Korean War - participating countries

During the war in Korea both sides deployed around one million soldiers each and a lot of ships, tanks and medical facilities. The Commonwealth navies and their auxiliary services alone sent 76 ships in total to serve for varying periods.

Naval forces came from Australia, Canada, Colombia, France, Netherlands, New Zealand, Republic of Korea, Thailand, United Kingdom and United States.

This page contains descriptions of the individual efforts of the participating countries.

The general history of the Korean War can be found on the appropriate page Korean War.

Individual persons are listed in the persons catalogue.

Individual ship can be found on the Korean War - individual ships page.

Belgium

On request of the United Nations the Belgian government decided to form a battalion of soldiers to send to Korea. On 18 September 1950 the training centre for commando units in Marche-Les-Dames received 3.000 candidates for an intense training to prepare them for combat.

Some 700 of them finished the training successfully. The bilingual battalion was names Volunteer Corps for Korea and was placed under American command. In Korea the battalion was know as the Belgian United Nations Command (BUNC).

One of the platoons of this battalion was composed entirely of soldiers from the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. On 18 December 1950 BUNC embarked the vessel Kamina from Antwerp for the final destination Pusan, where it arrived on 31 January 1951.

During the conflict, the battalion took part in several military operations where it got lots of respect from the allied troops. The banner of the unit was decorated with six honours among which one American and one Korean. The battalion received the fourragère in the Leopold Order and the honorary cross in gold from the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.

At the end of the conflict more than 100 Belgian and Luxembourg soldiers had died, 478 were wounded.

Stamp catalogue

Belgium 28 September 2005

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last revised: 6 September 2009