In combination, the post-World War II arrangements on the Korean peninsula, the War itself, and the specific terms of it’s cold, prolonged pause have generated legacies for the present and proximate future. Even as the generation of combatants passes on, legacies of two kinds persist. Some are residual effects embodied in relatively tangible matters of physical borders, economic performance, military capabilities and deployments. Those residues reside in Northeast Asia. Others are more matters of ‘memory in use’ – ideas, images, and emotions to be evoked as precedents and expectation setters for contemporary policy choices. Evocations are applicable well outside of Northeast Asia. The legacies arguably differ in content and importance for the U.S. and for others that were directly involved. For each of the parties, they do have continuing implications for how they view each other, and for the pitfalls associated with the superpower security protection and development influence scenarios the ‘two Koreas’ have experienced. Even a cursory examination argues against those who: a) enthuse about the massive payoffs from either decisive bold stroke U.S. policies or patient incrementalism; and b) assume that initiatives and ‘shaping’ in international affairs are primarily the province of great powers.

The POW experience during the Korean War has generally been misunderstood by the American public.  Dr. Lori Bogle’s presentation will clarify the reality of the Korean War Prisoner of War – those held by UN forces and those held by the enemy - and official policy regarding voluntary repatriation. She will also discuss the public outrage when 21 American POWs held captive during the Korean War refused to return home in 1953.  Exaggerating the extent of treason during the war (claiming up to 1/3 of American POWs had betrayed their country), the Pentagon launched the Code of Conduct (1955) to serve both a strict set of rules for captured service personnel as well as a declaration of the military’s new, “tougher” moral standard for all Americans.  High-ranking officers, both conservative Christians and not, saw great promise in these two objectives.  But it would be Pentagon evangelicals who broadened Code instruction to the American public with a number of controversial programs.

What did ordinary Chinese really think about the Korean War and its primary combatants? The PRC, unsurprisingly, has portrayed the war as enjoying widespread legitimacy among its citizens, resulting in a "surge" of patriotism that helped consolidate political support. Academic scholarship has tended to concur with this view. Recent evidence from urban and rural archives in China, however, suggests an alternative reading of public reactions to the Korean War, as well as to government efforts to draft people into the armed services during the conflict. By looking at the issue of public support from the "bottom-up," this presentation hopes to offer a far more complicated view of the legitimacy of the war in China.

In writing about Matthew B. Ridgway, historians and other contemporary chroniclers have focused primarily on his significant role in the Korean War. Ridgway deserves to be remembered more fully for his wide range of other important contributions.

The understanding of war and thus much of the capability to fight it, as well as the ability to know when it is over, rests in acknowledging that both the advantages and the costs of war are far more culturally conditioned than more recent discussions on the nature of war might suggest. An illustration is the lack of a Home Front during the Korean War. While General Ridgway is credited with popularizing the phrase “The Forgotten War,” he is perhaps a better source for realizing that the war has been more ignored than forgotten. And, if this is the case, might well be a significant part of the ongoing discussion about the effect of technology on the nature of warfare, and the failure of the war in Iraq to grasp the American people.

The Korean War may be said to have resulted in a number of consequences, the most immediate and significant being the massive loss of life, combatant and civilian, on both sides. But it also had enormous strategic, tactical, economic, social, medical, and political consequences for both sides. A number of these will be “thumb-nailed” in the 20 minutes allotted.

This paper will examine the armistice negotiations at Kaesong, providing a different explanation for why these discussions established a pattern of acrimonious exchanges that delayed for two years an end to the Korean War. Most scholars have attributed the absence of swift progress toward an agreement to the inflexibility and truculence of the Communist delegation. But it was in fact the United States that bears responsibility for establishing an uncompromising and angry tone in negotiations because of its preposterous initial proposal for resolving the first substantive agenda item calling for establishing "a military demarcation line" and "demilitarized zone as a basic condition for a cessation of hostilities."