The day itself: history has made its first move, and the next one is yours.
Briefing
Sunday, 25 June 1950. At 4 a.m. Kim Il-sung's Korean People's Army – 135,000 men and some 150 T-34s – crosses the 38th parallel. Syngman Rhee's army has no tanks and no anti-tank guns; Seoul is fifty kilometres away. The Soviet Union has boycotted the Security Council since January, Mao is massing troops to invade Taiwan, France is bogged down in Indochina, and Stalin has the bomb. Defend the South, unite Korea, draw China in or keep it out – every country is playable.
Real history stays a strong tendency: what happened later is planned for its date – until your actions change the world.
You govern: the orders are the state's.
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The world on 25 June 1950
Before dawn on 25 June 1950 the army of North Korea crosses the 38th parallel along its whole length. Its divisions, trained and armed by the Soviet Union and led by T-34 tanks, outnumber and outgun the South Korean army, which has no tanks and few weapons that can stop them. Seoul, barely fifty kilometres from the border, is in danger within days.
Korea has been divided since 1945, when Soviet and American forces took the Japanese surrender north and south of the parallel. In 1948 two states were proclaimed, Kim Il-sung's Democratic People's Republic in the north and Syngman Rhee's Republic of Korea in the south, each claiming the whole peninsula. American combat troops left the South in 1949, and in January 1950 Secretary of State Dean Acheson left Korea outside the defence line he drew across the Pacific.
The Cold War is at its sharpest. The Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb last year, the Communists won China's civil war in October, and the Soviet delegate has stayed away from the UN Security Council since January over China's seat. Truman must decide whether to fight for South Korea and whether to do it through the United Nations; Moscow and Beijing must decide how far they will back Pyongyang.