The Korean War ended on July 27, 1953. It had erupted on June 25, 1950, as a result of a conflict between North Korea and South Korea.
The peninsula was divided along the 58th parallel into two countries - North Korea, the DPRK, with a communist government and under the influence of the USSR and China, and South Korea, under the protection of the United States. This is the longest-lasting conflict of World War II and the Cold War, which has not yet found its solution.
The war began with an attack on the South by Kim Il-sung, who hoped to unite Korea militarily into a single state governed in the spirit of a communist dictatorship. In response, the UN Security Council decided to assist the South Koreans. In the context of the boycott policy undertaken by the USSR, the UN, with the decisive participation of the USA, counterattacked and pushed the North Korean troops back to the borders of China. Subsequently, neither side had a certain superiority and the war was fought with varying success for each of them.
American warplanes bombed North Korea for three whole years. Without thinking at all about the civilian population, as the American historian Bruce Cummings, who described the US actions as a war crime, claimed to "Deutsche Welle".
In those years, the Americans dropped more bombs and napalm on North Korea than in the battle against Japan in World War II. During the bombing, 20 percent of the entire North Korean population died, according to General Curtis LeMay, who commanded the US Air Force during the Korean War. In a 1984 interview, he said the following: "In one way or another, we razed every city to the ground. Also some cities in South Korea. We even destroyed the city of Pusan. By mistake".
A similar assessment was made by former US Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who was responsible for East Asia during the Korean War: "Between the 38th parallel and the Chinese border, we bombed everything that moved. We had complete air superiority and leveled North Korea to the ground". And in a 1954 interview, the Supreme Allied Commander General Douglas MacArthur expressed his regret that he had not received permission to implement his plan to end the war within ten days. This plan called for dropping "30 to 50 atomic bombs". In addition, General MacArthur wanted to turn the North Korean border with China into an impassable zone by surrounding it with a five-kilometer belt of radioactive cobalt. The goal was to thwart further support for North Korea from China. Ultimately, however, the UN and the US State Department rejected MacArthur's plan.
Even more brutal were the anti-communist purges carried out by the South Korean army. Immediately after the war began, thousands of real or simply suspected communists and sympathizers of North Korea were killed. With the knowledge and in front of the eyes of American officers. Because they were classified for decades, reports and photographs of these crimes did not see the light of day until 2008. The so-called Reconciliation Commission, appointed by former South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun, estimates the number of victims at at least 100,000 people. North Koreans were wrongly accused of many of these massacres. But in the interest of truth, it must be said that they also carried out bloody purges.
Meanwhile, North Korea is becoming a semi-feudal totalitarian state, seized by the rapacious hands of the Kim family, the heirs of Kim Il-sung, while the southern part of the peninsula, after a series of dictatorships, is currently a prosperous country, one of the Asian tigers, with democratic rule.