In the early morning of September 1, 1939, Germany brazenly tore up the German-Polish Non-Aggression Pact and launched an air raid on Polish airfields, which marked the outbreak of World War II, which is known as the German blitzkrieg on Poland.
In September 1945, the Second World War officially came to an end, and the anti-fascist coalition was finally victorious, and the three fascist Axis powers, Germany, Italy, Japan, and other vassal powers, were finally put to justice.
According to statistics, during World War II, more than 70 million people (conservative figures) died directly from war and war-related factors worldwide, and more than $5 trillion in property was lost, of which more than 20 million Chinese people died (about 35 million people in total).
It can be seen that war has brought irreparable losses to all mankind. In World War II, many well-known generals emerged in various countries, some fought for justice, and some defected to the ** camp.
So, who was the highest-ranking officer captured on the battlefield by each ** team in World War II? What happened to these high-ranking officers after they were captured?
Pang Bingxun, a Chinese general with great military achievements, was imprisoned in China's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression. As a rare anti-Japanese hero in modern Chinese history, his legendary life is thought-provoking.
Let's review the life and deeds of this heroic anti-Japanese general Pang Bingxun.
Pang Bingxun fled to Taipei after the founding of the People's Republic of China and died in 1963. He was the highest military officer captured in World War II, and the highest commander captured in the Eighth Route Army was Zhang Youqing.
Zhang Youqing was captured during the breakout and died heroically in the Taiyuan concentration camp on July 7, 1942. Although Zhang Youqing was a civilian worker, his position made him the highest-ranking military officer captured in captivity.
In addition, there were some other captured generals, most of whom held the rank of staff officer of a major general or deputy division commander of a major general. In contrast, Japan had many officers captured in World War II, but the ranks and duties of these officers were not recorded in detail.
During World War II, the Japanese army embraced the spirit of bushido and believed that it would rather die on the battlefield than surrender. However, Fukurushi, a Japanese vice admiral, showed a different attitude when he was captured.
Fukuru served twice as Chief of Staff of the Combined Fleet, assisting Isoroku Yamamoto and Mine Koga for one or two terms. However, on a mission on March 31, 1944, his plane encountered severe convective weather, and Friyuzhan was forced to land, where he was captured by Philippine guerrillas.
Other high-ranking Japanese officers who were captured at the same time as him chose to commit suicide or resist, but Furushi chose to let it go, without fighting, let alone committing suicide. Fu Rushi originally thought that there was no way to escape, because he had planned a series of bloody crimes.
However, the Japanese threatened to kill all the islanders of Cebu, and the guerrillas were pressured to return Furushi to the Japanese army. After that, Friyushi was appointed commander of the Second Air Fleet, but after the end of World War II, he was imprisoned for three years as a Class B war criminal.
Although Fukurushi held various positions in Japan's post-war life, including chairman of the Water Fair and adviser to the Defense Agency, his life did not change because of this.
In February 1971, Furushi died of illness at the age of 80. Although his attitude is far from the bushido spirit of the Japanese army, his story is still food for thought.
On the battlefield in China, in addition to Norihide Abe, a Japanese major general who was directly killed, there was also a captured high-ranking Japanese officer named Yoshio Okino. He was a military attache with the rank of colonel in the navy, and on the afternoon of January 18, 1944, his plane made a forced landing on a riverside sandbar in the mountains of Shidai County, Anhui Province.
* Officers and soldiers of the 3rd Army of the 50th Theater of Operations spotted him and concentrated their fire on the cockpit. It didn't take long for a white flag to appear inside the plane, and the officers and soldiers rushed into the plane and dragged the 13 crew members out one by one.
In addition to the death of the driver and two others, seven Japanese soldiers and four civilians were also captured, and one of the Japanese officers who was shot in the right knee was Yoshio Okino. After being captured, he underwent surgery to remove his right lower limb, and He Yingqin personally sent someone to send Okino Yinan to Chongqing.
In early 1946, Okino was released and returned to Japan, where he died on March 4, 1978, at the age of 79. The Japanese Major General Akamoto Sanni, who was captured by the Eighth Route Army, circulated on the Internet, was actually just a sergeant (sergeant rank) of the Zunhua Gendarmerie.
And there was another Japanese officer, Yoshio Toyama, who was captured at the Tengxian railway station. He was the head of the Japanese economic inspection team, with the rank of major general, but he was not a front-line soldier, and his rank of major general was a false post.
Compared with Yoshio Okino, a real naval officer, Yoshio Toyama's rank and status are a bit low.
The Soviet Union suffered heavy losses in World War II, a total of 77 generals were captured by the enemy, 29 of whom unfortunately died, and the remaining 48 were either reinstated after the war or were liquidated and executed.
On the Soviet side, the commander of the 20th Army, Lieutenant General Yershakov, was captured in the Battle of Bryansk in October 1941, captured and imprisoned in the Hamelburg concentration camp, where he died on June 9, 1942, and was buried in the cemetery of the camp.
In addition, Lieutenant General Andreyevich, Lieutenant General Fellodovich, and Lieutenant General Ivanikolayevich were also captured, with a tragic end. In general, the highest-ranking general captured in the USSR was Vlasov, but he surrendered to the Germans, was a well-known traitor, quite controversial, so he was not taken as an example.
On the German side, the highest officer captured was the "famous" Field Marshal Paulus. In 1939, Paulus was promoted to major general. On August 26, 1939, Paulus was appointed chief of staff of the 10th Army under the command of Reichenau.
In 1942, Paulus was promoted to general of the Panzer Corps, and in early January 1943 he was promoted to general, awarded the knight's Iron Cross with oak leaves, and at the end of January of the same year, he was promoted to marshal.
In early February 1943, the Battle of Stalingrad ended, and 24 generals, led by Paulus, surrendered to the Soviet army. In 1953, Paulus returned to live in East Germany, where he died of illness four years later.
He was the first German field marshal to be captured in World War II.
During World War II, Britain demonstrated bravery in the "Dunkirk Retreat", but more than 130,000 British troops were also captured in the Malay Peninsula and Singapore battles.
On 15 February 1942, Singapore was captured by the Japanese, and the highest command, Lieutenant General Arthur Percival, subsequently surrendered to the Japanese. 3.Percival was imprisoned in a prisoner-of-war camp in northeastern China, but was released in August 1945 to attend the signing of the Japanese surrender and spent the rest of his life peacefully.
The United States was one of the Allied Powers, and in December 1941, Japan launched an attack on Pearl Harbor in the United States, which caused heavy losses to the Pacific Fleet, and Roosevelt** subsequently declared war on Japan.
Lieutenant General Jonathan Wainwright succeeded MacArthur as commander-in-chief of the U.S. Far East Army, and on May 5, 1942, in order to save nearly 70,000 Filipino civilians, he led 120,000 U.S. troops surrendered to the Japanese.
Vice Admiral Wainwright was imprisoned in a war criminal camp in northeastern China and witnessed the unconditional surrender of the Japanese aboard the USS Missouri in September 1945.
In World War II, there were several high-ranking prisoners of war on the battlefield between the Axis and the Allies. Their end is often tragic, because war is actually a duel between faith and flesh, and the loser is destined to become prisoners, while prisoners of war often live worse than death.
In particular, these powerful and high-ranking generals, who often carry a large number of national secrets, are destined to become the focus of the enemy's care, and only those lucky ones are likely to escape from danger.
But in any case, war is not the only way to solve the problem. The people of the whole world aspire to peaceful development, and any person or group that provokes war will be spurned by the people of the whole world.