Korean War Trivia
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47 free Korean War trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Korean War trivia for history readers, veterans' families and anyone who knows M*A*S*H better than the war it was set in. The quiz starts in 1945, when two American colonels drew a line along the 38th parallel in half an hour, and follows the split into two states, the June 1950 invasion, the UN vote the Soviets missed by boycotting the Security Council, and Truman's 'police action' that was never a declared war. The middle rounds cover the fighting: Task Force Smith at Osan, the Pusan Perimeter, MacArthur's gamble at Inchon, the drive to the Yalu, China's entry, the frozen retreat from Chosin Reservoir, Ridgway's revival of the Eighth Army, MacArthur's dismissal, and the MiG-15 versus F-86 duels over MiG Alley. Later questions cover the two-year armistice talks at Kaesong and Panmunjom, the prisoner exchanges, Stalin's death, the 4 km wide DMZ, the Swiss and Swedish observers still on duty, the bombing that flattened North Korea's cities, and the war's afterlife in the Korean War Veterans Memorial and the most-watched finale in TV history. Questions run from easy to expert and every answer was checked against a reference page and carries its source. See also our Cold War, Vietnam War and South Korea quizzes.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01South Koreans commonly call the Korean War 'yugio', or 6·25, after what?
The date the North invaded
The date the North invaded was 25 June 1950, written 6·25 in Korean style. The attack came before dawn, and Seoul fell just three days later.
Q 02Korea was divided in 1945 into Soviet and American occupation zones along which line of latitude?
the 38th parallel
The 38th parallel was picked in a hurry by two US colonels working from a National Geographic map, because it kept Seoul in the American zone. To their surprise, the Soviets accepted it.
Q 03Which future Secretary of State to Kennedy and Johnson helped draw Korea's dividing line as a young colonel in 1945?
Dean Rusk
Dean Rusk later admitted that neither he nor fellow colonel Charles Bonesteel was a Korea expert, and nobody who was had been consulted before the line was drawn.
Q 04Which neighbour annexed Korea in 1910 and ruled it as a colony for the next 35 years?
Japan
Japan annexed Korea in 1910, so when it surrendered in 1945 the victors split the peninsula into northern and southern occupation zones, a division meant to be temporary.
Q 05Who led North Korea from Pyongyang at the outbreak of the war?
Kim Il Sung
Kim Il Sung grew up in Manchuria, where his parents had fled colonial rule, and fought there as a guerrilla before returning to Korea in 1945.
Q 06Which veto-wielding member's boycott let the UN Security Council condemn the invasion?
the Soviet Union
The Soviet Union had walked out in January 1950 because Nationalist China still held China's seat. With no veto cast, the resolution passed 9-0.
Q 07President Truman initially described US involvement in Korea as what?
a police action
A police action, not a war, was the official line because Truman sent troops without asking Congress to declare war, and they fought under the UN flag.
Q 08By what name is the war officially known in North Korea?
the Fatherland Liberation War
The Fatherland Liberation War is Pyongyang's name for it, and the armistice date, 27 July, is a national holiday there called Victory Day, though the war is widely seen as a stalemate.
Q 09America's first ground battle of the Korean War was fought near which town, now the namesake of a major US air base?
Osan
Osan is where Task Force Smith, rushed in from Japan, tried to block a North Korean tank column. Its rockets bounced off the T-34s, and the tanks simply drove on through.
Q 10By August 1950, UN and South Korean forces held only a small south-east pocket known as what?
the Pusan Perimeter
The Pusan Perimeter held because its port let the UN pour in troops, tanks and supplies faster than the North could replace its losses.
Q 11MacArthur's Operation Chromite, the surprise amphibious landing of September 1950, came ashore at which Korean port?
Inchon
Inchon looked like the worst place to land, with huge tides, mines and narrow channels, and the Joint Chiefs at first opposed it. MacArthur brushed the worries aside, and Seoul was retaken within two weeks.
Q 12At Wake Island in October 1950, MacArthur told Truman he hoped to pull the Eighth Army back to Japan by when?
Christmas
Christmas was his hope, and he put the chance of China stepping in at 'very little'. Within days, Chinese troops were crossing into Korea.
Q 13In October 1950 Chinese forces entered the war by crossing which river on Korea's northern border?
the Yalu
Q 21Truce talks opened in July 1951 in which city, later home to a joint North-South industrial park?
