Eastern Battalions
Which military brach did Yang Kyoungjong belong to from 1943 to Jun 1944?
Yang Kyoungjong Yang Kyoungjong ( ) is the name of a Korean soldier who , according to some historians , fought in the Imperial Japanese Army , the Soviet Red Army , and later the German Wehrmacht during World War II . He is , to date , the only soldier in recent history thought to have fought on three sides of a war , and this status has earned him recognition . Although popular news outlets and several historians have regarded this as a fact , others have expressed doubt , and a 2005 Korean SBS documentary that focused on his case concluded there was no convincing evidence of his existence . World War II . In 1938 , at the age of 18 , he was in Manchuria when he was conscripted into the Kwantung Army of the Imperial Japanese Army to fight against the Soviet Union . At the time , Korea was ruled by Japan . During the Battle of Khalkhin Gol , he was captured by the Soviet Red Army and sent to a Gulag labor camp . Because of Soviet manpower shortages in the fight against Nazi Germany , he was pressed , in 1942 , into fighting in the Red Army , along with thousands of other prisoners . He was sent to the Eastern Front of Europe . In 1943 , he was captured by Wehrmacht soldiers in eastern Ukraine during the Third Battle of Kharkov , and then joined the Eastern Battalions to fight for Germany . Yang was sent to Occupied France to serve in a battalion of former Soviet prisoners of war on the Cotentin peninsula in Normandy , close to Utah Beach . After the D-Day landings in northern France by the Allied forces , Yang was captured by paratroopers of the United States Army in June 1944 . The Americans initially believed him to be a Japanese soldier in German uniform ; at the time , Lieutenant Robert Brewer of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment , 101st Airborne Division , reported that his regiment had captured four Asians in German uniform after the Utah Beach landings , and that initially no one was able to communicate with them . Yang was sent to a prison camp in Britain and later transferred to a camp in the United States . Later life . Allegedly , Yang Kyoungjong , a German prisoner-of-war , was released by the US Army from captivity in 1947 . He became a US citizen and moved to Illinois , United States , where he lived until his death , in 1992 . Identification . After the invasion of Normandy on D-Day , a photo was taken of an unidentified man in Wehrmacht attire being processed as a prisoner of war . The official caption does not give his name , and instead refers to him as young Japanese . The current description on the US National Archives refers to him as a young Japanese man . The identity of the man has been a source of speculation , and in the 1990s a theory emerged that he was a Korean who was captured by the USSR , who was then captured by Nazi Germany and pressed into service . Then later the man was identified as Yang Kyoungjong , however , no direct proof of this has been found . Author Martin Morgan believes the man is not Yang Kyoungjong , but instead an ethnic Georgian from the 795th Georgian Battalion , which was composed of Georgian Osttruppen troops . In December 2005 , the Seoul Broadcasting System aired a documentary on the existence of the Asian soldiers who served Nazi Germany and were captured by Allied forces . The documentary concluded that although there had been Asian soldiers in the German Army during World War II , there was no clear evidence for the existence of Yang Kyoungjong . Legacy . The story of Yang was the basis for the 2011 South Korean film My Way . In 2018 , a city councillor in St . Johns , Newfoundland , used the story of Yang as the basis for an online ad promoting her real estate business , which caused backlash .