The soldier who fought on both sides

 

What is a fascinating historical fact that the majority of people are unaware of?

During the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944, a young Asian soldier surrendered to a squad of American paratroopers. His captors initially believed him to be Japanese, although he was actually Korean. He went by the name Yang Kyoungjong.

Yang Kyoungjong was forcibly enlisted by the Japanese in their Kwantung Army in Manchuria in 1938 when he was eighteen years old. He was imprisoned by the Red Army and transferred to a labour camp after being captured in the Battle of Khalkhin-Gol a year later. In 1942, during a time of crisis, the Soviet military authorities forced him, along with thousands of other detainees, to join their army.Later, in the start of 1943, he was captured by Nazi forces in the Ukraine's Battle of Kharkov. He was transported to France in 1944 while donning a German uniform to join an Ostbataillon that was meant to strengthen the Atlantic Wall from the Cotentin Peninsula, which was located inland not far from Utah Beach. He spent some time in a British prison camp before moving to the United States, where he remained silent about his history. He made this country his home and died in 1992 in Illinois.Yang Kyoungjong, a reluctant former soldier of the Japanese, Soviet, and German forces, was comparably fortunate in a conflict that claimed the lives of more than sixty million people and fought on a worldwide scale. However, his life story continues to serve as one of the most stunning illustrations of how powerless the majority of common people were in the face of historically tremendous powers.

Yang Kyoungjong, a Korean national who had been consecutively enlisted by the German Wehrmacht, the Imperial Japanese Army, and the Red Army of the Soviet Union, was taken prisoner by the Americans in Normandy in June 1944.