Seventy-five years ago this week, more than 135,000 North Korean troops invaded South Korea, starting a war that cost millions of lives and left scars that linger to this day.

Yet, the Korean War has been forever overshadowed by World War II, a much larger conflict that ended less than five years earlier. Even the US Army refers to Korea as “the Forgotten War” – despite more than 36,000 American lives lost.

Sixteen nations, including the United States, sent combat troops in aid of South Korea under the United Nations Command. Chinese troops intervened on the North Korean side.

War broke out on June 25, 1950, when North Korean forces stormed across the 38th parallel dividing North and South Korea. An armistice signed on July 27, 1953, stopped the conflict, but the war never officially ended because there was no peace treaty.

While the twists and turns of today’s US-North Korea relationship have put a spotlight on the Korean War’s legacy, it is still a widely overlooked conflict.

Here are six things you might not know about the Korean War:

The US Army once controlled one of the world’s most secretive cities

It’s almost impossible for Americans to travel to North Korea or its capital city Pyongyang. US passport holders are not allowed to go there without special permission from the US State Department.

But for eight weeks in 1950, Pyongyang was under control of the US Army.

On October 19 of that year, the US Army’s 1st Cavalry Division along with a division of South Korean soldiers captured the North Korean capital, according to US Army histories.

The US forces quickly made themselves at home, according to the histories.

By October 22, the US Eighth Army had set up its advance headquarters in what was the headquarters building for North Korean leader Kim Il Sung.

A picture from the time shows an American intelligence officer sitting at Kim’s desk with a portrait of Soviet Union leader Joseph Stalin hanging on the wall behind him.

But the US military’s occupation of Pyongyang was short-lived. When Chinese troops entered the war in late November 1950, they quickly pushed south and vanquished US forces from Pyongyang by December 5.

The US dropped more bombs on North Korea than on the entire region during WWII

Most images of the Korean War are of ground battles fought in places like the Chosin Reservoir and Incheon. But much of the destruction wreaked on North Korea by the US military was done in a relentless bombing campaign.

During the three years of the Korean War, US aircraft dropped 635,000 tons of bombs – both high explosive and incendiary – on North Korea. That’s more than the 500,000 tons of bombs the US dropped in the Pacific in the entirety of the Second World War, according to figures cited by historian Charles Armstrong in the Asia-Pacific Journal.

Journalists, international observers and American prisoners of war who were in North Korea during the war reported nearly every substantial building had been destroyed. By November 1950, North Korea was advising its citizens to dig holes for housing and shelter.

North Korea didn’t keep official casualty figures from the bombings, but information obtained from Russian archives by the Wilson Center’s Cold War International History Project put the number at more than 280,000.

Gen. Curtis LeMay, the father of US strategic bombing and the architect of fire raids that destroyed swathes of Japanese cities in World War II, said this of the American bombing of North Korea:

“We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, some way or another.”

Armstrong said that bombing of North Korea has effects that linger to this day.

“The DPRK (Democratic Republic of Korea) government never forgot the lesson of North Korea’s vulnerability to American air attack, and for half a century after the Armistice continued to strengthen antiaircraft defenses, build underground installations, and eventually develop nuclear weapons to ensure that North Korea would not find itself in such a position again,” Armstrong wrote.

North Korea convinced the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin to let the war happen

When World War II ended, control of the Korean Peninsula – occupied by defeated Japanese troops – was divided between the Soviet Union in the north and the United States in the south.

Kim Il Sung, the leader of North Korea, wanted to unite the two Koreas under communist rule and sought permission of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to do so by force, according to records from the Wilson Center.

Upon Kim’s first request to invade in March 1949, Stalin was wary and did not want to be pulled into a conflict with the United States, which still had occupation troops in South Korea.

But when those troops were pulled in the summer of 1949, Stalin’s opposition softened, and by April 1950 the Soviet leader was ready to hear Kim out again when the North Korean leader visited Moscow.

Stalin told Kim that the USSR would back the invasion, but only if Kim got communist China to approve too.

Emboldened by communist China’s victory over Nationalist forces in 1949 – in a civil war in which Washington did not intervene – Chinese leader Mao Zedong agreed and offered to be a backup force for North Korean troops in the eventuality the US intervened.

With that, Kim had the green light to invade.

