone. To their surprise, the Soviets accepted it.

Which future Secretary of State to Kennedy and Johnson helped draw Korea's dividing line as a young colonel in 1945?

Dean Rusk later admitted that neither he nor fellow colonel Charles Bonesteel was a Korea expert, and nobody who was had been consulted before the line was drawn.

Which neighbour annexed Korea in 1910 and ruled it as a colony for the next 35 years?

Japan annexed Korea in 1910, so when it surrendered in 1945 the victors split the peninsula into northern and southern occupation zones, a division meant to be temporary.

Who led North Korea from Pyongyang at the outbreak of the war?

Kim Il Sung grew up in Manchuria, where his parents had fled colonial rule, and fought there as a guerrilla before returning to Korea in 1945.

Which veto-wielding member's boycott let the UN Security Council condemn the invasion?

The Soviet Union had walked out in January 1950 because Nationalist China still held China's seat. With no veto cast, the resolution passed 9-0.

President Truman initially described US involvement in Korea as what?

A police action, not a war, was the official line because Truman sent troops without asking Congress to declare war, and they fought under the UN flag.

By what name is the war officially known in North Korea?

The Fatherland Liberation War is Pyongyang's name for it, and the armistice date, 27 July, is a national holiday there called Victory Day, though the war is widely seen as a stalemate.

America's first ground battle of the Korean War was fought near which town, now the namesake of a major US air base?

Osan is where Task Force Smith, rushed in from Japan, tried to block a North Korean tank column. Its rockets bounced off the T-34s, and the tanks simply drove on through.

By August 1950, UN and South Korean forces held only a small south-east pocket known as what?

The Pusan Perimeter held because its port let the UN pour in troops, tanks and supplies faster than the North could replace its losses.

MacArthur's Operation Chromite, the surprise amphibious landing of September 1950, came ashore at which Korean port?

Inchon looked like the worst place to land, with huge tides, mines and narrow channels, and the Joint Chiefs at first opposed it. MacArthur brushed the worries aside, and Seoul was retaken within two weeks.

At Wake Island in October 1950, MacArthur told Truman he hoped to pull the Eighth Army back to Japan by when?

Christmas was his hope, and he put the chance of China stepping in at 'very little'. Within days, Chinese troops were crossing into Korea.

In October 1950 Chinese forces entered the war by crossing which river on Korea's northern border?

The Yalu crossings went almost unseen: Chinese troops marched by night and hid by day, so UN aircraft barely spotted them before the first attacks fell.

Which Chinese leader's eldest son was killed by an American air raid while serving in Korea in 1950?

Mao Zedong's son Mao Anying grew up partly in Russia and fought the Germans in the Red Army. He volunteered for Korea and died in a US air raid weeks after China entered the war.

In the brutal winter of 1950, US Marines fought their way out of a Chinese encirclement around which reservoir?

Chosin is the name on the maps UN troops carried; Koreans call the lake Changjin. The cold was an enemy too, freezing the ground so hard that foxholes could barely be dug.

In the evacuation of Hungnam in December 1950, the US freighter SS Meredith Victory sailed south crammed with some 14,000 what?

Korean refugees were taken aboard as Chinese and North Korean forces closed in on the port. Among them were the parents of Moon Jae-in, born in 1953 and elected South Korea's president in 2017.

Which Second World War airborne commander took over the Eighth Army in December 1950 after Walton Walker's death?

Matthew Ridgway, known for the hand grenade strapped to his gear, took over an army in retreat, rallied it and within months had pushed the Chinese back out of South Korea.

Fired by Truman in April 1951, MacArthur told Congress that old soldiers never die, they just do what?

Fade away was his exit line before a joint session of Congress. At the Senate hearings that followed, General Omar Bradley said MacArthur's wider war would be the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

Which swept-wing jet fighter, flown for the communist side, was countered by the American F-86 Sabre?

The MiG-15 owed its power to Britain: its engine was developed from a Rolls-Royce design that London had let Moscow have after the Second World War.

In 1953 US planes dropped leaflets over North Korea offering $100,000 to the first pilot who would do what?

Defect with his jet fighter was the deal, yet no one did until two months after the armistice. The North Korean pilot who then landed near Seoul said he had never heard of the reward, and was paid anyway.

Truce talks opened in July 1951 in which city, later home to a joint North-South industrial park?

Kaesong, an ancient Korean capital, was a South Korean city when the war began. The armistice left it in the North, and the talks themselves soon moved down the road to Panmunjom.

