Casualties

A casualty of war is someone who has been killed, captured or injured as a result of the war...

There are two kinds of casualties, military and civilian. Armed forces record their casualties where possible but during a war it is frequently not possible to record with accuracy the number of civilians who die or are injured. After the war this is done but by then it may be impossible to do other than broadly estimate the casualties among civilians caught up in the war. Thus the estimates for Korean civilians who were injured as a result of the war are unreliable. Estimates of those who died vary between one and two million but probably about 700,000 South Korean and 900,000 North Korean civilians perished as a result of the war.

Military casualties are more accurately recorded though there are still difficulties as nations vary in their manner of recording casualties. Some include deaths not in battle – to accident or illness – and some do not. There is also a category 'missing in action' to record those whose exact fate is unknown. However at this distance in time they can be presumed to be dead and are included below in that category.