Canadians remember the Korean conflict the war that refuses to end

It took an awfully long time almost three decades to convince the federal government to carve the dates of the Korean War into the side of Canada's national war memorial.

Tucked away on the side of the soaring granite monument in downtown Ottawa, next to Canada'sTomb of the Unknown Soldier,the inscription is easy to miss. For author and historian Ted Barris, it'sa sad illustration of where the bloody, three-year-longwar and its eventual stalemate sitin the country'scollective memory.

"I think it was the mid-1990s before local cenotaphs across the country chipped the names of those who served in Korea into their [local] stone monuments. And up until that point,for many Canadians,they were invisible," said Barris, author of Deadlock in Korea, a seminal account of soldiers on the front lines of what was known at the time (somewhat derisively)as a United Nations "police action".

But the war was neverinvisible to Bill Black; he can see it still.When the war broke out 70 years ago today the former able seaman was a 16-year-old high school student, the child of a Second World War soldier who'd served overseas for years.

Initially, Black joined the army militia (now the reserves) the Queen's Own Rifles of Toronto with a phoney identification card. His father convinced him to switch to the navy.

He shipped out as a marine engineer aboard the TribalClass destroyer HMCS Cayuga in 1952 as the war entered its bloody, decisive phase. When he looks at the state of the Korean peninsula today with no peace treaty and no prospects of one, and a brutal, nuclear-armeddictatorship periodically threatening its neighbour to the south with destruction he is dismayed.

"It's just madness," he said.

More than 26,000 Canadians served in the war, on land, at sea and in the air. The Korean conflict took the lives of516 Canadians, making it the country's third most deadly conflict.

The war and its painful legacy of division and international tension is also clearin the mind of Tina Park, a noted national security analyst and commentatorwho grew up in South Korea.

June 25, 1950 the day 75,000 North Korean troops under communist dictator Kim Il-sung,grandfather of current leaderKim Jong-un,sweptacross the border has a solemn place on the South Korean calendar.

From kindergarten onwards, Park said, South Korean schoolchildren learn to honour and thank veterans.

"When I was growing up, it affected me personally," she said. "I would dream of reunification one day."

Is the dream of reunification dead?

The dream of a reunited Korea is just as elusive today as it was on July 27, 1953, when the warring nations agreed to an armistice that puta stop to the fightingbut did not restorethe peace.

The intervening years have only seen the trenches grow deeper and the barbed wire thicker between the two sides.

North Korea's belligerent, reclusive regime now armed with nuclear weapons and long-range missiles marked the anniversary of the start of the war this week with a new round of threats against the United States.

Park said theatmosphere of anxietyand forebodingon the peninsulais not likely to lift soon. She saidshe fearsthe dream of reunification of bringing togetherfamilies separatedfor generations by a war that refuses to conclude is about to suffer a lingering death.

The decades since the armisticehave only deepened the profound differences between the two Koreas,economically, politically and socially. Park saidmany millennials in the affluent south are indifferent to the notionof reunification. Some areeven openly hostile to the idea ofembracing their poverty-stricken, insular northern cousins.

The last gasp of the Cold War

To them, she said, reunificationisn't worththe expense and upheaval itwould entail. But the fate of reunification is also largely out of their hands,she added.

A lasting peace would require the endorsement and support of the United States, China and Russia, the chief antagonistsin the proxy conflicts of the post-Second World War period.Barrissaid Korea was the first hot conflictof the Cold War, the generation-long geopolitical standoff that has beenlargelyover now for more than a quarter century making it especially ironic that the Korean conflict itself was never resolved.

"This was, then and now, a great standoff in every respect, politically, militarily, between East and West," said Barris, who has interviewed hundreds of Korean War veterans about their experiences.

For many Canadians, then and now, the Korean War remains a distant, murky event. Even when Canadians were still fighting and dying on the peninsula, few people back home had a clear idea of what was going on.

A 'totally invisible' war

One soldier toldBarris how, upon hisarrival back home in northern Ontario after fighting in Korea, his pals approached him and asked where he had been.

"They had no idea," said Barris. "It was totally invisible to small town Canada, what young men who had stepped up for the Korean War had experienced."

Black recalled the day his ship arrived back home to silence no cheering crowds, no parades, justthe spouses and children of the married sailors. He couldn't help but contrastit with the pandemonium that greeted the arrival of his father's troop train in Toronto following the Second World War.

His most enduring memory of the war was a visit toan orphanage ashore, whenCanadian sailors brought the children toys and treats.

"They were all in tatters," he said.

Black said the collective amnesia of Canadians he saw upon his return homehas been compensated for, in many respects, by the respectthe Korean people continue to showthe men and women who fought for them.

"The people of South Korea have provided and instilled in us a sense of pride."