Joseph R. Beyrle was the first paratrooper to land in Normandy and the only soldier to fight for both the United States and the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany.
His life is the stuff of legends; his story, told around the world.
Born in Muskegon, Michigan, Beyrle graduated from high school in 1942 with the promise of a scholarship to the University of Notre Dame, but enlisted in the US Army instead.
US Army
Upon his enlistment, Beyrle chose to become a paratrooper, joining the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne’s “Screaming Eagles” division, specializing in radio communications and demolition, and was first stationed in Ramsbury, England to prepare for the upcoming Allied invasion from the west.
After nine months of training, Beyrle completed two missions in occupied France in April and May 1944, delivering gold to the French Resistance.
On the pitch-black night of June 5, 1944, Beyrle and the 101st Airborne Division flew in on their dangerous mission to land behind enemy lines, cut bridges and power supplies, and soften up defenses for the men who were going to land on Utah Beach at dawn.
On June 6, D-Day, Beyrle’s C-47 came under enemy fire over the Normandy coast, and he was forced to jump from the exceedingly low altitude of 120 meters.
With planes blowing up around him, flak explosions rocking his aircraft, and tracer fire from anti-aircraft cannons snaking around the sky in every direction, Joe Beyrle jumped out of a airplane to death-from-above the Germans , there was a Nazi sniper hiding in the steeple, and that asshole was taking potshots at Beyrle’s parachute during the entire descent.
Unfortunately, he landed on the roof of this church at Come du Mond.
With bullets planking off the roof around him, in pitch darkness, with his parachute still spread out around him, Joe Beyrle shimmied down off the roof, slammed a mag into his M1 Carbine, and started out on a mission so amazing, when you visit the church at Come du Mond today you can see a plaque that looks like this:
Beyrle was a basically, an Army of One back before that became Branding™.
Completely alone, with no real idea where the rest of his unit was, he killed a few Nazis, found the Come du Mond power substation, blew it up with thermite, ambushed a full squad of German infantry by chucking grenades at them, and then headed off to blow up a bridge and prevent the Nazis from sending reinforcements to Utah Beach.
Unfortunately, he crawled through a hedgerow and fell head-first into a German machine gun nest.
He looked up to see ten guys pointing Schmeissers at him.
Rather than try to funk it, he surrendered.
Prisoner of war
Over the next seven months, Beyrle was held in seven different German prisons.
The Germans marched Beyle deeper into France, towards a POW holding area, when suddenly explosions started ripping out around them everywhere – either German artillery or American aircraft, it was tough to tell, but both Germans and American POWs were getting blown up by it ,it sucked for everyone.
Beyrle took shrapnel and was blown off his feet and into a ditch, but rather than lay there and cry about it he used to opportunity to escape.
He evaded capture for another 12 hours behind enemy lines before they caught him again.
This time they put him in a truck and drove it towards St. Lo., but the truck was strafed by Allied aircraft.
Beyrle tried to escape again, was caught, was taken to St. Lo., but then the Americans bombed St. Lo all night long and Beyrle was lucky to survive it.
Now, at various points I’m going to quote Sgt. Beyrle here, because they simply don’t make guys like this anymore.
If you want to read his full first-person account, there’s a link to it at the bottom.
I was interrogated 20-24 hours a day, they were trying to get all the usual questioned answered. “Why me, a German, was I fighting for the Jews Roosevelt and Morganthau against my own people?”
Sometime during the questioning I called a German officer a “SOB” and woke up several days later in a hospital with a big headache and a bashed head and later I was taken back to the monastery.
For the next three months Beyrle was starved, beaten, interrogated, and moved to a number of different camps.
He’d work during the day, survive Allied bombings at night, and weather hunger, disease, and exhaustion constantly.
At one point he was locked in a boxcar for a week with 50 other guys.
The train was then strafed by Allied planes, and he was lucky to survive that (it seems to be a recurring theme).
By September of ’44 he was in Poland, at a Russian POW camp with about 12,000 Russian men and women POWs.
Naturally, he immediately began planning his escape.
On a cold night in November of 1944, Joe Beyrle and 3 other Americans cut through the barbed wire in the camp and began their escape South.
They snuck into a railway station, hopped a train car headed for Poland, and planned to meet up with the Red Army , which was a short distance away.
Unfortunately, they got on the wrong train, and ended up in Berlin – the capital of enemy territory.
One thing you never hear a lot about is , there were a large number of Germans who hated Hitler, and they’d organized a German Underground Resistance which would help the Allies during the war.
Beyrle and the Americans, still in their POW uniforms, linked up with the resistance, and spent nearly a week hiding from the authorities and attempting to contact Allied Command.
The Gestapo found them first.
Beyrle was turned over to the Gestapo by a German civilian.
In the next 7 to 10 days we found out everything we had heard about the Gestapo was true. We were interrogated, tortured, kicked, knocked around, walked on, hung up by our arms backwards, hit with whips, clubs, and rifle butts. When you thought they could do no more, they would think of other ways to torture you. When you would slip into semi consciousness, they would start again.
Beaten and tortured, he was released to the German military, after officials stepped in and determined, the Gestapo had no jurisdiction over prisoners of war.
