A radio report on this week being an anniversary of the WW2 battle for Iwo Jima made me wonder…
There was at least one American Military unit comprised of all Japanese-ancestry Americans serving, in Europe, in WW2.
Were there any all- or even mostly-American-ancestry units serving for any of the Axis power is WW2?
I do recall Kurt Vonnegut writing in either Slaughterhouse-5 or Mother Night about an attempt to form an all-American unit for the German military, but my sense was it was ficticious.
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I’d be particularly interested in Americans with no Japanese ancestry fighting *for *Japan during WWII, bit of a buff and can’t think of a single instance off the top of my head…
Interestingly, there were some Koreans in the German army captured by the Americans after D-Day. These are probably the most unlucky people in the world. They were conscripted by Japan, because Korea was part of Japan at that time, and fought in the border war between the Japanese and the Soviets in 1939, at which point, they were captured by the Soviets. They were then drafted into the Red Army, and when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, were captured by the Germans. They were then sent to France to work on Atlantic Wall defenses when the Normandy landings happened and they were captured by the Americans.
And then sent to Korea, captured by the Commuists, fought, captured by the Americans, fought, captured by the Red Chinese.
Possible?
The Germans played up the existence of an ‘American Free Corps’, comprised of US POWs, but it was a pretty poor effort;
No doubt it was inspired by the existence of the British Free Corps, which was an actual SS unit, if a very small one.
Nothing to add, except that an officer of the British Free Corps appears as a villain in Jack Higgins’s over-the-top but fun WW2 thriller, The Eagle Has Landed.
I read that in Stephen Ambrose’s D-Day and thought is was one of the most fascinating (and saddest) things I’d ever read. Sounds like a great topic for further investigation, if it hasn’t already been done.
I think, actually, after the war, the Americans sent them back to the Soviet Union, where they were probably killed as traitors. I like to think, though, that AK84 is right, though, and that they’re still out there, somewhere, being bounced back and forth in wars that they don’t care about.
I was thinking that the germans might have had a unit, composed of american men (born to german immigrants to the USA, who took them back to Germany). I know a few of these guys wound up as spys (at the Battle of the Bulge)-they dressed up in American Army uniforms, and attempted to sow confusion among the US forces. Most of them were captured and shot.
There were also small army units in the SS (SS Nordland-composed of Norwegian and Danish volunteers)…I can’t imagine the fate of these men, after the german defeat.
They fought in the battle of Berlin, and most of them were captured by the Soviets and died in Soviet prison camps. The ones who managed to escape to the Western Allies were sent back to their home countries, where they were tried for treason, and then imprisoned or executed.
Starved for manpower, the Waffen-SS created quite a few non-German and ethnic units: Waffen-SS foreign volunteers and conscripts - Wikipedia
You are referring to Operation Greif. I am aware of no evidence that the German soldiers used were or had been Americans. They were merely the German soldiers who spoke the best English. In all only 44 were sent through the lines, of whom 8 did not return.
The fellow in Slaughterhouse 5 struts into the camp cafeteria in a hilarious Uncle Sam as a Nazi uniform and tries to recruit Americans to fight on the Eastern Front, using the logic that the commies are the real enemy.
Quite the movie to watch, if for nothing else than for the scenes of what happened in Dresden. Oh, and Billy almost gets shot as a spy by fellow Americans during the battle of the bulge because he’s a blonde, blue-eyed kid who doesn’t know who plays for the Yankees.