The Korean War saved Taiwan from a potential communist takeover

In 1949, communist China was amassing forces along its coast to invade Taiwan, the island to which Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist forces had fled after losing to Mao and the communists in the Chinese Civil War.

But the outbreak of the Korean War put a big roadblock in the way of communist China’s plans – the US Navy. Fearful of the fighting in Korea spreading across East Asia, President Harry Truman dispatched US warships to the waters between China and Taiwan.

The US State Department tells how close Taiwan, now a self-governed democaracy that Beijing still claims as part of China, came to a potential communist takeover.

“In late 1949 and early 1950, American officials were prepared to let PRC (People’s Republic of China) forces cross the Strait and defeat Chiang, but after the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, the United States sent its Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Strait to prevent the Korean conflict from spreading south,” reads a passage from the department’s Office of the Historian.

“The appearance of the Seventh Fleet angered the Chinese communists, who transferred their troops poised for an invasion of Taiwan to the Korean front,” it reads.

By October 19, 1950, 12 divisions of communist Chinese troops, more than a quarter-million men, were in North Korea, according to a Brookings Institution account.

Those Chinese troops would inflict horrific losses on the US and South Korean troops they faced, eventually driving them out of North Korea completely.

But China also suffered massive losses; more than 180,000 of its troops were killed.

The first jet-vs-jet dogfight

Jet fighters entered military service in World War II with the introduction of the German Messerschmidt 262. But the jet fighters didn’t go head-to-head in a “Top Gun”-style dogfight until the Korean War.

Records seem to agree that first dogfight occurred over Sinuiju in North Korea, near the Yalu River, and its border with China on November 8, 1950. The Americans, flying F-80 Shooting Star jets, were confronted by MiG-15s, Soviet-made jets that were probably being piloted by Soviet pilots from bases in China.

According to a report from the historian of the US Air Force’s 51st Fighter Wing, eight to 12 MiGs came after an American flight of four F-80s that day. In a 60-second encounter with one of those MIGs, Air Force 1st Lt. Russell Brown hit a MiG-15 with fire from his jet’s cannon and saw it explode in flames, becoming the first jet fighter pilot to score a kill in a dogfight, the report says.

But others dispute that account, with a report from the US Naval Institute (USNI) saying that Soviet records show no MiGs were lost that day.

What is certain is that the next day, November 9, 1950, US Navy Lt. Cmdr. William Amen, flying an F9F fighter off the aircraft carrier USS Philippine Sea, shot down a MiG-15 during airstrikes against bridges on the Yalu River.

Soviet records confirm the MiG-15 loss that day, according to the USNI report.

Later in the war, the US introduced the F-86 jet to the Korean conflict. That plane won fame in battles against the MiG-15 in what was know as “MiG Alley,” the area along the Korea-China border, where the Soviet pilots flew out of bases on the Chinese side.

The National Museum of the US Air Force in Ohio explains MiG Alley this way:

“Large formations of MiGs would lie in wait on the Manchurian side of the border. When UN aircraft entered MiG Alley, these MiGs would swoop down from high altitude to attack. If the MiGs ran into trouble, they would try to escape back over the border into communist China. (To prevent a wider war, UN pilots were ordered not to attack targets in Manchuria.) Even with this advantage, communist pilots still could not compete against the better-trained Sabre pilots of the US Air Force, who scored a kill ratio of about 8:1 against the MiGs.”

The United States never declared war

Though millions of lives were lost during the fighting on the Korean Peninsula between 1950 and 1953, they were technically casualties of what was called a “police action.”

Under the US Constitution, only the US Congress can declare war on another nation. But it has not done so since World War II.

When North Korea invaded the South in 1950, US President Harry Truman sent the US military to intervene as part of a combined effort approved by the United Nations Security Council.

“Fifteen other nations also sent troops under the UN command. Truman did not seek a formal declaration of war from Congress; officially, America’s presence in Korea amounted to no more than a ‘police action,’” reads a passage from the US National Archives.

And those police actions have become the norm for US military intervention ever since. The Vietnam War, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo, all have seen US troops enter combat under congressional authorizations for the use of military force (AUMF), according to the US House of Representatives website.

Though the AUMF had been around since the beginning of the republic, “after World War II … AUMFs became much broader, often granting Presidents sweeping authority to engage America’s military around the world,” the US House website says.