The Gestapo were about to shoot Beyrle and his comrades, claiming that he was an American spy who had parachuted into Berlin.
After about a week the Gestapo turned Beyrle over to the German Army, and they put him back in the prison camp at Stalag Luft III – where he was sentenced to spend 30 days in a 4-by-5 pine box, box so small he couldn’t lay down, as punishment for escaping.
Luckily, he only served 7, but only because a Red Cross operative from Geneva intervened on his behalf.
The Stalag Luft camp was opened in April 1942 and the Germans considered it to be practically escape-proof.
The Stalag Luft camp housed mainly British and American airmen whose planes had crashed on Axis territory.
The Germans generally captured prisoners with the words
‘For you, the war is over.’
However, it was the sworn duty of all captured military personnel to continue to fight the enemy by surviving, communicating information and escaping.
It took months for Beyrle to get his strength back, but, as soon as he did, you could be sure he was going to make another run for it.
With 3 buddies, Beyrle broke through a wall and made a mad dash for freedom – the Nazis machine gunned all 3 of Beyrle’s friends to death as they ran for it, but Beyrle got away – only to hear the faint barking of the German Shepherds the Nazis sent to hunt him down.
So, in the freezing cold of Poland in January, Sgt. Beyrle dove into a frozen river and followed it for a couple miles East, to throw off the trail of the dogs.
He was also hoping to meet up with the Soviet army.
Somehow, miraculously, after not being shot, devoured by hounds, or freezing to death, Joseph Beyrle reached Soviet lines.
Encountering a Soviet tank brigade, he raised his hands, holding a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes, and shouted in Russian,
‘Amerikansky tovarishch!’ (“American comrade!”)
He met up with and was greeted by Battalion Commander Aleksandra Samusenko, a woman who holds the distinction of being the only female tank commander of World War II.
Even though he spoke very little Russian, somehow Beyrle convinced her to let him join up,thus beginning his month-long stint in a Soviet tank battalion, where his demolitions expertise was appreciated.
She gave him a PPSH-41 submachine gun, a few drums of ammunition, and told him what their next objective was:
He was about to liberate the POW camp he had just escaped from, in the middle of January,
Soviet Army
Beyrle’s new battalion was the one that freed his former camp, Stalag III-C, at the end of January, but in the first week of February, he was wounded during an attack by German Stuka ,dive bombers.
He was evacuated to a Soviet hospital in Landsberg an der Warthe (now Gorzów Wielkopolski in Poland), where he received a visit from Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov, who, intrigued by the only non-Soviet in the hospital, learned his story through an interpreter, and provided Beyrle with official papers in order to rejoin American forces.
When word came down that there was a U.S. POW in a Red Army uniform, things got kind of crazy.
Beyrle met Zhukov, was sent back and arrived at the US embassy in Moscow in February 1945
Unfortunately, when Beyrle finally met a friendly American face after nearly a year behind enemy lines, it turned out that there was yet another problem:
The U.S. Ambassador told him, he had been reported by the US War Department as killed in action on June 10, 1944 on French soil.
A funeral mass had been held in his honor in Muskegon, and his obituary was published in the local newspaper.
Embassy officers in Moscow, unsure of his bona fides, placed him under Marine guard in the Metropol Hotel until his identity was established through his fingerprints.
Still, the Ambassador was a little concerned that Beryle was lying about his identity and may have been a German spy, so Beyrle was shipped around to Odessa, Egypt, and Italy, before finally being cleared and returning home on April 11, 1945.
His parents were pretty surprised and happy to see him, mostly because they thought he’d been dead for ten months.
Joe Beyrle was given the Purple Heart.
Post-military
Beyrle returned home to Michigan on April 21, 1945, and celebrated V-E Day two weeks later in Chicago.
He was married to JoAnne Hollowell in 1946—coincidentally, in the same church and by the same priest who had held his funeral mass 2 years earlier.
Beyrle worked for Brunswick Corporation for 28 years, retiring as a shipping supervisor.
I’ll end this the way he ends his autobiography, because it’s amazing:
My funeral Mass was held at St. Joseph’s Church in Muskegon by Father Stratz on September 17, 1944. My wife and I were married in the same church on September 14, 1946, by Father Stratz. We are now the parents of a daughter and two sons and have seven grandchildren.
His unique service earned him medals from U.S. President Bill Clinton and President Boris Yeltsin of Russia at a ceremony in the Rose Garden of the White House marking the 50th anniversary of D-Day in 1994.
But Beyrle’s story has always been too big to stay home.
On Thursday, a retrospective of his life — a traveling exhibit called “Jumpin’ Joe Beyrle: A Hero for Two Nations”— will open at the Russian State Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.
The exhibit is timed to coincide with Russia’s Defender of the Fatherland Day celebration Feb. 23, honoring that country’s war veterans.
Beyrle, who died on Dec. 12, 2004, at the age of 81, is considered one of those defenders, an American awarded a chestful of medals for his service by the Russians.
Some of Beyrle’s artifacts, including his basketball uniform fromSt. Joseph High School in Muskegon, will be part of the traveling exhibit that will be in Russia .
Other items include a photo of Beyrle paratrooping and the boots and jacket he wore during the war.
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