Yang Kyoungjong

An Asian Wehrmacht soldier, allegedly Yang Kyoungjong, in American captivity
Korean spelling
Hangeul	양경종
Revised Romanization	Yang Gyeong-jong
McCune- Reischauer	Yang Kyŏngjong
See also : Korean name

Yang Kyoungjong (born March 3, 1920 in Korea , † April 7, 1992 in Illinois ) was allegedly a Korean soldier who served in the Imperial Japanese Army , the Red Army and the Wehrmacht during World War II . If this version of events is correct, Yang Kyoungjong would be the only known soldier to serve in three different armies during a war in recent history. However, doubts about the authenticity of his story have been raised , particularly in Yang's native South Korea .

Life

At the age of 18 he joined the Japanese Kwantung Army and fought in the Japanese-Soviet border conflict in 1938 , in which he was captured by the Red Army and had to do forced labor in a gulag while in captivity . During the war against the German Reich in 1942 he was forced to fight the Wehrmacht on the side of the Soviet Union. He was captured by German soldiers in the Battle of Kharkov in 1943 and joined the Wehrmacht. In a company that consisted of former Soviet prisoners of war, he was sent to Normandy . When the Allies landed on the beaches of Normandy in the course of D-Day in 1944 , he was captured again and taken to a prisoner-of-war camp in England. He was later transferred to a camp in the United States. After his release, he stayed in the United States until his death.

Media interest

The war film Prisoners of War (2011) by Kang Je-gyu was inspired by Yang's life.

Historical debate about Yang Kyoungjong's existence

In December 2005, the South Korean private broadcaster SBS published a documentary about soldiers of Asian descent in the German Wehrmacht. This documentation came to the conclusion that there were Asians in the Wehrmacht, but that there is no evidence of Yang Kyoungjong's extraordinary military career.

American historian Martin Morgan doubts that the prisoner of war in the famous photograph is Yang Kyoungjong. According to Morgan, the photo shows a Georgian from the 795th Battalion "Shalva Maglakelidze". This battalion belonged to the Georgian Legion .

Other historians have given Yang Kyoungjong's story as real. The British historian Antony Beevor uses Yang in his complete works on the Second World War, the English original title The Second World War , as an example of the global scope of the war. Yang is the first person named in the introduction to Beevor's book. In addition to his books, Beevor also uses the story of Yang in articles for newspapers such as the Daily Mail .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Stephen E. Ambrose: D-Day. June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II . Simon and Schuster, 1994, ISBN 978-0-671-67334-5 (655 pages, limited preview in Google book search).
2. ^ Antony Beevor: The Second World War . Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2012, ISBN 978-0-297-86070-9 (736 pages, limited preview in Google Book Search).
3. ^ ^{A b} Antony Beevor, (2012). The Second World War . Weidenfeld & Nicolson. P. 13.
4. ↑ ^{a b} 다시 보기: SBS 스페셜 ( Korean ) Archived from the original on March 4, 2016. Retrieved June 6, 2016.
5. ↑ ^{a b} Antony Beevor: The soldier forced to fight for three sides in WW2 ... the ultimate tale of a man who became a reluctant veteran of the Japanese, German and Soviet armies. In: Daily Mail . June 2, 2012, accessed February 16, 2017 . 
6. ^ Song Ho-jin: 'My Way' documents Korean soldier in the Battle of Normandy. In: The Hankyoreh . November 26, 2011, accessed November 26, 2011 . 
7. ^ Morgan A., Martin K .: The Americans on D-Day: a photographic history of the normandy invasion May 15, 2014, ISBN 9781627881548 , p. 135, OCLC 874563481 .

Note: This article places the family name before the person's first name. This is the usual order in Korean. Yang is the family name here, Kyoungjong is the first name.