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   Pitted against the enemy of his former enemy’s enemy.

Here we go again

Every twist of fate leads to other twists of fate.

This is the story of a man who experienced some big ones. A pawn in a giant game whose rules he didn’t understand, he wound up serving in three armies in Asia and Europe. And was a prisoner of war (POW) in three countries.

It seemed like a good idea at the time

His name was Yang Kyoungjong (Yang was his surname). He was born in Korea on 3/3/1920, about 10 years after Japan incorporated Korea into its Empire. This made him a Japanese national, although as an ethnic Korean he was denied all the privileges of Japanese nationals born of Japanese parents. He did, however, incur all the obligations of a Japanese national, so he was drafted into Japan’s permanent military force in Manchuria, northeastern China (“The Kwangtung Army”).

Our story opens here in 1938.

Japan had grandiose plans for enlarging the Japanese Empire by seizing Mongolia and swathes of Siberia. This would be easy for two reasons:

Firstly, Manchuria – ostensibly the independent nation Manchukuo – was Tokyo’s obedient puppet state, providing The Kwangtung Army with the ideal base for a war of conquest.

And secondly, while the Soviet Union and its obedient puppet state -Mongolia – stood in the way, the Red Army (the Soviet military) was reportedly in tatters. Its generals had been arrested in droves, tortured and executed. This arose from the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s paranoia about traitors in every closet and spies under every bed. Japanese intelligence officers noted with satisfaction that the Red Army’s leading tank warfare specialist was among the first to disappear into oblivion. The Red Army’s morale, said the intelligence reports, could hardly be lower.

Smashing the Red Army would be a cinch.

“…are hereby sentenced to death…”

Not so fast! said the Japanese Navy. The admirals saw the acquisition of sub-Arctic tundra as a monumental waste of effort. (Not to mention this was all the Army’s idea, so the Navy could not partake of much glory.) But the Army had the Emperor’s ear, and he gave Operation Hokushin his approval.

Meanwhile, Yang and his fellow Kwangtung Army troops geared up for what they were told would be a brief campaign resulting in certain victory. But the Soviets inflicted a stinging defeat on the invaders. Japan’s generals searched for someone to blame, the admirals said We told you so and the Emperor now gave the Navy’s idea – seizing American and European colonies in the Asia-Pacific area – his earnest attention.

All this meant nothing to Yang, who – along with 3,000 other Japanese and Manchurian soldiers – was now a prisoner of war in the Soviet Union.

Back home Yang’s family received notification he’d been killed in action. Japanese military tradition compelled its troops to commit suicide rather than fall into captivity. To spare their loved ones the shame of a POW in the family, Yang and the others were declared dead, case closed. (For the Army they were as good as dead anyway.)

He languished in the Soviet Union, learning the debased Russian vocabulary of the prison camps, never knowing if he’d see another day, never knowing what fate held in store. Then geopolitics intervened.

In June 1941 Hitler’s forces (the Wehrmacht) and its Axis allies (Croatia, Hungary, Italy and Romania) invaded the Soviet Union.

They caught the Soviets with their pants down, taking hundreds of thousands of prisoners. Only the U.S.S.R.’s vast distances and the brutal winter of 1941-42 saved Moscow itself from capture.

The Soviet leader, Josef Stalin, ordered all Red Army units to hold firm and fight to the last man. Surrender was forbidden. But hopelessly cornered Red Army troops facing certain death surrendered in droves.

The Soviet manpower situation became critical. Stalin now looked to the prison camps (the gulag) in Siberia and Arctic Russia. In 1942 he ordered the release of political prisoners plus the POWs from Manchuria. The idea was: put a little meat on their bones, give them rudimentary training and pitch them straight into battle. That should buy us some time, Stalin thought.

It bought Yang about a year. But in early 1943 the Wehrmacht captured him at Kharkov. He was now in a German prison camp.

Will trade rag for potato

Prison camp was a generous term. Stalin’s communist regime ignored all international agreements on the treatment of prisoners of war, so Germany had no legal obligation to provide its Soviet captives with adequate food, shelter or medical care. Most of them huddled in barbed wire enclosures, left to freeze and starve, sleeping in piss puddles, surrounded by putrefaction and despair.

The “lucky ones” were used in ghoulish medical experiments. Some wound up as slave workers as far away as Norway and the Channel Islands. And a surprising number were either forced into the Wehrmacht (the German armed forces) or enthusiastically volunteered to fight against Stalin.

Join us and fight for a brighter Europe!

Nazi ideology permitted the concept of Honorary Aryan: “racially acceptable” non-Europeans, like the Japanese and northern Indians.  There’d be no objection to them serving in German uniforms (whether they wanted to or not). Nazi racial experts toured the camps, selecting POWs to replenish the Wehrmacht‘s numbers after its heavy losses fighting the Soviets.

