Thoroughly Modern Miscellany item.
Posted on 05/10/2026 1:16:39 PM PDT by Twotone
The incredible story of Yang Kyoungjong is all the more phenomenal because, while there's very little proof that he ever existed, our need to believe that he did has been so urgent that facts seem to matter very little. But that hasn't stopped at least three reputable historians from telling Yang Kyoungjong's story with confidence, and the premise of his life even became the basis for My Way, a multimillion-dollar South Korean action movie, albeit one embroidered with its own fictions.
Yang Kyoungjong's story begins just after D-Day when, in an interview made for historian Stephen Ambrose years later, an American officer recalls the capture of four soldiers of Asian origin in Wehrmacht uniforms. They were, he said, Koreans who had been conscripted into the Japanese Imperial Army, captured by the Soviets, forced to fight against the Germans who captured them in turn and pressed them into one of the forced labour battalions sent to build and man the fortifications along the English Channel. (Or at least that's how Ambrose tells the story.)
A photograph of an Asian-looking young man in a German uniform taken prisoner by the Allies after D-Day, while never attested in any official record to be Yang Kyoungjong, became attached to his story as proof that these hapless men existed. And because every story needs an ending, we were told – with remarkable confidence given the vagueness of the scraps of fact about Yang Kyoungjong's origin – that he had been sent to a prison camp in the UK and emigrated to the U.S. after the war, dying in Illinois in 1992. An incredible story, repeated in books and online and on museum walls, albeit one that hasn't been substantiated by a single piece of paperwork in eight decades.
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
Dear FRiends,
We need your continuing support to keep FR funded. Your donations are our sole source of funding. No sugar daddies, no advertisers, no paid memberships, no commercial sales, no gimmicks, no tax subsidies. No spam, no pop-ups, no ad trackers.
If you enjoy using FR and agree it's a worthwhile endeavor, please consider making a contribution today:
Click here: to donate by Credit Card
Or here: to donate by PayPal
Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794
Thank you very much and God bless you,
Jim
I have it on good authority that (a) the reason the Chinese soldiers who were sent to reinforce the North Korean army were so ill-equipped is because they had been staged for an attack on Taiwan, and therefore had no winter clothes, and (b) somewhere around 20% of the surviving PLA soldiers sent into North Korea defected to the south during and after the war.
On a related note, here’s a video about an Italian army that landed in Normandy.
https://youtu.be/39BhaqucJzg?si=_fiXOsz24eGJeurL
These Italians were on the Allied side at this stage of the war, and served in non-combat roles.
Thoroughly Modern Miscellany item.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
