Hello and welcome to Battleground Korea with me Saul David and Roger Morehouse.

Well, last week we ended with the armistice in 1953, and today we're

going to look at the unfinished truce and enduring legacy. Before we get to this long tail, Roger,

let's talk a little bit about the appalling human cost. I mean, as we're ever with wars,

there is a disagreement about casualties,

but some figures estimate as many as 3 million people lost their lives in the war,

admittedly most of them civilians, but that doesn't make it any better as a statistic, does it?

Probably in the region of about 2 million civilian casualties and another 1 million

military casualties, most of the latter, of course, absorbed by both the Chinese and the North

Koreans. Yes, I mean, they're quite astonishing figures. For a conflict that I think is still seen

as being rather sort of peripheral, I suppose, for many, particularly in the UK,

the figures are really quite astonishing, as you say. So grand total, perhaps, of something approaching

three million, the majority of those being civilian dead, the result of that really overpowering

aerial bombing campaign carried out by the Allied forces, in which, incidentally, you know,

more tonnage was dropped than in the entire Pacific theatre in World War II, which is astonishing

the capability that particularly American forces had at that point to drop, you know,

the huge amounts of ordnance on North Korea. Using, you know, B-29s, as we know, most, most effective, you know, heavy bomber of that period

caused absolute horrors on the ground for North Korean, so hence contributes to that huge

civilian death toll.

But amongst the combatant nations, so Republic of South Korea, so something like about a quarter of a million

dead, something more than that for North Korea, estimates up to about 300,000, and amongst Chinese

troops, again, something like 400,000, but again, that last figure is very much an estimate.

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