As the Allied forces took the beaches of Normandy in June of 1944,
hundreds of Axis soldiers were captured, but a young Asian man stood out.
The soldier was infamously photographed and identified merely as ‘Young Japanese man,’
but it is believed that he was Yang Kyoungjong, a Korean soldier who had crossed half the globe
to fight in several theaters of World War 2.
Initially recruited in the Imperial Japanese Army from an occupied colony in Korea,
Yang was later captured and forced to serve with the Red Army.
More impressively, he would also end up fighting alongside the Nazis with the Werchmacht,
the only soldier in recent history presumed to have fought on three sides of a war.
Still, many historians claim that his story was a mere construction
to emphasize a myth, but author Anthony Beevor disagrees: (QUOTE)
“Yang remains perhaps the most striking illustration of the helplessness of most
ordinary mortals in the face of what appeared to be overwhelming historical forces.”
Hot Spot
In the early 20th century, Japan emerged victorious from the Russo-Japanese War.
Then, to defend the Kwantung Leased Territory and South Manchurian Railway Zone,
Japan formed the Kwantung Army in 1906.
The army would defend the Japanese interests in China, Manchuria,
and Mongolia during the Interwar period,
and would eventually become the most prestigious command in the entire Imperial Japanese Army.
By September of 1931, Japan ruled the Korean Peninsula,
Manchuria, and South Sakhalin. Furthermore, the Kwantung Army was largely responsible
for the constitution cof the Japanese puppet-state in Manchuria, known as Manchukuo.
Needless to say, the puppet government’s main goal was to expand their territory,
which rekindled millenary frictions with the neighboring nations.
Conflicts continued for several years between the Russians, the Mongols,
the Chinese, and the Japanese, and the hassle turned into a blunt battle.
In 1937, the Marco Polo Bridge Incident led to the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War,
waged primarily between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan.
The conflict constituted the Chinese theater of the wider Pacific Theater during World War
2. In fact, the beginning of the war in the Asian continent is credited by many scholars
to a quarrel in Peking that triggered a full-scale invasion on July 7, 1937.
China would then go into combat with the growing Nipon Empire with support from the United States
and the Soviet Union, which would not openly engage Japan for many years.
Conflicts in the East would then merge with those in the West, resulting in the devastating war.
However, the Second Sino-Japanese War is regarded as the largest Asian war in the 20th century
and accounted for most civilian and military casualties in the Pacific War.
Millions of Chinese and Japanese lives were lost from war-related violence and famine,
among other causes, earning the nickname of the Asian Holocaust.
During this time, the Imperial Japanese Army recruited a massive amount of soldiers
to help with the intense conflicts on the border, among them thousands of Korean men.
A vassal state for the Nipon Empire, Korea became a pool of resources to fuel Japan’s greed,
and numerous young Korean men were frequently conscripted into the
Japanese occupation troops in the Chinese countryside.
One of these men was 18-year-old Yang Kyoungjong, who was sent to
the Kwantung Army stationed in Manchuria to become what would become a lengthy odyssey.
Tides of War
As the open confrontation between China and Japan progressed,
a second, undeclared war was fought on the Soviet-Japanese border.
After occupying Manchuria, Japan desired Soviet territories bordering the area. The Mongolian
People's Republic was allied with the Soviet Union, and together, they faced the invaders.
On the one hand, Japan maintained that the border between its occupied territory, Manchukuo and
Mongolia, was the Khalkhin Gol, or the Khalkha River. But Mongolia and their allies claimed
that the border was roughly ten miles to the east of the river, beyond the village of Nomonhan.
Despite the prominence of the Kwantung Army, the west of Manchukuo was garrisoned by the 23rd
Infantry Division, a relatively new formation with little experience and armed with outdated
equipment. According to Japanese Army experts, the division's competence was below medium,
similar to occupation garrison divisions on duty in China.
The Soviet 57th Special Corps, together with Mongolian cavalry brigades and
light artillery units, then inflicted a decisive reverse on the Japanese forces.
During the 1939 Battle of Khalkhin Gol, the then-unknown Commander Georgy Zhukov
forced the invaders back using prototype combined-arms tactics,
and a significant part of the Japanese equipment was destroyed in the process.
To make matters worse, many Japanese soldiers were captured, including Korean conscripts. Yang was
one of them, and just as with many other prisoners of war, he was sent to a Soviet forced-labor
concentration camp, or Gulag. Yang’s whereabouts over the following years remain unknown.
