The end of any war doesn't necessarily mean the end of all tension between belligerents. Not long
after World War II wrapped up, tensions between the East and West erupted into the 45-year-long
Cold War, with heavy hitters such as the USSR and the United States threatening nuclear cataclysm on
a global scale. On a smaller scale, the ripples of one particularly brutal Cold War-era conflict
are still felt strongly to this day. We are of course talking about the Korean War and
the border incidents that followed. In this video, we're going to discuss eight of the bloodier ones.
In 1910, Japan annexed Korea. From then until 1945, when Imperial Japan surrendered to the
Allies in the Second World War, Korea was under Japanese rule. With the Japanese
nuked and thoroughly defeated, the USSR and US divided Korea into two occupation zones,
the nation split along the 38th parallel into the north and south. The Soviets administered
the north, the Americans the south. In 1948, with things heating up between
the USSR and US, Korea's administered regions became sovereign states. The north was ruled
by Kim Il-sung's communists, and the south became the anti-communist Republic of Korea.
Both governments thought they were the rightful rulers of the whole Korean Peninsula.
Meanwhile, North Korea had been providing military assistance to the Chinese Communist
Party in the 1945-to-1949 phase of the Chinese Civil War, earning themselves a
place in the soon-to-be-created People's Republic of China or PRC’s good books.
In June 1950, North Korea's Korean People's Army or KPA crossed the border into South Korea
and—assured the support of the PRC and USSR—went to war with the South Korean Army. In response,
the United Nations, most notably the United States, got involved, and this led to a three-year
conflict in which as many as one million soldiers and three million civilians lost their lives.
To cut a long story even shorter, the conflict came largely to an end on the 27th of July 1953,
when the UN, KPA, and Chinese People's Volunteer Army signed the Korean Armistice Agreement.
As part of the armistice, North and South Korea established the Korean Demilitarized
Zone or DMZ across the border. This is a buffer zone between the two states.
It's about 250 kilometres or 160 miles long and four kilometres or 2.5 miles wide,
and it is not impregnable. In fact, since the DMZ's establishment more than 70 years ago,
both North Koreans and South Koreans have made incursions into the DMZ and their rival states.
While some border incidents occurred back in the 50s and early 60s, one of the bloodiest
early incidents began in October 1966 and went through to December of '69. Some consider it a
Second Korean War, but this incident is better known as the Korean DMZ Conflict. in 1966,
with US forces and some South Korean Divisions tied up in the Vietnam War, Kim II-sung believed
South Korea was in a more vulnerable position. He deployed some 386,000 troops along the DMZ.
By this point, a man named Park Chung-hee was the president of South Korea.
In answer, he sent out some 585,000 troops, backed by a US army, a US corps, and two US divisions,
a combined force that smeared itself across the edge of the DMZ. The North did not opt for a
full-blown invasion, however. Instead, Kim II-sung sent small units of lightly armed soldiers trained
in guerrilla warfare to infiltrate South Korea and upset the South Korean defence.
Lacking dedicated anti-guerrilla units, thousands of Kim Il-sung's infiltrators
slipped through the South Korean lines, clashing with soldiers and civilians alike. Fighting also
took place within the DMZ, when opposing units ran into each other during patrols.
At night on the 17th of June 1968, the North Korean spec ops unit Unit 124 penetrated the DMZ
to assassinate President Park in the Blue House in Seoul, an incident known as the Blue House raid.
On the night of the 21st, posing as a South Korean patrol, the operatives made it to a
checkpoint just 100 meters or 330 feet from the Blue House. Luckily for Park,
a police unit stopped and questioned the operatives. When they were unable to give
the police the answers they wanted, a police officer drew his pistol, and Unit 124 opened fire.
As they fled the checkpoint and back across the border, 29 of Unit 124's 31 operatives were shot
dead. One escaped, and one was captured. While Unit 124 managed to kill 30 South Koreans and
Americans and wound a further 66 as they went, they absolutely failed their mission objective
After the failed Blue House raid, the South tightened its defences,
so Kim II-sung looked to the coastline instead. On the 30th of October 1968,
North Korea landed 120 Unit 124 operatives in South Korea's Gyeongsang and Gangwon Provinces,
intending to set up guerrilla bases in the Taebaek Mountains and indoctrinate the locals.
The landing went well enough, but when they reached the mountains, they found out that the
South Korean villagers had already been taught to guard themselves against communist infiltrators.
