In South Korea, the war is usually referred to as "625" or the "6-2-5 Upheaval", reflecting the date of its commencement on 25 June. In North Korea, the war is officially referred to as the "Fatherland Liberation War".

Jet fighters confronted each other in air-to-air combat for the first time in history, and Soviet pilots covertly flew in defense of their communist allies.

In March 1951, secret United States intercepts of diplomatic dispatches disclosed clandestine conversations in which General MacArthur expressed confidence to the Tokyo embassies of Spain and Portugal that he would succeed in expanding the Korean War into a full-scale conflict with the Chinese Communists. When the intercepts came to the attention of President Truman, he was enraged to learn that MacArthur had secretly informed foreign governments that he planned to initiate actions that were counter to United States policy. Truman relieved him of command a few days later, saying "We are trying to prevent a world war--not to start one."

General Matthew B. Ridgway, who took over for MacArthur, called racial segregation "both un-American and un-Christian." By May 1952 he had integrated the entire Far East Command, and by September 1954 the rest of the armed forces had followed suit.

A month after the war broke out, Major General William F. Dean, commander of 24th Infantry Division, was separated from his forces while going after water for a wounded man. He wandered alone in the mountains for 36 days before being ambushed by North Koreans. Although he tried to fight them off, he had lost more than 80 pounds and was too weak to resist. Dean was taken prisoner on August 25, 1950, and remained a prisoner until the end of the war.

The Korean War was among the most destructive conflicts of the modern era, with approximately 3 million war fatalities and a larger proportional civilian death toll than World War II or the Vietnam War. It incurred the destruction of virtually all of Korea's major cities, thousands of massacres by both sides, including the mass killing of tens of thousands of suspected communists by the South Korean government, and the torture and starvation of prisoners of war by the North Koreans.

The fighting ended on 27 July 1953 when the Korean Armistice Agreement was signed. The agreement created the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) to separate North and South Korea. However, no peace treaty was ever signed, and the two Koreas are technically still at war.

M*A*S*H (an acronym for Mobile Army Surgical Hospital) is an American war comedy-drama television series that aired on CBS from 1972 to 1983. It follows a team of doctors and support staff stationed at the "4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital" in Uijeongbu, South Korea.

In the English-speaking world, it is sometimes referred to as "The Forgotten War" or "The Unknown War" because of the lack of public attention it received both during and after the war, relative to the global scale of World War II, which preceded it, and the subsequent angst of the Vietnam War, which succeeded it.

The Korean War Veterans Memorial consists of 19 steel statues, each measuring around seven feet tall and weighing nearly 1,000 pounds, as well as a peaceful Pool of Remembrance.