The autumn 1951 battles of Bloody Ridge and Heartbreak Ridge were fought mainly to do what?

Shorten and straighten the lines was all the UN wanted by then, and even that cost so many casualties that it gave up major offensives that November.

Which president-elect travelled to Korea in December 1952 to find out how the war might be ended?

Dwight Eisenhower had promised the trip late in the campaign with the line 'I shall go to Korea', a pledge that helped a war-weary country hand the old general a landslide.

Which newly independent Asian country proposed the UN's 1952 plan for neutral custody of prisoners who refused to go home?

India ended up doing the job itself: an Indian general chaired the neutral commission, and Indian troops guarded the prisoners while their own side tried to talk them round.

Which leader's death on 5 March 1953 helped move the armistice talks into a new phase?

Stalin's successors, caught up in their own power struggle, called for a quick end to the fighting within weeks of his death, and the stalled talks were back on by late April.

Which party refused to sign the 1953 Armistice Agreement?

South Korea's president wanted to fight on until the peninsula was united, and weeks before the signing he tried to derail the deal by freeing thousands of prisoners who refused to go north.

The armistice created a Demilitarized Zone along the front line roughly how wide?

4 km is simply each army stepping back two kilometres from where it stood. Left almost untouched ever since, the strip has turned into a haven for endangered cranes and Asiatic black bears.

Officers from which two countries are still stationed at the Korean DMZ as the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission?

Switzerland and Sweden stayed on after the North pushed out the Czech and Polish teams in the 1990s. For years their officers kept posting weekly reports in a North Korean army mailbox that nobody emptied.

The famous huts at Panmunjom's Joint Security Area are painted what colour?

The buildings were designed so their blue roofs and white sides would stand out from the border.

US aircraft dropped some 32,000 tons of which weapon on Korea, years before it became notorious in Vietnam?

Napalm fell alongside more bombs than the US had dropped in the entire Pacific theatre of the Second World War, and before the end the bombers were running short of towns to hit.

Which nickname is the Korean War commonly known by in the United States?

The Forgotten War got far less attention at home than the Second World War before it or Vietnam after, yet in three years it killed more than 36,000 Americans and millions of Koreans.

The Bodo League, whose members South Korean forces shot in their thousands in summer 1950, was created to do what?

Re-educate suspected leftists was the stated aim, but membership quotas were filled out with farmers who had no politics at all, and they were shot too. The killings stayed largely hidden for decades.

Which news agency won a Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for revealing that US troops shot civilians at No Gun Ri in 1950?

Associated Press reporters found veterans who backed up what survivors had been petitioning about for years. The Army then confirmed the killings, and President Clinton voiced his regret in 2001.

Which American general, who had captured Rome in 1944, took over the UN Command in Korea in 1952?

Mark W. Clark, the man who took Rome, ended his career with a truce instead of a victory: he signed the Korean armistice for the UN Command in July 1953 and retired later that year.

The 19 steel soldiers of the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington are all dressed in what wind-blown garment?

Ponchos, sculpted as if caught by the wind, cover the patrol's weapons and gear. A polished black granite wall beside the figures reflects them, so that 19 become 38, one for each month of the war.

The Korean War sitcom M*A*S*H takes its title from an acronym that stands for what?

Mobile Army Surgical Hospital units worked close behind the front line. They outlasted the war by half a century: the Army handed its last one to Pakistan in 2006 after treating earthquake victims there.

The M*A*S*H finale 'Goodbye, Farewell and Amen' held what record from 1983 to 2010?

The most-watched US television broadcast drew about 106 million viewers, and when a Super Bowl finally edged past that total 27 years later, it still drew a smaller share of the television audience.

Which adviser in Greece's civil war took over the Eighth Army in Korea in April 1951?

James Van Fleet paid a personal price in Korea: his only son, an Air Force pilot, went missing on a bombing mission in April 1952 while his father commanded the army on the ground.

The Republic of Korea was formally established on 15 August 1948 with which man as president?

Syngman Rhee was 73 and had spent most of his adult life abroad: after earning a Princeton doctorate in 1910 he settled in Hawaii and lobbied for Korean independence for some thirty years.

Which April 1951 battles, fought by British Commonwealth troops, blunted the Chinese spring offensive north of Seoul?

Imjin River and Kapyong kept the Chinese from breaking through to Seoul, at a price: one British battalion, the Glosters, was surrounded on a hilltop, and most of its men were captured.