The locals informed the authorities, and some 70,000 South Korean troops went out on a manhunt
through to late December, killing or capturing all but three of the 120 men.
In the final year of the Korean DMZ Conflict, a pair of North
Korea MiG-21s shot down an American Lockheed EC-121M Warning Star over the Sea of Japan,
killing 31 men, but there weren't any other major infiltrations.
Throughout that year, the North's efforts tapered, and the South claimed victory.
Seven years later, in August 1976, five workers of the Korean Service Corps or KSC—accompanied
by two US Army officers, a South Korean captain, and 11 United Nations personnel—entered the DMZ's
Joint Security Area to fell an obscuring poplar tree near the so-called Bridge of No Return.
Not long after they began, some 15 North Korean soldiers arrived and told them to stop cutting
the tree. The American Captain Arthur Bonifas ignored the North Koreans, telling his boys to
keep on cutting. Then a further 20 North Koreans arrived in a truck carrying crowbars and clubs. At
this point, the KSC workers dropped their axes and gave it legs. The North Koreans seized the weapons
and turned them on the US officers, hacking and bludgeoning Bonifas and First Lieutenant
Mark Barret. Bonifas was killed on the spot, and they fatally wounded Barret, who died on the way
to the hospital. Later, the North Koreans claimed they had acted out of "self-defence." The US Army,
the UN Joint Security Force, and the South Koreans retaliated by means of Operation Paul Bunyan,
driving into the Joint Security Area with chainsaws to end the poplar tree for good.
While the Americans and South Koreans deployed a great many troops and military assets
(including attack helicopters, fighter jets, and bombers) to oversee the operation,
things did not escalate beyond a good old-fashioned D-measuring.
Now let's jump ahead 20 years to 1996, two years after Kim Il-sung died of a heart
attack. On the 16th of September, a North Korean Sang-O-class submarine ran aground
trying to deposit a recon team on the South Korean coast, near the town of Jeongdongjin.
With the sub out of action, 23 North Koreans tried to sneak their way overland to the DMZ. The South
Koreans soon caught wind of them, deploying some 43,000 soldiers to hunt the enemy operatives down.
They ultimately killed 13 of the operatives, found the corpses of 11 executed by their own men,
and captured one. The final operative was listed as missing. The captured man
was taken in for interrogation. He revealed everything and later defected to the South.
Less than three years later, something went down in the West Sea. In June 1999,
the North Koreans, now led by Supreme Leader Kim Jong-il, decided to redraw the maritime
boundary between the North and South, known as the Northern Limit Line or NLL. A few days after the
North Koreans started testing the NLL on the 9th of June, crossing the line near Yeonpyeong Island,
the South Korean Navy retaliated by physically bumping into the North Korean vessels, instead
of being the ones to fire the first shot. On the 15th, around 20 North Korean fishing boats, four
patrol boats, and at least one torpedo boat were south of the NLL, ramming the South Korean vessels
as the South Koreans had previously done to them. At around 9:30 AM, a North Korean patrol boat got
sandwiched between two enemy boats and decided to respond by firing on them with machine guns
and a 25 mm cannon. The South Koreans answered in kind, and a skirmish broke out, with the
South Koreans sinking one torpedo boat, damaging five patrol boats, killing as many as 30 men,
and wounding a further 70. By 11:00 AM, the North Koreans had limped back over the NLL.
In 2002, the Koreans clashed once again in a second Battle of Yeonpyeong, though the
bombardment of Yeonpyeong in 2010 was far more significant. On the 23rd of November, some 70,000
South Korean and US troops were performing their annual Hoguk exercise, which was essentially a
giant military drill that took place on Yeonpyeong Island and Baengnyeong Island, south of the NLL.
They used live rounds during the drill but stated they were aiming their fire to the south.
The North Koreans thought otherwise, believing it was some sort of attack.
At around 2:30 PM, batteries on the islands of Mudo and Kaemori started shelling Yeonpyeong,
firing two barrages in total. The guns at Yeonpyong answered. After about an hour,
the North stopped firing, and the South followed suit an hour after that.
All in all, just two South Korean civilians and two soldiers were killed, while a further 22 were
wounded. The attack started fires all throughout the island, however, destroying 70% of its forests
and fields and around 30 buildings. The North's Korean Central News Agency later claimed that the
South had used the civilians present on the island as a "human shield" to cover military action.
But what do you think? Did you know the borders between North and South Korea were such a mess?
Are there any other border incidents you'd like us to cover in more detail or in a
second video like this one? Please share your thoughts in the comments.