The Korean & Vietnam Wars

The Cold War got its name because the two superpowers never fired at each other directly. But the people of Korea and Vietnam would have found the word "cold" obscene. Between 1950 and 1975, somewhere between five and eight million people died in wars fought on their soil, with their cities as the battlefields and their civilians as the casualties, while Washington and Moscow supplied the weapons, the advisors, and the ideological justifications from a safe distance.

These were not peripheral skirmishes. Korea produced the first major armed conflict of the nuclear age and nearly triggered World War III when Chinese forces poured across the Yalu River. Vietnam became the longest war in American history up to that point and the first one the United States lost. Together they reshaped the global order, shattered assumptions about Western military supremacy, and left scars across East and Southeast Asia that are still visible today.

Korea had been a unified kingdom for over a thousand years before Japan annexed it in 1910. Japanese colonial rule was harsh. Koreans were forced to adopt Japanese names, speak Japanese in schools, and labor in Japanese factories and mines. When Japan surrendered in August 1945, Koreans expected independence.