“The war was the first large overseas US conflict without a declaration of war, setting a precedent for the unilateral presidential power exercised today,” Emory University law professor Mary Dudziak wrote in a 2019 opinion column for the Washington Post.

“The Korean War has helped to enable this century’s forever wars,” Dudziak wrote.

An empty base as a target, with many hours warning, and a limited number of missiles fired at some of the best air defense systems in the world. Iran’s retaliation for the US’s weekend strikes on three of its nuclear facilities can only have been designed to deescalate.

The US-run Al Udeid airbase in Qatar had been evacuated days earlier, with satellite images showing the departure of planes and personnel widely publicised in the media. It is the most important US military airbase in the region, the home of Central Command. It even launched the drone that killed Iran’s top military personality, General Qasem Soleimani, in 2020, Iranian state media said in the hours after “Operation Glad Tidings of Victory.” The Monday strike against Al-Udeid had close to zero chance of American casualties – and provided the perfect moment of quasi-absurd face-saving for Iran.

The first hint of a possible strike came when the US Embassy in Doha, Qatar, issued an emergency “shelter in place” order for US citizens. As if to remove any doubt, Qatar closed its airspace about an hour prior to the launch of what appears to have been close to a dozen missiles by Iran. Adding to the favourable conditions of the launch for Iran’s dwindling arsenal, Qatar is close enough to permit the use of shorter-range missiles, stocks of which have not been as depleted as the medium-range missiles used to hit Israel over the past week.

To pour water on anything resembling a flame, Iran’s National Security Council said moments after the attack the number of missiles fired had been “as many as the number of bombs used in the attack on Iranian nuclear facilities.” Packaging the barrage as the definition of a proportionate response, the Iranian statement went on to insist the attack posed “no dangerous aspect to our friendly and brotherly country of Qatar and its noble people.”

Tehran’s method of retaliation-without-fangs has been successfully tried and tested. After Soleimani was killed, Iran’s retaliatory missile attack against the US’s Al Asad airbase in Iraq was reportedly telegraphed to Baghdad beforehand, possibly helping reduce the level of US injury suffered to mostly concussions. Iran’s response to Israel’s assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in July 2024 in the heart of Tehran heavily telegraphed in advance.

“We knew they’d retaliate. They had a similar response after Soleimani,” a senior White House official said Monday night.

A playbook appears to be forming. But it is one that compounds Iran’s military weakness each time it is employed. In 2020, the Islamic Republic lost its pre-eminent military personality – an Iranian hardline hero. In 2024, it showed that valuable allies were not safe in central Tehran. This year, the regime has lost control of its own airspace to the point of previously unthinkable strikes on their prized nuclear facilities by both Israel and the US.

This is stark testament to the differing powers on display. Iran has to feign its strength in a managed presentation of restrained and muted anger. The US and Israel get to break taboos daily, shattering Iran’s long-held position as a regional power in under ten days, and perhaps ending its ambitions to be a nuclear power.

There is now only one real red line left for the United States or Israel to cross, and that is to directly target Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But that may seem ill-advised, given the likelihood this octogenarian theocrat would be replaced by a younger hardliner who is keener to flex Iran’s muscles of deterrence. Better to accept toothless retaliations amid Tehran’s slow decline.

Each expression of Iran’s anger has confirmed its slow erosion of power. An angry fledging nuclear power would have accelerated its race to an atomic bomb. That may still happen. But it looks more likely that Iran is desperately hoping its performative lashing out can sate what remains of its hardliners, decimated by Israeli strikes. It may even hope to shuffle back to diplomacy, with talks to contain a nuclear program and ballistic missile stockpile likely severely depleted to shadows of what they were merely ten days ago.

In the past 48 hours, the Middle East has witnessed an unprecedented US airstrike on Iran with its most powerful non-nuclear weapons, an Iranian retaliatory strike on the largest US air base in the region, to an apparent truce that will see Iran and Israel end their hostilities that have set the world on edge.

The region and the wider world watched warily as events unfolded overnight into Tuesday, but with a degree of hope as daylight broke in the region that what US President Donald Trump called the “12 Day War” may be over.

“THE CEASEFIRE IS NOW IN EFFECT. PLEASE DO NOT VIOLATE IT!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social account.

Around the same time, Israeli emergency workers were at the site of what appeared to be Iran’s final attack of the 12-day conflict, a missile strike in Beer Shiva that left at least five people dead and 20 wounded.