The coerced ones and the eager volunteers trudged out of the piss puddles, stepped over the corpses, were deloused, received decent food and were issued German uniforms. Next they’d be assigned to Ost-bataillone (Eastern battalions): Wehrmacht units under German command but comprising troops from the Soviet Union’s non-Slavic populations. (Later, as we’ll see, the Slavs’ sub-human status was conveniently forgotten and any Russian POW or defector wanting to fight Stalin could join in.) The keen Estonians and Latvians were high up the racial totem pole, and the Caucasians (Armenians, Georgians and so on) were also good to go. So were the Central Asians (Kazakhs, Turkmen, Uzbeks…).

Yang made the cut as an Honorary Aryan. Whether some racial expert simply liked the look of him or whether Yang somehow managed to convey to his captors that he was Japanese (his Korean ethnicity being irrelevant here) we’ll never know. But some time in 1943, Yang Kyoungjong, formerly of the Imperial Japanese Army and the Red Army, became a private in the Wehrmacht‘s 709th Infantrie-Division. That was a static division – it relied on horse-drawn vehicles and many of its troops were far from being first-rate.

Next stop, France.

We’re racially acceptable

What went through the Korean’s mind as he was shunted across Europe to Normandy to  be pitted against the enemy of his former enemy’s enemy?

At least he was still alive and in one piece despite often coming close to being neither. One spring day in 1944 he climbed off the troop wagon at the opposite end of the Eurasian landmass from where he’d started, felt the salty tang of the wind from the English Channel and joined his new Wehrmacht buddies in a unit charged with repelling the expected Anglo-American invasion.

The 709th Division had its fair share of ex-Red Army soldiers, Russians and lots of Georgians. Their combat effectiveness wasn’t expected to be high and their willingness to lay down their lives could never be taken for granted. So, when the invasion of Normandy came, the U.S. paratroopers assigned to that area overwhelmed them without much trouble.

We don’t know exactly how Yang’s third capture happened, but we know he was luckier than some. Many of his fellow soldiers met a grizzly end, as the movie Saving Private Ryan depicted. In an early scene the Americans take heavy casualties on the beach then fight their way slightly inland. They encounter a German bunker complex. Two Wehrmacht guys emerge with their hands in the air, shouting something the Americans can’t understand. With the noise of battle and the fog of war they might as well have spoken Tamil. The Americans shoot them anyway.

Wir sind Russen! Russen!

The G.I.’s guarding Yang and his fellow-prisoners saw four East-Asian-looking men among them and discovered one of them was “Japanese” (Yaponskiy). They immediately assumed all four were Japanese. The guards sent word to their superiors who sent word to their superiors who sent word to Washington D.C. There are Japanese troops fighting for Hitler in France! We have the proof right here!

Questions immediately arose. How was this even possible? They couldn’t cross the Japan Sea to the U.S.S.R. and travel overland to France. Did they somehow cross the Pacific, traverse South America and cross the Atlantic to Europe? Why go to all that trouble? And how many troops are we talking about? Enough to tip the balance?

Even in 1944 the Anglo-Americans had little idea that the Wehrmacht included hundreds of thousands of ex-Soviet citizens of all ethnicities. When the Western Allies encountered almond-shaped eyes and high cheekbones they immediately saw “Japanese”. Only later, as Germany’s war effort collapsed and they took masses of prisoners, did the reality hit. But the NKVD (the KGB’s predecessor) already knew all about this.

Cossacks for Hitler

The practice of POWs switching sides was not entirely new. During the American Civil War some 5,000 Confederate prisoners joined the Union Army and about 1,600 Union POWs signed on with the Confederate Army.

The scale here was massive. As early as 1942 NKVD officers saw ample evidence of Soviet troops defecting en masse to the Germans. They learned not only of POWs voluntarily switching sides, but soldiers on active duty. Whole units joined the enemy without waiting to be captured. Not only troops from ethnic minorities, but actual sons of Russia. Not only ordinary Russian soldiers but officers too. Military academy graduates! Not only officers – and this made the sweat trickle down the investigators’ backs – but actual Communist Party members. The Soviet elite! Holy Mother of God! the NKVD officers whispered under their breath as they two-finger-typed their reports to Moscow.

Comrades, let’s not kid ourselves, these reports said (although less straightforwardly). We can understand – but can never forgive! – Ukrainians acting on anti-Soviet impulses after the harsh treatment – harsh but totally justified, comrades! – they received during the agricultural collectivization campaigns before the war. And we can understand – but never forgive! – the Central Asians’ resentment at the Soviet government’s completely justified suppression of their Islamic practices.

As for the Armenians, Chechens and so on, well, comrades, who can trust those people?

And so on. The revelation that Homo Sovieticus would so eagerly betray the motherland and communism shocked the Kremlin. Stalin (never one for half-measures) ordered a 25-year Siberian prison camp sentence for every Soviet POW surviving enemy captivity and returning to the U.S.S.R. – whether he’d joined the German war effort or not.

Then worse revelations came.

He would liberate Russia

General Vlasov survived Stalin’s mass arrests in 1938. By 1942 he was a highly decorated hero hailed by the Soviet media. But that summer his forces – undermanned and undersupplied, unable to advance but forbidden to withdraw – were hung out to dry. He was captured on July 12, readily betrayed to the Germans by a local farmer.

