Born in Korea, raised in Manchuria, served in Japan, was captured in the Soviet Union, captured in Germany, and finally captured by the British and thrown into a prisoner-of-war camp in the United States.
Such a bizarre thing is not a novel, but it is more wonderful than a novel.
He is the most legendary little man in World War II, the Korean Yang Jingzhong.
Born in March 1920 in an ordinary family in Uiju, North Korea, Yang immigrated to Manchuria, China, due to the oppression of Japan's Korea.
However, with the change of the times, the claws of the Japanese Emperor eventually devoured the family.
In Manchuria, Yang Jingzhong, who grew up to 18 years old, was captured by the Japanese Kwantung Army and entered the Kwantung Army.
It was 1938.
We know that the Kwantung Army expanded on a large scale at that time, mobilized its troops, and prepared to fight with the Soviet Army in order to stabilize the north.
Since the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, the Japanese Emperor has won the victory, feeling that his ability is very strong, and the whole country has become more and more fierce, and he wants to teach the polar bears a good lesson so that they dare not interfere in their ambitions to invade Manchuria in the north.
As a result, the Zhang Gufeng Incident and the Battle of Nomenkan broke out in 1938 and 1939.
However, the outcome was not expected by the Japanese emperors, they did not teach the Soviet Union a lesson, but were armed with modern weapons in the Soviet Union, giving a tragic lesson.
After the Battle of Nomonkan, Japan no longer mentioned plans to move its forces north, and instead moved south to the Pacific Ocean to stir up trouble.
Yang Jingzhong was captured by the Soviet army as a Japanese ghost in the Battle of Nomonkan.
This was the first time he had been taken prisoner.
In 1941, the world came stormy.
First Germany lightning attacked the good brothers in the Soviet Union, and then Japan could not stop and sneaked into Pearl Harbor in the United States.
The Soviet Union was almost crippled by the menacing Hitler, but fortunately the Soviet Union was tossed and turned, and finally dragged until the winter, hitler's army was almost frozen to death in Moscow.
Thus, the Great Patriotic War shattered Hitler's Blitzkrieg, and the situation gradually became favorable to the Soviet Union.
In 1942, the Soviet Counteroffensive needed a large army, so the captured Yang Jingzhong put on the Soviet uniform and became a Soviet Red Army for the Great Patriotic War.
Who knows, less than a year later, in the Battle of Kharkov in Ukraine in the spring of 1943, Yang Jingzhong was captured again and captured by the Germans.
At this time, Germany also needed a large number of troops to serve its continuous invasion war, and Yang Jingzhong was quickly absorbed.
It should be said that Hitler's army, known as the Pure Germanic race, with Aryan blood as the "optimal" bloodline, would not use people of other nationalities as soldiers, let alone absorb foreigners into its own army.
The theory of this statement is this. But the reality is that its aggression is constantly expanding, and the number of troops needs to be greatly increased to make up for the war losses. Nazi Germany had to adapt and use legions of foreigners.
The Eastern Legion is one of them. The Koreans, the Japanese, the Russians, the Caucasians... were all absorbed by them and formed independent battalions. Management only needs to be strictly guarded and prepared.
Moreover, to deploy these unruly foreign legions to unimportant places in Western and Southern Europe or to occupied countries can at least be a security puppet army.
Data show that at the end of World War II, such foreign soldiers in Nazi Germany accounted for nearly 60% of the total number of SS troops.
This was the historical background at that time.
Yang Jingzhong and other Korean soldiers thus joined the German Army and were assigned to the "Eastern Battalion" of the 709th Coastal Defense Division of the German Wehrmacht.
In 1944, the world anti-fascist war ushered in an important turning point, and on June 6, the history-changing Normandy landings took place.
The first place to land on the Allied landing was the Utah Beach Cotangan Peninsula in Normandy.
And stationed here to defend was exactly Yang Jingzhong's miscellaneous troops -- other elite units were sucked away by the Germans.
In this way, Yang Jingzhong's troops saw that they were unstoppable and simply surrendered their weapons again. Anyway, if you don't shoot or kill, the days will turn around - they have come all the way.
According to the American historian Ambrose's "D Day":
The first to be captured by the Allies during the Normandy landings were two German soldiers of Korean nationality. Soon, more than 20 North Korean soldiers were captured.
After being captured by the Allies, Yang was first imprisoned in a British prisoner-of-war camp and later transferred to the United States.
The Americans treated prisoners of war well, and when they registered the Koreans, they found that they could neither speak German nor English, thinking they were Japanese.
But when I asked an interpreter, I learned that they were Koreans, later Japanese soldiers, and then joined the Soviet Red Army and the Nazi German Army, which was a legendary experience that surprised American officers.
But this is the fact of Yang Jingzhong.
After the war, the veteran soldier, who had been captured three times, served three or four countries, and traveled half the world, made a request: never return to North Korea, but stay in the United States.
The United States took in these "refugees" and resettled them in Illinois.
Here, Mr. Yang became an American, spent the quiet second half of his life, and died in April 1992.
Yang Jingzhong's strange experience is the epitome of an ordinary civilian in the war.
Under the storm of war, no one can be left alone. The ups and downs of life and the rain and the fight are the inevitable experiences of most ordinary people in the cruel war.
Photographs of the surrender of the Germans to the Allies during the Battle of Normandy were collected in the American Museum, and the story was later picked up by historians.
Years later, a director made a Korean blockbuster based on this, "Landing Day".
Some good netizens said that from Korea to the Japanese army, from the Soviet army to the German army, from the British army to the United States, Yang Jingzhong's story can actually be continued, such as:
During the Korean War, he was sent to the Korean battlefield by the United States, but was captured by the volunteer army, taken prisoner for the fourth time, and finally returned to his hometown in Korea... (End)