Admin error 'killed' 20,000 troops (2000)

The lives of nearly 20,000 people appeared to have been saved retrospectively yesterday when a glitch appeared in the approved US history of the Korean war.

For almost 50 years it was accepted that 54,246 Americans had died in the war, which ended in a truce in 1953. The number is engraved on the national Korean war memorial, in Washington.

Now the Pentagon has revised the figure down to 36,940. It is not a matter of thousands of families mourning unnecessarily but rather a case of bungling back at base.

Far away from the battlefields of Asia, an anonymous government clerk laboured away with his ledger sheets at the Pentagon. Burdened with the solemn duty of compiling the final tally of those who had fallen in the three-year war, the clerk performed a calculation of history-warping dimensions.

He took the number of non-battlefield US military deaths during those years - 20,617 - and added the number to the more than 33,000 who actually did die in action in Korea. Only 3,275 of those who died off the battlefield, usually in accidents or of disease, did so in Korea, producing the new total of 36,940.

This new take on military precision appears in today's issue of Time magazine, which says: "In a rare example of inter-service cooperation, a Pentagon memo notes: 'All service historian offices have been advised... and are in agreement with the revision.' "