Normandy – Utah POWs

A captured Georgian from the German 795th Ost Battalion gives his name to a US Army captain at “Utah” Beach. At the time, American troops believed the man was a Japanese soldier in German uniform. In the years after the war he was identified as a “Yang Kyoungjong,” a Korean national inducted into the Russian Red Army, who was in turn captured by the German Army in 1942. The theory went on speculate that “Kyoungjong” immigrated to the United States after the war, where he died in the 1990s. The man’s facial features, however, reveal him to be a member of the ethnic minorities of Georgia. (US Office of Public and International Affairs)