Meanwhile, in the European Theater, Hitler launched the invasion of the Soviet Union, which
was unwilling to engage in a two-front war and would therefore still not declare war on Japan.
Overwhelmed, the Red Army started to forcibly conscript inmates from its camps.
And for the second time, Yang had to fight for a cause that was not his.
After a couple of years of strenuous labor, Yang was now sent across the continent to fight for
the Soviets, and although the exact purpose his new commanders had for him is uncertain,
it is believed that he was deployed as a service or supply soldier.
In 1941, the Nazis overran vast territories in the Soviet Union and captured droves of prisoners.
Soldiers ranging from Russians, Ukrainians and other European ethnicities,
to Far East nationals, filled the German prison camps.
Some accounts affirm that Yang eventually fought in the battle of Kharkov in Ukraine
in 1943, where he was captured by the Nazis,
and the long-suffering Korean draftee was then taken to a huge open-air camp.
However, this time Yang was given a choice. He could linger in a camp
and face an uncertain future, or he could serve in the German army.
Yang chose to join the Wehrmacht.
Joining the Nazis
The Germans were used to conscripting prisoners into their forces, whether by choice or not.
These conscripts provided an essential source of manpower for their campaigns during the war.
In particular, Ostlegionen, or Eastern Legions,
were complements of the Nazi Army assembled from personnel from the Soviet Union,
and they made up a significant part of the Wehrmacht’s foreign volunteers and conscripts.
Osttruppen, or Eastern Troops, were usually stationed away from the front lines
and instead allocated to rear-area activities like security operations or coastal defense
to free up regular German forces to fight in the main arena.
Furthermore, there were two classes of foreign conscripts: those who fought and those who didn’t.
Hilfswillige, or Hiwis, were mostly volunteers who helped in non-combat roles, usually as supply
troops or construction laborers. Still, many Hiwis were forced into combat as the fighting increased.
The Eastern Front had undermined the German Army,
and they were in dire need to defend their positions along the Atlantic Wall.
Crippled battalions and older German soldiers did not suffice, and many foreigners,
including Czecholsovakians and Koreans, were among those sent to resist an upcoming Allied landing.
Yang was sent to France in 1944, where he joined the 709 Infanterie Division
and defended the port of Cherbourg in Normandy.
As the allies invaded the area in June, the young Korean was captured once again,
but this time by paratroopers of the United States Army.
The allies initially believed that he was a Japanese soldier serving with the Werchmacht,
and Lieutenant Robert Brewer of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne
Division, reported that his regiment had captured four Asian soldiers in German uniform.
As no one spoke each other's languages, the soldiers were then labeled as Japanese.
Yang was subsequently sent to another camp in Britain, where he stayed for a while,
and then transferred to yet another camp in the United States.
He was eventually released in 1947 and settled in the country,
where he lived a peaceful life and died in Illinois in 1992.
Myths
The famous picture of an unidentified Asian man in German attire being
processed as a prisoner of war after D-Day was initially captioned as ‘Young Japanese.’
No actual name was provided, which has raised doubts about the existence
of Yang Kyoungkong over the following decades.
In addition, the identity of the man in the picture has been the source of much speculation.
A well-known theory in the 1990s asserted that the man was a Korean soldier captured by the Soviets.
He was later identified as Yang, but despite thorough investigations,
no convincing evidence of this fact was actually found.
Many scholars insist that the story is false and that the
image should have been mislabeled or even staged.
Furthermore, several researchers assert that the man in the picture was actually a Georgian soldier
serving with the 795th Georgian Battalion, composed of Georgian Osttruppen elements.
Then, in 2005, a South Korean documentary delved into the life of Asian soldiers
serving with Nazi Germany that were captured by the Allies.
The film concluded that there had been Asian soldiers in the German army during the war,
but they found no evidence of the existence of a man called Yang Kyoungjong.
Still, the story inspired a South Korean film released in 2011 called ‘My Way.’
In any case, Yang’s story is often used as an example of the suffering of millions. Antony
Beevor, author of the book ‘The Second World War,’ opens with Yang’s story and concludes that:
(QUOTE) “This reluctant veteran of the Japanese, Soviet and German armies had been comparatively
fortunate in a war that stretched around the globe and killed between 60 and 70 million people.
In the monstrous clashes of the Second World War, individuals had no control over their own fate.
It felt as if they were at the mercy of giant historical forces.”
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