The Man Seized by Four Armies

Yang Kyoungjong was born in Korea in 1920. His extraordinary life, not of his own making, reads like a novel that would be criticized as too far-fetched to be believable.

In 1938, the occupying Japanese conscripted him into the Imperial Japanese Army to fight against the Soviet Union.

In 1939, Yang was captured by the Red Army during the Battles of Khalkhin Gol and was sent to a Soviet prison camp. In 1942, the Soviets were desperate for manpower and forced him to fight against the Germans.  

In 1943, Yang was captured by the Germans during the Third Battle of Kharkov. By this time, the Wehrmacht was desperate for manpower, and put him in the Eastern Battalion which was sent to France to fight the Allies.

In 1944 the Allies invaded Normandy, and Yang was captured by U.S. paratroopers. He was sent to a prison camp in Britain, but this time, he was not forced to fight for his captors. The U.S. doesn’t do that, and the war was almost over anyway. That might have been the reason Yang emigrated to the U.S. after his release. He lived in Illinois for the rest of his life. Yang had three children, but never told them the complete story of his globetrotting service in World War II.   -via reddit