Vlasov later claimed this senseless waste of lives turned him against Stalin and the Soviet system. In the prison camp he approached the Germans with a seemingly outlandish offer: he wished to recruit POWs of Russian ethnicity and train them as an army to fight side-by-side with the Germans against the Red Army.

Russians will fight with passion against the Communist beast, he told anyone who’d listen. And I, Andrey Andreyevich Vlasov, will lead them in this crusade.

But his idea to use an army of Russian prisoners to liberate Russia was ignored. Later, though, as Germany’s manpower situation deteriorated, the thinking evolved. In Berlin the conversations might have gone thus:

These creatures in their barbed wire enclosures must be miserable.

Certainly.

Living in their own filth, waiting to shrivel up and die.

Quite.

Is it true there’s cannibalism in those camps?

In all probability.

And many of them must hate Stalin and all he stands for.

It stands to reason.

And this Vlasov fellow seems rational enough, don’t you think?

I do.

He’s not Jewish, is he?

No. We checked.

So what have we got to lose?

Nothing.

.

The Russian Liberation Army

It took ages to get the ball rolling, by which time most ex-Red Army Russians were already ensconced in Ost-bataillone. Vlasov’s Russian Liberation Army was too little too late. By then Yang was in his third POW camp.

The Americans shipped most of their Wehrmacht prisoners to the States. But Yang wound up in Britain. As victory in Europe drew closer Stalin demanded the Anglo-Americans  hand over all captured ex-Red Army men in German uniforms to Soviet authorities. This meant Yang. But he was also ex-Japanese Imperial Army, and strictly speaking he’d never been a Soviet citizen. So the British weren’t obliged to return him to the NKVD’s loving arms.

Let’s pause and examine the situation so far:

An 18-year-old Korean – officially a Japanese national – is drafted into the Japanese Army. He’s captured by the Red Army during Japan’s unwise attempt to seize territory from the Soviet Union’s Mongolian puppet state. He’s kept prisoner in the Soviet Union until 1942, by which time the desperate Red Army transforms political prisoners and POWs from into cannon fodder.

He’s thrown into the Red Army and the Germans capture him about a year later. They put him into their army and send him to France in time for the Anglo-American invasion. He’s captured again, this time by the Americans, and shipped to a POW camp in Britain.

What happened then?

Yang posed an administrative  problem. He wasn’t a German so couldn’t be repatriated to post-war Germany. The Soviets weren’t legally entitled to him. He was technically Japanese but Japan was half a world away and still the enemy. Then, with Japan’s defeat in August 1945, that country could no longer claim him, since Korea’s ties with Japan were severed and Yang was now a Korean. So what to do?

The details are murky, but Yang eventually emigrated to the United States in 1947. What transpired between the German surrender and 1947 remains unexplained.

Perhaps he was a Christian, like some other ethnic Koreans. That would have helped his application to move to America. Who knows?

We do know three things:

Yang settled in Illinois – at last! a place he could pronounce without strain! He married and had kids.

He never spoke about his experiences, even to his kids. He gave no interviews and resisted the temptation to write his memoirs.

He died in 1992, aged 72.

So how did information on the Yang saga emerge?

Bits and pieces from here and there surfaced over the decades. Other stories circulated about similarly surprising discoveries. Cornelius Ryan’s 1959 best-seller about the Normandy invasion – The Longest Day – mentioned American troops capturing “a Tibetan shepherd” in a Wehrmacht uniform. Ryan reported that months after this capture, when they finally found someone who could understand his language, the shepherd explained he’d been kidnapped by Soviets who’d illegally crossed the border to kidnap able-bodied men for the Red Army. Later, like Yang, the Germans captured him, put him in their army and sent him to France.

The problem here is that Ryan’s geography was way off. He should have seen that Tibet is a long way from the Soviet Union. It’s more likely the POW in question – if he did exist – was from China’s Xinjiang Province, whose Uighur people share ethnic and linguistic roots with some Soviet Central Asian populations. And Xinjiang’s long, porous border with the Soviet Union would have allowed Red Army “press gangs” easy access.

Some analysts contend that all of these events never happened to Yang. He may have come from the ethnic Korean community in the Soviet Far East, served in the Red Army as a regular conscript, was captured and forced into the Wehrmacht, then became a POW of the Americans. That’s not impossible.

Others argue Yang’s a composite character: the stories of two or more East Asian soldiers have been combined and conflated into one figure. That’s also not out of the question.

Only Yang knew for sure. But he remained stubbornly silent.

In 2011 a South Korean film studio made a highly fictionalized film about Yang (played by a handsome hunk with guaranteed box-office appeal to the ladies). My Way had its Wehrmacht Korean escaping from Normandy and somehow making it back to Korea (!). It was a critical and commercial flop. Don’t bother.

Because Yang never gave us his version of these events we can never be certain that the story we’ve inherited is 100% true. He took his tale to the grave. And unless something pops up to confirm or refute it, in the grave it will remain.