June 25: Started the Korean War: North Korea invaded South Korea with the support of China and the Soviet Union in 1950.

On June 25, 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea by sea and land.

The armistice was signed in July 1953. History tells us that the Korean Peninsula was held by Japan since 1910. But, as Japan was the big loser of the Second World War, the Allies divided the peninsula using the 38th Parallel line.

Kim Il-sung, head of the communist state of North Korea supported by the Soviet Union and China, travelled to Moscow to arrange the invasion and pull the United States out of the peninsula. China was still in its war with the communist takeover in 1949. But Mao supported the communist invasion of South Korea, violating the line of the 38th parallel.

Parallel serving as the dividing line between two Koreas

At first, the Communists almost invaded the entire peninsula. Five days after the invasion, US President Harry Truman ordered respond to the attack and called allies in the United Nations. President Laureano Gomez of Colombia agreed to participate and sent to the Battalion Colombia, and there suffered 639 casualties, almost 15% of its workforce.

Argentina, Brazil and Mexico had agreed to participate, but when they realized that this was a confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union withdrew and did not have to send their children to be massacred by external causes!

Joseph Stalin, Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin (born with the name of Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili in Georgia)

Joseph Stalin, Harry Truman and Winston Churchill at the Potsdam Conference, July 1945. Truman wears his usual double breasted suit and bowtie.

The Korean War is important in the history of international relations because it is the first meeting of the "Cold War" between the two superpowers winners of the World War II that arose the bipolar world!

The Korean War cost more than $50 billion and 33,000 U.S. lives, plus another 110,000 or so were wounded. It also cost Truman politically. When MacArthur publicly disagreed with Truman over Truman’s decision not to invade China, the general was fired. MacArthur returned to a hero’s welcome in America, and Truman was pilloried as being soft on communism.