On June 27, President Truman announced to the nation and the world that America would intervene in the Korean conflict in order to prevent the conquest of an independent nation by communism.
In June 1950 communist North Korea invaded South Korea. The United States came to the aid of South Korea at the head of a United Nations force composed of more than a dozen countries. Communist China joined North Korea in the war in November 1950, unleashing a massive Chinese ground attack against American forces. The Soviet Union also covertly supported North Korea. After three years of fighting, the war ended in a stalemate with the border between North and South Korea near where it had been at the war’s beginning. This was the first hot war of the Cold War, and in it the United States demonstrated its continued commitment to containment (the idea that the US would ultimately defeat communism by containing its spread).
