Korean War Death Toll Error

For decades, Americans believed that 54,246 U.S. service members had died in the Korean War, and the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., carried that number in stone. In 2000, Pentagon officials reexamined the records and realized that a government clerk had made a clerical error when compiling the total. The original figure had quietly mixed in thousands of non-combat deaths worldwide that occurred during the same period. After the correction, the official Korean War death toll dropped to 36,940, forcing historians and memorials to reckon with a long-standing mistake.

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