Korean War

The Korean War was a conflict which was fought between 1950 and 1953 as a proxy war in the developing Cold War between the western powers led by the United States and the communist bloc led by the Soviet Union. It ultimately had its roots in the occupation of Korea decades earlier by the Empire of Japan and the power vacuum that was created on the Korean Peninsula after the Second World War by the defeat of Japan. In the course of the second half of the 1940s competing movements emerged in Korea, one which aligned with the western powers and one with the USSR and the Chinese communist movement. This led to open war in 1950, one in which American and Russian forces played a part. After three years of bitter fighting an armistice was agreed whereby the country would be divided into a communist North Korea controlling lands north of the 38th parallel north and a western-aligned South Korea south of this line. Theoretically the war has never ended, as the United States blocked Chinese-led efforts to broker a peace deal at the Geneva Conference in 1954, but the war has been cold since 1953. The Korean War led to mass migration involving over three million Koreans, many of them fleeing the region entirely to other countries, or many leaving North Korea for South Korea.

Korean War chronology of events

The Korean War came about as a result of nearly a century of foreign intervention in Korea. Like Japan and China, Korea had largely closed its borders to foreign interference in the seventeenth century and remained isolated from the world until the mid-nineteenth century when the US and European powers forced them to allow westerners into their country. Then, beginning in the 1870s, Japan began to take over Korea, effectively annexing it entirely in 1910. It remained under Japanese control until the end of the Second World War. But when that conflict ended it was split between opposing ideological forces, some favoring communism as it had developed along the northern frontiers of the Korean Peninsula in China and Russia, and others aligning themselves closely with the United States which had occupied nearby Japan at the end of the Second World War. Eventually the peninsula was divided into a sphere of Soviet influence north of the 38th parallel and the US occupying the region south of this line. This formed the basis for the establishment of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea or North Korea and the Republic of Korea or South Korea in 1948.

American tanks during the Second Battle of Seoul in September 1950

Tensions rose between the two new states from 1948 onwards until the North Koreans invaded South Korea in the summer of 1950. They quickly overran much of the country, but in the months that followed a US and United Nations-led coalition of troops effected landings across South Korea and began pushing the North Koreans back towards the 38th parallel. Then the US invaded North Korea itself in the autumn of 1950, before a Chinese intervention pushed the western forces back south. Years of fighting around the 38th parallel and stalemate followed before peace negotiations were entered into. An armistice was established in July 1953. This is now regarded as the de-facto end of the Korean War, though theoretically the war is still in progress as peace has never officially been established.

Migration after the Korean War

It is estimated that about three million Koreans were displaced between 1950 and 1953, approximately 10% of the population of roughly 30 million people across the peninsula at mid-century. Of these, many were internally displaced and migrated from the north of the country to the south, increasing South Korea’s respective proportion of the peninsula’s population in the second half of the twentieth century, while many others fled abroad. These fled to a range of other countries. Given the proximity of the border, many headed into eastern Russia, while others migrated into the Manchuria region of north-eastern China. Others boarded ships and headed for Japan, while small numbers left for countries in the western Pacific such as Australia, the Philippines and Vietnam.

Park Chung Hee, dictator of South Korea from 1961 to 1979

The war years, though, were only the beginning of the migration from the Koreas. In the course of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s many other Koreans left South Korea and North Korea. The reasons for the flight from North Korea are relatively clear, as the country has struggled under the brutal dictatorship of the Kim family since independence. But South Korea was no stranger to authoritarianism either as a result of the Korean War. Syngman Rhee was the first authoritarian president of South Korea between 1948 and 1960, while Park Chung Hee ruled South Korea as a dictator throughout the 1960s and 1970s. In this environment many hundreds of thousands of Koreans continued to flee from both countries where they could, many heading to the United States following the passage of the Immigration Reform Act of 1965, or to neighboring China.

Demographic impact of the Korean War

The demographic impact of all this migration has been extensive. Internally it has led to a population imbalance between North and South Korea. There are an estimated 26 million people in North Korea today, with almost exactly twice that amount, 52 million, in South Korea, despite North Korea actually being about 20% larger as a country in terms of geographical size. The migration of Koreans from the north to the south of the peninsula also led to a rapid period of urbanization in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, as people headed for cities like Seoul, Busan and Incheon. Between 1945 and 1985 the percentage of the South Korean population which lived in cities and towns increased from just 14% to over 65%.

Abroad, the biggest demographic impact has been felt in the United States and China. There are over seven million Koreans that make up the Korean diaspora. Of these over 2.6 million are Korean Americans, with large concentrations of people of Korean descent in cities on the West Coast including Seattle, Los Angeles and San Francisco, while on the East Coast states and cities like New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania have thriving Koreatowns. These came in great numbers in the 1960s and 1970s in particular, with an estimated 30,000 Koreans arriving per year in the mid-1970s. There are approximately 2.3 million people of Korean heritage living in the People’s Republic of China, these being largely concentrated in the east and north-east of the country. The only other major Korean diaspora community is in Japan where there are over 800,000 people of Korean descent. Beyond these communities of between 100,000 and 200,000 are found in countries like Canada, Russia, Australia and Vietnam.

Explore more about the Korean War

• Korean War casualties, 1950-1957 historical record collection on MyHeritage
• Other military records on MyHeritage
• Crossing the 38th Parallel: Researching Your Korean War Ancestors, webinar by Michael L. Strauss, AG on Legacy Family Tree Webinars

References

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