Korea

The Cold War forged new international relationships in which physical distance seemed overcome by ideological proximity. In North Korea, East Germany found a fellow traveller – and a fellow victim.

The Korean War began as a conflict over territory. It would become a fight for prisoners’ asylum.

The Korean peninsula was a chessboard on which the fates of great powers were decided. China, Japan and Russia learned this to their cost in the 'Other Great Game’.

Prisoners of war are driven to their execution in a harrowing image from 1950.

Rowena Hammal explains why the Korean War broke out in 1950.

In the middle of the 19th century, Korea was isolated from the rest of the world and unknown. Many attempts were made to open it.

To Cold War hawks the ambitions of Stalin lay behind Kim Il Sung. Only with the opening of archives some 50 years later did Soviet responsibility for the Korean War become known.

When North Korean tanks and infantry crossed the Thirty-Eighth Parallel in 1950, the Korean War began. The three-year war cost United Nations and South Korean forces over 200,000 casualties.

Brian Catchpole remembers the sufferings and heroism of the Commonwealth Division in the first major conflict of the Cold War.