Which US Navy spy ship, seized by North Korea in 1968, was later put on show in Pyongyang as a museum?

USS Pueblo's crew were held for 11 months, and slipped raised middle fingers into propaganda photos until their captors learned what the gesture meant. As of 2021 the US Navy still listed the ship as commissioned.

The Korean War saw the first large-scale use of helicopters for what purpose?

Medical evacuation by helicopter was a cold, windy ride: the wounded lay in stretchers fixed outside the bubble cockpit, on top of the landing skids, with only a small clear shield over the head.

Which Korean War hill battle of 1953 was turned into a 1959 film starring Gregory Peck?

Pork Chop Hill had been fought over for more than a year when, on 11 July 1953, US commanders gave it up as not worth more lives. The armistice was signed about two weeks later.

In June 1950 South Korea's army blew up a crowded bridge in Seoul over which river, trapping many of its own troops?

The Han bridge went up in the small hours with no warning, while soldiers and civilians were still crossing, and hundreds died. The army's chief engineer was shot for it, though he may only have been following orders.

Which blunt code name for a February 1951 UN offensive drew a protest from the US Army's chief of staff?

Killer, the chief of staff warned, would be hard to handle in public relations. The Eighth Army's commander kept it anyway, as a plain statement of the aim, and called his next offensive Ripper.

Before the war, South Korean forces crushed a leftist uprising on which island, now the country's top holiday destination?

Jeju lost tens of thousands of people, by some estimates a tenth of its population, most of them killed by the security forces. The killings went undiscussed for decades, until the government apologised in the 2000s.

In May 1953 UN aircraft went after North Korea's rice crop by bombing what?

Dams held the water for the rice fields, so breaching them flooded the farmland below and destroyed the crops. Attacks on irrigation dams were only approved that year, after most Northern cities already lay in ruins.

Which comedian's USO troupe was already on the beach at Wonsan in October 1950 when delayed US Marines finally landed?

Bob Hope beat the Marines ashore because mines kept their ships circling offshore for days, a wait the seasick troops named Operation Yo-Yo.

Which Hollywood star broke off her honeymoon in February 1954 to sing for tens of thousands of US troops in Korea?

Marilyn Monroe sang for more than 60,000 servicemen in four days of USO shows, within weeks of marrying baseball star Joe DiMaggio.

Which Hall of Fame hitter flew 39 combat missions as a Marine pilot in Korea, his second wartime absence from baseball?

Ted Williams once limped a flak-damaged jet back to base for a belly landing, then went back to the Red Sox and won two more batting titles.

Reckless, promoted to staff sergeant by the US Marines after hauling ammunition under fire in Korea, was which animal?

A horse bought for $250 at a racetrack, Reckless made 51 trips alone in a single day of battle in 1953 to resupply front-line guns.

Budae-jjigae, Korea's 'army base stew' born of wartime hunger, is known for which canned food smuggled off US bases?

Spam stayed contraband for decades and could only be sold legally in the country from 1987, yet the stew built around it never went out of fashion.

In which TV drama does the lead character steal a dead officer's identity after an explosion during the Korean War?

Mad Men reveals that ad man Don Draper was born Dick Whitman and swapped dog tags with his lieutenant, the real Draper, killed beside him.

Which future astronaut shot down three enemy jets over Korea in July 1953, in the final weeks of the war?

John Glenn flew those missions on exchange with the Air Force, whose pilots painted a teasing nickname on his jet after he complained of having nothing to shoot at.

Which structure in Kijong-dong, North Korea's 'Propaganda Village' in the DMZ, was once the world's tallest of its kind?

A flagpole 160 metres tall rose in Kijong-dong after the South put up a 100-metre one in the village opposite, a contest dubbed the flagpole war.

North and South Korea are often described as technically still at war since the 1953 armistice for which reason?

No peace treaty followed the armistice, which was a military ceasefire signed by generals; a 1954 conference in Geneva failed to agree a political settlement.

In which 2008 Clint Eastwood film is retired factory worker Walt Kowalski a recently widowed Korean War veteran?

Gran Torino is named for the 1972 Ford that Walt Kowalski treasures, the car a neighbour's teenage son is pushed by a gang to steal.

Which future moonwalker ejected from his Panther jet over Korea in 1951 after losing part of a wing on a bombing run?

Neil Armstrong was 21 and went on to fly 78 missions from the carrier USS Essex; after he parachuted down, a jeep driven by his flight-school roommate picked him up.