It could be the last hostile act of two days of whipsawing developments leading up to Trump’s surprise announcement of a ceasefire.

Here’s the situation Tuesday in the Middle East.

The ceasefire deal

On Monday evening in Washington, the US president announced the ceasefire.

“It has been fully agreed by and between Israel and Iran that there will be a Complete and Total CEASEFIRE,” Trump said in a social media post.

“I would like to congratulate both Countries, Israel and Iran, on having the Stamina, Courage, and Intelligence to end, what should be called, “THE 12 DAY WAR,” Trump said.

Trump said the ceasefire would be phased in, with Iran ending attacks on Israel first, then Israel stopping its attacks on Iran 12 hours later. But the exact timing of those events was unclear.

During the negotiations, Trump communicated directly with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Marco Rubio and special envoy Steve Witkoff negotiated the terms, through direct and indirect channels, with the Iranians, the source said.

Trump said in a later social media post that both Israel and Iran came to him to get a ceasefire done.

Iranian state media reported, however, that Trump sought the ceasefire deal “in a begging-like manner” after the attack on the US air base in Qatar.

Whether a ceasefire will hold remains to be seen.

Around the time Iran was supposed to have stopped its attacks under the Trump timeline, its missiles hit Israel, killing at least five civilians, according to Israeli officials.

Iran fires on biggest US base in region

Just hours before Trump’s ceasefire announcement, Iran fired about a dozen short- and medium-range ballistic missiles at the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the largest US military installation in the Middle East.

But Tehran tipped both the US and Qatar that the strike was coming, and air defenses, including Patriot missile batteries, were able to intercept all but one of the incoming Iranian missiles, according to US and Qatari officials. No deaths or injuries were reported in Qatar.

In a social media post, Trump thanked Iran for warning the missile attack was coming.

“Most importantly, they’ve gotten it all out of their ‘system,’ and there will, hopefully, be no further HATE. I want to thank Iran for giving us early notice, which made it possible for no lives to be lost, and nobody to be injured,” Trump said.

“Tehran’s choice to limit its retaliation and deescalate the crisis is rational on their part given overwhelming US strength and Iranian weakness,” said Rosemary Kelanic, director of the Middle East Program at Defense Priorities.

What about Iran’s nuclear program?

Israel’s contention that Iran would soon be able to build a nuclear weapon was the impetus for the conflict, which began with Israel Defense Forces strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities and against Iran’s military and nuclear program scientists on the night of June 12-13.

Trump followed on Israel’s airstrikes by ordering an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, including a fleet of US B-2 bombers to dropping fourteen 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs on two deeply buried sites in Iran, the first time weapon had been used in combat.

Trump administration officials said Iran’s nuclear weapons program, which they said was just days away from the ability to make a nuclear bomb, was set back years by the US strikes.

Experts were more skeptical, saying Iranian stores of enriched uranium may have escaped destruction in the US strikes and Tehran may be able to make a weapon in just a few months.

What now for Gaza?

The Middle East has been a tinderbox since October 2023, when Hamas militants from Gaza entered Israel in force, killing hundreds and taking dozens more hostage.

Israel responded with an invasion of the Palestinian enclave to root out Hamas from tunnels and other fortifications that has left over 55,000 people dead, much of Gaza in ruins and its population of 2.1 million at risk of famine, according to the World Health Organization.

While the world’s attention has been on Israel’s fighting with Iran, dozens of people have been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza as they scramble to get the limited food aid allowed into the territory, including 21 in the past day, Palestinians say.

A group advocating for the return of Israeli hostages held in Gaza has called for the ceasefire between Israel and Iran to be expanded to include the war-torn enclave.

“Those who can achieve a ceasefire with Iran can also end the war in Gaza,” the Hostages and Missing Families Forum said in a statement Tuesday.

The forum said the ceasefire “must expand to include Gaza” and called on the government “to engage in urgent negotiations that will bring home all the hostages and end the war.”

“After 12 days and nights during which the people of Israel could not sleep because of Iran, we can finally go back to not sleeping because of the hostages,” the forum said.

Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid echoed those sentiments, writing in a post on X: “And now Gaza. This is the moment to close that front as well. To bring the hostages home, to end the war. Israel needs to start rebuilding.”