In June 1944, a young soldier surrendered to American para- troopers in the Allied invasion of Normandy. At first his captors thought that he was Japanese, but he was in fact Korean. His name was Yang Kyoungjong. In 1938, at the age of eighteen, Yang had been forcibly conscripted by the Japanese into their Kwantung Army in Man- churia. A year later, he was captured by the Red Army after the Battle of Khalkhin Gol and sent to a labour camp. The Soviet mili- tary authorities, at a moment of crisis in 1942, drafted him along with thousands of other prisoners into their forces. Then, early in 1943 he was taken prisoner by the German army at the Battle of Kharkov in Ukraine. In 1944, now in German uniform, he was sent to France to serve with an Ostbataillon supposedly boosting the strength of the Atlantic Wall at the base of the Cotentin Pen- insula inland from Utah Beach. After time in a prison camp in Britain, he went to the United States where he said nothing of his past. He settled there and finally died in Illinois in 1992. In a war which killed over sixty million people and had stretched around the globe, this reluctant veteran of the Japanese, Soviet and German armies had been comparatively fortunate. Yet Yang remains perhaps the most striking illustration of the help- lessness of most ordinary mortals in the face of what appeared to be overwhelming historical forces. Europe did not stumble into war on 1 September 1939. Some his- torians talk of a 'thirty years' war' from 1914 to 1945, with the First World War as 'the original catastrophe'. Others maintain that the 'long war', which began with the Bolshevik coup d'état of 1917, continued as a 'European Civil War' until 1945, or even lasted until the fall of Communism in 1989.
Sir Antony James Beevor, FRSL (born 14 December 1946) is an English military historian. He has published several popular histories on the Second World War and the 20th century in general. Born in Kensington, Beevor was educated at two independent schools; Abberley Hall School in Worcestershire, followed by Winchester College in Hampshire. He then went to the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, where he studied under the military historian John Keegan, before receiving a commission in the 11th Hussars on 28 July 1967. Beevor served in England and Germany and was promoted to lieutenant on 28 January 1969 before resigning his commission on 5 August 1970. Beevor is descended from a long line of writers, being a son of Kinta Beevor (born Janet Carinthia Waterfield, 22 December 1911 – 29 August 1995), who was the daughter of Lina Waterfield, an author and foreign correspondent for The Observer and a descendant of Lucie Duff-Gordon (author of a travelogue on Egypt). Kinta Beevor wrote A Tuscan Childhood. Antony Beevor is married to biographer Artemis Cooper; they have two children, Nella and Adam.