Which Cockney film star fought in Korea as a young conscript with the Royal Fusiliers before his 1960s breakthrough?

Michael Caine was sent home with malaria in 1953, and his first film part, three years later, was a private in A Hill in Korea.

Which 1962 thriller follows an American sergeant captured in Korea and programmed by communists as a sleeper assassin?

The Manchurian Candidate stars Frank Sinatra as the officer who works out that a playing card, the queen of diamonds, is the trigger that sets his old comrade killing.

Which actor, the only M*A*S*H regular to appear in all 256 episodes, played Captain Hawkeye Pierce?

Alan Alda also co-wrote and directed the feature-length finale, though his own Army service was six months at Fort Benning and never took him to Korea.

Which Cold War doctrine, first set out by diplomat George Kennan, did the United States go to war in Korea to uphold?

Containment briefly gave way to rollback when UN forces pushed north in late 1950, until China's counterattack sent Washington back to simply holding the line.

Which reform, ordered by the president in 1948, did troop shortages in Korea finally force on a reluctant US Army?

Racial integration spread through the Army because depleted white units needed replacements, and its last segregated units were officially gone by 1954.

Which American folk hero gave his name to the 1976 operation that felled a tree in the Korean DMZ with massive force?

Paul Bunyan was the code name for cutting down one poplar with 27 helicopters overhead and B-52 bombers in the distance, three days after two US officers were killed beside it.

North Korea claimed that tunnels found beneath the DMZ from 1974, cut through solid granite, were dug to mine what?

Coal was the cover story, and some walls had even been painted black to look like anthracite, though the four tunnels ran through bare granite.

Which bomber type, the one that dropped the atomic bombs in 1945, flew some 20,000 sorties over Korea?

B-29 Superfortress crews were moved to night raids after jet fighters shot down too many of the propeller-driven bombers in daylight.

Which artist's 1951 painting Massacre in Korea shows a machine-like firing squad aiming at naked women and children?

Pablo Picasso based the composition on Goya's The Third of May 1808, making it his third anti-war canvas after Guernica and The Charnel House.

In Seinfeld, which character is a former Army cook still haunted by a meal he served during the Korean War?

Frank Costanza, played by Jerry Stiller, refuses to cook for years because he once sickened his unit by over-seasoning three-week-old meat.

Which Secretary of State left Korea outside America's Pacific defense line in a January 1950 Press Club speech?

Dean Acheson was accused by critics of signalling that the peninsula would not be defended; the North invaded only five months after he spoke.

Which secret 1950 policy paper, urging a huge US military build-up, was revived by the outbreak of the Korean War?

The NSC-68 report had stalled for two months over its unstated cost, and its lead author had all but given up on it when the invasion made its case for him.

Which British prime minister met Truman in December 1950 to voice alarm at talk of using the atomic bomb in Korea?

Clement Attlee spoke for the Commonwealth too, and Truman's military chiefs advised keeping nuclear weapons for covering a withdrawal or averting a major disaster.

Which Joint Chiefs chairman told Congress that taking the Korean War into China meant the wrong war in the wrong place?

Omar Bradley was answering MacArthur's case weeks after the dismissal, arguing for the Joint Chiefs that China was not the power bent on dominating the world.

In the first days of the Korean War, Truman ordered the US Seventh Fleet to protect which island from invasion?

Taiwan then offered its own troops for Korea, which Washington turned down for fear of provoking Beijing, whose premier called the fleet's move armed aggression.

Under which name did China send regular troops into Korea, a label meant to avoid open war with the United States?

People's Volunteer Army units were in fact regular formations transferred straight from China's standing army, the PLA.

Which African country's Kagnew Battalion, drawn mostly from its ruler's bodyguard, fought with the UN Command in Korea?

Ethiopia sent more than 3,000 men in rotation, and the battalions took their name from the warhorse of Emperor Haile Selassie's father.

Which was the only South American country to send an army battalion to fight in Korea, along with three frigates?

Colombia said yes after Washington's hopes of regiments from Mexico, Argentina and Brazil had all been turned down.

Truman's 1951 dismissal of MacArthur is remembered as a landmark assertion of which American principle?

Civilian control of the military was at stake once the general's letter attacking the president's policy was read out in the House; he was dismissed six days later.

Which Second World War tank design, about 120 of which led North Korea's invasion, shrugged off early US bazookas?

T-34 crews lost that edge within months as heavier Allied tanks and a new 3.5-inch super bazooka arrived, and after October 1950 the North's armour was rarely seen.

