U.S. and Soviet Warrior Dies – Amerikansky Tovarishch

‘Amerikansky Tovarishch’ Dies

     Warrior who fought for U.S. and Soviet Army

by Anatoly Kasparov

Joseph Beyrle, left, attending Victory Day celebrations in May with his son John Beyrle and U.S. Ambassador Alexander Vershbow.
 
 
Joseph Beyrle, who is believed to be the only American soldier to fight for both the U.S. and Soviet armies during World War II, died Sunday, his family said. He was 81.

A native of Muskegon, Michigan, Beyrle served in the U.S. airborne forces and spent months in Nazi prisoner-of-war camps after being captured by the Germans. Surviving torture, he escaped and joined a Soviet tank brigade.

His unusual war service earned him medals from U.S. President Bill Clinton and President Boris Yeltsin on the 50th anniversary of D-Day in 1994.

Beyrle died of heart failure in his sleep on a visit to Toccoa, Georgia, the town where he trained with the parachute troops in 1942. From there, he shipped out to Britain in preparation for the Allied landings in France.

Beyrle, whose son John Beyrle is deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, traveled here last May for the Victory Day parade on Red Square and was planning to return.

Beyrle completed two missions into occupied France in April and May 1944, delivering gold to French resistance fighters. A member of the 101st Airborne’s “Screaming Eagles” division, he parachuted into Normandy the night before the D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944. He lost contact with other paratroopers but managed to blow up a power station and carry out other acts of sabotage before being captured by Nazi soldiers a few days later, Beyrle recalled in an interview with The Moscow Times in May.

Over the next seven months, Beyrle was held in seven different Nazi prisons, escaping twice only to be recaptured. On the second escape attempt, Beyrle and two other prisoners were turned over to the Gestapo and tortured.

Beyrle was taken to the Stalag 3-C POW camp in Alt Drewitz, where he finally made a successful escape in early January 1945, and after hiding near a farmhouse for a few days, joined a Soviet tank brigade.

“I went down with my hands up and said, ‘Amerikansky tovarishch, Amerikansky tovarishch,'” Beyrle recalled, using two of the few Russian words that he knew: American comrade.

He managed to convince the brigade’s wary commanders to let him fight alongside them on their march to Berlin, and thus began his one-month stint in the Soviet tank unit. He won their trust by using his demolition skills, blowing up trees in the way of Soviet tanks. He was then wounded and evacuated to a Soviet hospital in Landsberg, now in Poland, where he received a visit from Marshal Georgy Zhukov.

Zhukov asked where Beyrle was from and how he’d gotten there. After telling his tale, Beyrle was given a special pass that the marshal’s interpreter said would get him “anyplace you’d like to go.”

When Beyrle made his way to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, he found out that the military assumed he had been killed in action. After several frustrating weeks in Moscow, the Pentagon confirmed Beyrle’s identity from his fingerprints, and on April 21, 1945, Beyrle returned to Michigan where he celebrated V-E Day two weeks later.

After leaving the U.S. Army, Beyrle worked for Brunswick Corp. for 28 years, retiring as a shipping supervisor.

Beyrle did not talk about his war experience for years and only began to at the encouragement of his son, a career diplomat who has an interest in Russia.

“My dad always said, ‘When I go, I want to drop and skid along the ground,'” John Beyrle wrote in an e-mail to NBC News reflecting on his father’s death. “He came pretty close. His great fear was the slow slide into oblivion, a nursing home, or worse.”

In 2002, a book by Thomas Taylor about Beyrle, “The Simple Sounds of Freedom,” was published by Random House. A paperback version, “Behind Hitler’s Lines,” came out last June.