In 1938, an 18-year-old Korean man named Yang Kyoungjong was conscripted into the Japanese army. Korea was under Japanese rule and Japan needed soldiers, so Yang was sent to the Kwantung army in Manchuria, northeast China. A year later, he was fighting the Russians at the Battle of Khalkhin Gol and was captured as a prisoner of war. The war over and no longer a prisoner, Yang had almost been shipped around the entire globe. In his 2012 book The Second World War, historian Antony Beevor begins and ends his book with Yang’s story.

Source: National Post June 06, 2019 13:33 UTC