Kaesong
Kaesong, an ancient Korean capital, was a South Korean city when the war began. The armistice left it in the North, and the talks themselves soon moved down the road to Panmunjom.
Q 22The autumn 1951 battles of Bloody Ridge and Heartbreak Ridge were fought mainly to do what?
shorten and straighten the lines
Shorten and straighten the lines was all the UN wanted by then, and even that cost so many casualties that it gave up major offensives that November.
Q 23Which president-elect travelled to Korea in December 1952 to find out how the war might be ended?
Dwight Eisenhower
The Yalu crossings went almost unseen: Chinese troops marched by night and hid by day, so UN aircraft barely spotted them before the first attacks fell.
Q 14Which Chinese leader's eldest son was killed by an American air raid while serving in Korea in 1950?
Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong's son Mao Anying grew up partly in Russia and fought the Germans in the Red Army. He volunteered for Korea and died in a US air raid weeks after China entered the war.
Q 15In the brutal winter of 1950, US Marines fought their way out of a Chinese encirclement around which reservoir?
Chosin
Chosin is the name on the maps UN troops carried; Koreans call the lake Changjin. The cold was an enemy too, freezing the ground so hard that foxholes could barely be dug.
Q 16In the evacuation of Hungnam in December 1950, the US freighter SS Meredith Victory sailed south crammed with some 14,000 what?
Korean refugees
Korean refugees were taken aboard as Chinese and North Korean forces closed in on the port. Among them were the parents of Moon Jae-in, born in 1953 and elected South Korea's president in 2017.
Q 17Which Second World War airborne commander took over the Eighth Army in December 1950 after Walton Walker's death?
Matthew Ridgway
Matthew Ridgway, known for the hand grenade strapped to his gear, took over an army in retreat, rallied it and within months had pushed the Chinese back out of South Korea.
Q 18Fired by Truman in April 1951, MacArthur told Congress that old soldiers never die, they just do what?
Fade away
Fade away was his exit line before a joint session of Congress. At the Senate hearings that followed, General Omar Bradley said MacArthur's wider war would be the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.
Q 19Which swept-wing jet fighter, flown for the communist side, was countered by the American F-86 Sabre?
the MiG-15
The MiG-15 owed its power to Britain: its engine was developed from a Rolls-Royce design that London had let Moscow have after the Second World War.
Q 20In 1953 US planes dropped leaflets over North Korea offering $100,000 to the first pilot who would do what?
Defect with his jet fighter
Defect with his jet fighter was the deal, yet no one did until two months after the armistice. The North Korean pilot who then landed near Seoul said he had never heard of the reward, and was paid anyway.
Dwight Eisenhower had promised the trip late in the campaign with the line 'I shall go to Korea', a pledge that helped a war-weary country hand the old general a landslide.
Q 24Which newly independent Asian country proposed the UN's 1952 plan for neutral custody of prisoners who refused to go home?
India
India ended up doing the job itself: an Indian general chaired the neutral commission, and Indian troops guarded the prisoners while their own side tried to talk them round.
Q 25Which leader's death on 5 March 1953 helped move the armistice talks into a new phase?
Stalin's
Stalin's successors, caught up in their own power struggle, called for a quick end to the fighting within weeks of his death, and the stalled talks were back on by late April.
Q 26Which party refused to sign the 1953 Armistice Agreement?
South Korea
South Korea's president wanted to fight on until the peninsula was united, and weeks before the signing he tried to derail the deal by freeing thousands of prisoners who refused to go north.
Q 27The armistice created a Demilitarized Zone along the front line roughly how wide?
4 km
4 km is simply each army stepping back two kilometres from where it stood. Left almost untouched ever since, the strip has turned into a haven for endangered cranes and Asiatic black bears.
Q 28Officers from which two countries are still stationed at the Korean DMZ as the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission?
Switzerland and Sweden
Switzerland and Sweden stayed on after the North pushed out the Czech and Polish teams in the 1990s. For years their officers kept posting weekly reports in a North Korean army mailbox that nobody emptied.
Q 29The famous huts at Panmunjom's Joint Security Area are painted what colour?
bright blue
The buildings were designed so their blue roofs and white sides would stand out from the border.
Q 30US aircraft dropped some 32,000 tons of which weapon on Korea, years before it became notorious in Vietnam?
Napalm
Napalm fell alongside more bombs than the US had dropped in the entire Pacific theatre of the Second World War, and before the end the bombers were running short of towns to hit.