I am a war film buff. You'll find that there have been several movies made about the Korean War.. Many of these films were made contemporaneously with the war, but some were made later. Besides M.A.S.H., Porkchop Hill was a very popular film starring Gregory Peck and George Peppard. It's also important to note that the Clint Eastwood movie Heartbreak Ridge is named after a Korean War battle. According to the film, Gunnery Sergeant Highway was in the Army during the Korean War before reenlisting in the Marines.

There are a handful of films based on the topic of the war. They just aren't necessarily watched. This brings us to a second point.

Why is the Korean War not studied in history class? It really depends on the class. Some schools offer electives on Korea or cover Korea in A.P courses. Primary and secondary history courses usually use books that present history chronologically. Reaching modern history in class requires teachers to go through all of the preceding material. Also, many state achievement tests focus on civics, the Constitution, and earlier American history, so teaching modern history isn't that important from a testing standpoint.

On one hand, it is a symptom of the nature of the history education in the United States, but the nature of the war itself brings up some issues.

The Korean War is often called "The Forgotten War." Look at its place in time. WWII, a two theater world war, with millions dead ended in 1945. Many soldiers returned home and started theirs lives. America had economically survived the war, unlike many other parts of the world, and had emerged decidedly as a superpower. Following WWII, there was a the Baby Boom and suburbs with affordable housing popped up all over the country.

The Korean Conflict was a much smaller scale compared to World War II. There were innovations made during the Korean War that changed warfare: jet fighters, radar assisted machine guns, helicopters. However, the U.S. as part of the U.N. forces dispatched to the Korean Peninsula were not protecting U.S. territory like in WWII. The U.S. did not stand to gain anything from protecting Korea in the public eye. It was a peacekeeping mission concerned with aiding a far away people in a far away place. There were no blackouts on the West or East coasts, no attacks on ports.

Why was the Korean War not protested like Vietnam? The social climate wasn't right. There was a general happiness throughout the country. The greatest struggles were yet to come. The counter-cultural of the 1960s was just growing out of the Beats and other similar movements. There was antiwar sentiment at home, especially after the firing of Douglas MacArthur, but it was not to the fever pitch it reached during Vietnam. See Gallup. Further, the Red Scare and the Cold War were starting to build, so many concerns were focused at home.

Why did Vietnam capture the cultural consciousness unlike the Korean War? There are several reasons. The media had a huge presence in Vietnam like never before. The war spanned basically from 1964-1974 with some battles lost by the US despite claims of success. Success was measured by kill counts, and it was clear that that's not were success lay, public perception changed. Further, Walter Cronkite told America that the war was not winnable at one point. Cronkite was probably the most trusted man in America. Also, you had people on various platforms preaching against Vietnam, like some members of the Civil Rights Movement.

I think also that it's important to note that a significant percentage of troops, I've read as high as 25%, served in WWII and Korea, but the number of troops still serving when Vietnam rolled around was small. To some soldiers Korea was a continuation of their tour of duty, not a new war in a new generation as with Vietnam. The average age of Vietnam troops was around 19-20. They were born during or near the end of WWII. They were displaced from both WWII and Korea by the time they were 18 or 19.

Although /u/3crownking appears to imply that this question is asked from a U.S. perspective, it is interesting to compare U.S. attitudes to the war with that in Korea. While the Korean War is commonly referred to as "the Forgotten War" in the U.S., there is argument over what to call it in Korea. It is far from the only war to be fought in Korea, just the most recent. Many Koreans and the South Korean government refer to it as the 6.25 Incident (사변) or 6.25 War (전쟁) in reference to the date the war started 25 June 1950. Some modern revisionists who try to emphasize the domestic nature of the conflict have taken to calling it the 6.25 or Korean Disturbance (동란, could also be translated as upheaval). In its propaganda, North Korea still calls it the Fatherland Liberation War (조국해방전쟁), and China officially labels it as "War to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea" (抗美援朝战争, 항미원조전쟁).

The war is still very much a part of the Korean consciousness today, as its armistice conclusion left Korea in its currently divided state. Even what term is used to refer to the conflict has political connotations. A decent comparison is alternate names for the U.S. Civil War like "The War of Northern Aggression" etc.

The older generation of Koreans is comprised of many veterans, which has led to political turmoil for the South Korean left wing political parties, which are accused of being commie reds (좌빨).

North Korea has also never gotten over the Korean War, with propaganda depicting U.S. GIs committing atrocities, such as this this poster showing a GI about to drop a baby into a well, while his mother is restrained by other GIs. The caption reads "Do not forget the U.S. imperialist dogs." Or this poster warning the "U.S. imperialists" not to "carelessly provoke" war. In both of these examples the GIs are depicted wearing Korean War era fatigues and not more modern uniforms, despite the obviously more recent connotations of the latter poster.

In North Korean media, Charles Jenkins, a U.S. Army Sergeant who defected to the North in 1965 (and coincidentally died today ) reported in his book The Reluctant Communist: My Desertion, Court-Martial, and Forty-Year Imprisonment in North Korea that he portrayed U.S. GIs in propaganda films from the 1970s through his release from North Korea in 2004.

From a South Korean media perspective, there have been many movies made featuring the war, with the most internationally popular one being Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War (태극기 휘날리며, literally "As the [South Korean] Flag Waves" Tae Guk Gi being the name of South Korea's flag) which came out in 2004. The war is also very present in almost every aspect of the 1960 classic Obaltan (오발탄, sometimes translated as Aimless Bullet or Stray Bullet ), which has been voted a few times as the best Korean movie ever made. From the mid 1960s through the mid 1990s, South Korean filmmakers tended to shy away from films with a domestic message as censorship laws required them to insert government propaganda, and the propaganda films were not popular.

Recently, more attention has been drawn to South Korean involvement in the Vietnam War, especially through the 2014 movie Ode to My Father (국제시장, literally "International Market"), which tracks the ordeals of the older generation of Koreans beginning with the Korean War, touching on the Vietnam War and various other national events in recent Korean history. The film is somewhat comparable to Forrest Gump, for its tracking a few characters through momentous events in the nation's history.

The Vietnam War was the first time that South Korea ever deployed troops overseas. From 1964 to 1973, South Korea sent more than 300,000 troops to Vietnam, which was second only to the U.S. But in my studies of Korea I have only come across a handful of references to the Vietnam War, so it would seem that Vietnam is South Korea's forgotten war.

Hi folks,

If you're coming here to say "M*A*S*H is set during the Korean War!" but have nothing else to say, please don't clutter up the thread. A comprehensive answer to this question, as our rules require would deal with the subject of historical memory of the Korean War in popular culture, not just an example of a show that uses the war as its setting.

Thanks!