Which Royal Navy cruiser, a veteran of D-Day that also fought off Korea, is now a museum ship on the Thames?

HMS Belfast was in Korean waters from 1950 to 1952, and when the government declined to preserve her in 1971 a private trust stepped in to save her from the scrapyard.

Residents of Daeseong-dong, the South's village inside the Korean DMZ, are excused military service and what else?

Paying taxes is waived and the farmers earn some of the highest agricultural incomes in the country, but everyone must be home for an 11 p.m. curfew and headcount.

Which exchange, begun in August 1953, sent back all the remaining prisoners of the Korean War who wanted to go home?

Operation Big Switch handed 75,823 prisoners northward and brought 12,773 the other way, months after a smaller spring exchange of the sick and wounded.

Which James Michener story of Navy pilots in Korea became a 1954 film starring William Holden and Grace Kelly?

The Bridges at Toko-Ri follows a lawyer bitter at being recalled from civilian life to fly carrier jets against some of the most heavily defended targets in the North.

Which Herald Tribune reporter won a 1951 Pulitzer Prize for her front-line coverage of the Korean War?

Marguerite Higgins refused a rival colleague's order to go back to Tokyo, and the two ended up sharing the 1951 prize with four other correspondents.

Which pioneering Black US Navy pilot, shot down over Korea in December 1950, is the subject of the 2022 film Devotion?

Jesse L. Brown's wingman deliberately crash-landed his own plane beside the wreck to try to free him, an act that earned the Medal of Honor.

Which Marine colonel, the most decorated in the Corps' history, won his fifth Navy Cross in Korea in December 1950?

Chesty Puller is remembered for remarking, with his regiment encircled, that being surrounded simply made the enemy easier to find.

Which Scandinavian country sent a converted liner to Korea as a hospital ship rather than combat troops?

Denmark needed 42 nurses for the Jutlandia and received between 3,000 and 4,000 applications for the posts.

Which endangered bird, a symbol of longevity across East Asia, has found a haven in the unpeopled Korean DMZ?

Red-crowned crane flocks share the strip with Asiatic black bears and more than 100 other endangered species, sheltered by the fences and landmines that keep humans out.

Which Chinese commander led Beijing's troops in Korea and put his name to the 1953 armistice on their behalf?

Peng Dehuai was one of the few senior commanders who backed entering the war, and a year after it ended he became China's first defence minister.

Which House Republican leader read out a MacArthur letter attacking Truman's policy, days before the general was fired?

Joseph Martin hoped the letter would strengthen the general's hand; instead it set off the firestorm that ended his command, yet the two remained friends.

Which country's battalion in Korea was led by a general who took a demotion to lieutenant colonel to command it?

France's battalion was led by Raoul Magrin-Vernerey, a Foreign Legion inspector and Second World War hero who fought under the nom de guerre Monclar.

On which island did communist prisoners of war seize their own camp commandant, General Francis Dodd, in May 1952?

Koje-do held more than 170,000 captives by 1952, and Dodd's kidnappers had spent the spring studying his habits before they grabbed him.

Which nickname did newsmen give the communist stronghold in central Korea where Arrowhead Hill was fought over in 1952?

The Iron Triangle held the main road and rail links between the port of Wonsan and Seoul, and the region now straddles the Demilitarized Zone.

Which Norwegian, the first UN Secretary-General, urged the Security Council to act on the day North Korea invaded?

Trygve Lie argued that an attack on a ward of the UN was an attack on the UN itself; the Soviet Union then refused to recognise him as Secretary-General, and he resigned in 1952.

Which Ohio city names the 1952 Supreme Court case that overturned Truman's Korean War seizure of the steel mills?

Youngstown Sheet & Tube v. Sawyer went 6–3 against the president, who was stunned by the ruling but handed the mills straight back to their owners.

Which 2004 Korean blockbuster follows two brothers drafted into the army at the outbreak of the Korean War?

Taegukgi drew 11.74 million admissions at home, overtaking the previous record holder to become the country's biggest hit to that point.

Which director made the 1970 film M*A*S*H, a Korean War satire widely read as a comment on Vietnam?

Robert Altman's satire was at first banned from Army and Air Force base theatres for reflecting badly on the services, then won the top prize at Cannes.

Which tiny European country's soldiers fought in Korea as a platoon inside a Belgian battalion?

Luxembourg sent 110 men in all, who landed alongside the Belgians in January 1951 and went home two years later.