In June 1944, a young Asian soldier surrendered to a group of American paratroopers during the Allied invasion of Normandy. At first, his captors thought he was Japanese, but he was actually Korean.
His name was Yang Kyoungjong.
In 1938, at the age of eighteen, Yang Kyoungjong was forcibly recruited by the Japanese to join the Kwantung Army in Manchuria. A year later, he was taken prisoner by the Red Army at the Battle of Khalkhin-Gol and sent to a labor camp.
The Soviet military authorities, during a period of crisis in 1942, forced him, along with several thousand other prisoners, to join their forces. Later, in early 1943, he was taken prisoner during the Battle of Kharkov in Ukraine by Nazi troops.
In 1944, wearing a German uniform, he was sent to France to serve in an Ostbataillon that was to reinforce the Atlantic Wall of the Cotentin Peninsula, inland near Utah Beach. After spending time in a prison camp in Great Britain, he moved to the United States, where he kept quiet about his past. He settled in this country and died in Illinois in 1992.
In a war that killed more than sixty million people and had a global reach, Yang Kyoungjong, a reluctant veteran of the Japanese, Soviet, and German armies, was comparatively lucky. Yet his life story still provides perhaps the most striking example of how defenseless most ordinary people were in the face of what would have been historically overwhelming forces.
Korean citizen Yang Kyoungjong, who had been recruited successively by the Imperial Japanese Army, the Soviet Red Army, and the German Wehrmacht, was captured by the Americans in Normandy in June 1944.
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