The Unwilling Soldier of Three Armies

While looking up North Korean memes I came across this story . I have never heard of the life of this individual. Quite unique to say the least.

He Fought For Three Different Armies in World War II, Never by Choice
The strange story of Yang KyoungJong

In a war that saw over 60 million people killed, Yang Kyoungjong might be the unluckiest person who survived. In June 1944, American paratroopers fighting in Normandy took an unusual prisoner. He was clearly from east Asia, but he was wearing the uniform of a German Wehrmacht soldier. His name was Yang Kyoungjong, a Korean, and he was fighting for his third army of the war. None of them were by choice.

Imperial Japan had annexed the Korean peninsula in 1910. This set the stage for Japan’s invasion of northern China in the 1930s, where they created the puppet state of Manchuria. This led to a long, drawn-out war with China, as well as border tensions with the nearby Soviet Union. Yang Kyoungjong, then 18-years-old, was conscripted by the Japanese army and sent to the Russian front in 1938. Imperial Japan and the Soviet Union fought a brief, undeclared war in 1939, which ended with the Battles of Khalkhin Gol. Yang was captured by the Red Army and sent to a labor camp.

For three years, Yang was a prisoner in the camp. But by 1942, the Soviets were desperate for manpower. The German army was storming through Russia as part of Operation Barbarossa, and the Soviet Union pressed thousands of prisoners into penal battalions. Yang was sent to eastern Europe to fight for Mother Russia.

In early 1943, Yang was captured by the German army at the Battle of Kharkov in Ukraine. By this point, Germany was also short on manpower. So Yang was pressed into service once more, as part of one of the Wehrmacht’s “Eastern Battalions” — units comprised of conscripts and “volunteers” from German-occupied eastern Europe. Yang was sent to France to guard the Atlantic Wall from Allied invasion.

Yang was stationed near Utah Beach, one of the landing points of the D-Day invasion. He was captured by American paratroopers, who assumed he was Japanese. Why else would an Asian man be wearing a German uniform? Yang was sent to a British prison camp, and eventually ended up in the United States. He settled in Illinois after the war, saying nothing about his past, and died in 1992.

Historian Antony Beevor calls Yang “perhaps the most striking illustration of the helplessness of most ordinary mortals in the face of what appeared to be overwhelming historical forces.”

In a war that took so many lives, Yang was lucky to survive. But it’s hard to use the word lucky when describing a man who wore the uniforms of Imperial Japan, Soviet Russia, and the Third Reich all in the span of six years.
http://historybuff.com/he-fought-for-three-different-armies-in-world-war-ii-never-by-choice-J0obd2wyA8rQ

http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2015/10/soldier-three-armies/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yang_Kyoungjong

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