Abstract

The three years of the Korean War (1950–1953), which had more than three million victims, also resulted in significant military casualties over a short period of time. Despite these civilian and military fatalities, there was only scanty Korean media coverage of the fallen soldiers at the time. The Korean military, however, faced the war without experience or official guidelines regarding military honors for the dead or procedures for dealing with soldiers’ corpses. This paper will investigate one inevitable result of war: fallen soldiers. Scholarship thus far has failed to sufficiently consider the question of how the remains of fallen soldiers were handled during military operations in the Korean War. In other words, the moving of the remains of killed soldiers directly to the National Cemetery without an understanding of the process for handling the dead on the battlefield distorts the general public’s collective consciousness of the horrors of war. This study aims to analyze the military organization and media reports on the dead soldiers of the Korean War based on primary sources, which have received scant attention in the Korean War scholarship to date.