My grandfather and many of our grandfathers served in Korea but they never talk about it. World War II is talked about, Vietnam is talked about, desert storm is talked about - all of these American conflicts are such iconic parts of our history. Why not the Korean War?
Some relevant old answers:
A previous answer on this seems to have been filed in the memory hole, so let me expand on what I wrote earlier.
My grandfather and many of our grandfathers served in Korea but they never talk about it.
You've hit on something really important here. So much of how and why we remember WWII, Korea, and Vietnam is tied into how and why the veterans remember these conflicts.
For a long time, many WWII and Korean War veterans were like your grandfather. They just didn't talk about it. Before he passed, my grandfather (a former artilleryman in the 24th Infantry Division) only spoke about the war to me once. He told me about keeping a .38 automatic in his sleeping bag, afraid that a North Korean soldier would try to bayonet him at night.
By and large veterans of the 1940s and 1950s were reticent to sharing their wartime experiences. There are a great many reasons for this. For some, their war stories just weren't that interesting. They might have been a supply clerk or a typist.
For many combat veterans, both wars inflicted serious mental trauma (you may find this answer about combat stress and PTSD in WWII to be of interest). However, veterans of both wars tended to shut up about the bad things they'd seen, keep their struggles to themselves, and get on with. It wasn't until a few decades after Vietnam, veteran culture and American culture started to shift.
The public became more willing to listen. Veterans became more willing to talk. Films like Saving Private Ryan and popular books-turned-productions like Band of Brothers were both symptoms and causes of this changing zeitgesest. Every episode Band of Brothers literally opened and closed with interview with veterans from Easy Company. That's a relatively recent convention.
For some veterans of Korea and WWII, this shift came too late for them to tell their stories. Some had passed away. For others, time had dulled their recollections and faded their memories. Today, many veterans of Iraq and Vietnam have had the opportunity and the encouragement to tell others about their experiences. For a long time, that wasn't the case for WWII and Korean veterans.
For many of us, our grandfathers never talked about WWII or Korea. Without being reminded of something, it can be easy to forget.
However, this only partially answers the question. After all, WWII is now being endlessly remembered, mis-remembered, and half-remembered. Meanwhile the Korean War is the "Forgotten War."
Why? Well here's no one answer to this question.
Point 1: The Number of Participants
Considerably more people participated in WWII and the Vietnam War. Fewer Americans were killed and wounded. Fewer Medals of Honor were awarded. Let's look at some figures.
Here's WWII, by far the largest conflict in American history.
| Conflict | World War II |
|---|---|
| Dates | December 7, 1941 to December 31, 1946 |
| All Armed Forces [note: not all deployed overseas] | 16,112,566 |
| Deaths | 291,557 |
| Wounded | 671,846 |
| Medals of Honor | 433 |
By contrast, here's the Korean War. The timeline is similar; mid-1950 to mid-1953 isn't far off from late-1941 to mid-1945. However, as a more local "police action," the Korean War didn't pull in nearly as many Americans. And of the 5.7 million Americans in uniform during the Korean War period, only a fraction were deployed to Korea or Japan.
Also consider that a meaningful number of Korean War veterans were WWII veterans.
The For just a ballpark figure, the 1978 Statistical Abstract of the United States found that there were 1,218,000 living veterans who'd served during (if not necessarily in) both wars. Some of these men were career servicemen who'd stayed in uniform after WWII. Others were reservists who'd been called up when the U.S. armed forces found itself desperately short of manpower to fight the Korean War.
| Conflict | Korean War |
|---|---|
| Dates | June 25, 1950 to July 27, 1953 |
| All Armed Forces [note: not all deployed overseas] | 5,720,000 |
| Battle Deaths | 33,741 |
| Other Deaths (In Theatre) | 2,833 |
| Wounded | 103,284 |
| Medals of Honor | 131 |
Then, we have Vietnam, the second-longest war in American history. The number of Americans in uniforms was bigger. The number of servicemen and women killed, wounded, and missing was greater, although Korea had far more deaths per year on average.
The 1978 Statistical Abstract of the United States found 530,000 living Korean-era vets who had also served during the time of the Vietnam War (again, not necessarily in SE Asia). Another 203,000 living veterans had served in all three wars!
| Conflict | Vietnam War |
|---|---|
| Dates | August 4, 1964 to January 27, 1973 |
| All Armed Forces [note: not all deployed overseas] | 8,744,000 |
| Deployed to Southeast Asia | 3,403,000 |
| Battle Deaths | 47,424 |
| Other Deaths (In Theatre) | 10,785 |
| Wounded | 153,303 |
| Medals of Honor | 238 |
We see a similar pattern in the Selection Service System records for each conflict. As you can see, the Korean War involved the lowest number of draftees.
| Conflict | Dates | Number of Inductions |
|---|---|---|
| World War I | September 1917 to November 1918 | 2,810,296 |
| World War II | November 1940 to October 1946 | 10,110,104 |
| Korean War | June 1950 to June 1953 | 1,529,539 |
| Vietnam War | August 1964 to February 1973 | 1,857,304 |
Ok, so there were fewer people enlisting, fighting, and dying in the Korean War. So what? Why does this matter?
Think about the ripple effects of this. Fewer Gold Star families keeping alive the memory of a father or son who never returned. Fewer veterans swapping stories at the VFW hall. Fewer GIs with a literary bent penning war memoirs.
Fewer people to remember. Fewer people to be remembered. And fewer people to remind others.
Hi there! You’ve asked a question along the lines of ‘why didn’t I learn about X’. We’re happy to let this question stand, but there are a variety of reasons why you may find it hard to get a good answer to this question on /r/AskHistorians.
Firstly, school curricula and how they are taught vary strongly between different countries and even even different states. Additionally, how they are taught is often influenced by teachers having to compromise on how much time they can spend on any given topic. More information on your location and level of education might be helpful to answer this question.
Secondly, we have noticed that these questions are often phrased to be about people's individual experience but what they are really about is why a certain event is more prominent in popular narratives of history than others.
Instead of asking "Why haven't I learned about event ...", considering asking "What importance do scholars assign to event ... in the context of such and such history?" - the latter question is often closer to what to what people actually want to know and is more likely to get a good answer from an expert. If you intend to ask the 'What importance do scholars assign to event X' question instead, let us know and we'll remove this question.
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