BRIAN Fernley from the South West Airfields Heritage Trust was the guest speaker at the November 16 meeting of Crediton and District U3A.

He spoke about an American called Joe Beyrle (pronounced "By early").

There was a good attendance of 75 at the Boniface Centre in Crediton to hear of his exploits, primarily being the only American soldier to fight for both America and Russia in World War Two.

Joseph R. Beyrle was born in Muskegon, Michigan, on August 25, 1923. He was the third of seven children born to William and Elizabeth Beyrle, whose parents had come to America from Germany in the 1800s. He was six years old when the Great Depression struck.

An older sister died of scarlet fever at age 16.  His father, a factory worker, lost his job; the family was evicted from their home and was forced to move in with Joe's grandmother. Some of his earliest memories, Beyrle later told his children, were of standing in government food lines with his father.

His two older brothers dropped out of high school and joined the Civilian Conservation Corps, an unemployment work-relief programme, sending home enough money to allow the rest of the family to stay together. To earn some extra money, Joe found work sweeping at a local barbershop. Determined to see at least one of their children graduate, Joe’s parents pushed him to stay in school and earn his diploma. 

In his early years, Joe struggled in school and was held back in his first year because of his poor English.

His grandparents had immigrated to the United States from Bavaria in southern Germany, so in his household, German was spoken just as often as English.

Joe was also colour blind, which presented him with many unique challenges throughout his life.  However, he was a gifted athlete who excelled in baseball and track and field. He could run a mile within five minutes.

In Muskegon, one particular recruitment poster caught Joe’s attention. It depicted a U.S. Army paratrooper armed with a Thompson submachine gun dangling by a parachute after jumping out of an airplane.

The bold text at the bottom of the poster read: “Jump into the Fight.”  Joe had to admit on his application that he was colour blind.  The Sergeant asked him if he had ever gotten a traffic ticket for running a red light. Beyrle replied, “No.”

“Then don’t worry,” said the sergeant, “A dozen guys will push you out when the light changes.”

In April 1944, Joe Beyrle was one of three paratroopers selected from the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment to partake in a covert mission into Nazi-occupied France to deliver gold coins to the French Resistance.

In the dead of night flying from Exeter (not that anyone knew, it was all secret and code words), Beyrle parachuted near the town of Alencon in the Normandy Peninsula where he made contact with the Resistance.

Ten days later, he was secretly flown back to England, undetected by the Germans. One month later, Sergeant Beyrle dropped into Normandy once again to deliver gold coins to the French Resistance. Not long after he returned to his unit at Ramsbury, all of southern England went into lockdown.

His cover story was that his brother was ill and then had a relapse.

BIGOT was a World War II security classification at the highest level of security - above Top Secret.; BIGOT stood for the British Invasion of German Occupied Territory, was chosen by Churchill before America came into the War and remained the security classification even when Eisenhower took over the planning role.

The men were confined to their staging area and all contact with the outside world was cut off.

The men carried 50 per cent of their body weight in supplies and kit.  Thirteen of the men decided not to wash until their mission was completed. This became the basis for "The Dirty Dozen" film.  They were in flight for five hours and then had a 700 foot jump.

Joe was dropped in zone D.  On June 5, 1944, the night before D-Day, he again parachuted behind enemy lines into Nazi-occupied France, landing on the roof of a church in St. Come-du-Mont.

Under fire, he bounced down the steep pitch of the roof into a cemetery and set out on his mission, the demolition of two bridges behind Utah Beach. Three days later, he crawled over a hedgerow and stumbled into a Nazi machine gun nest.

The Germans marched Joe Beyrle and his fellow American POWs toward a prisoner staging area, while Allied planes strafed the scraggly procession.

Joe was hit by shrapnel but managed to escape for a few hours before running into another German unit. His dog tags were taken and ended up around the neck of a German soldier who was killed in France while wearing an American uniform.

In early September 1944, Mr Beyrle's parents in Muskegon, Michigan, received the dreaded telegram about their son's “death.”

Over the next seven months, Beyrle was held in seven German prisons. He escaped twice, and was both times recaptured.

Beyrle and his fellow prisoners had been hoping to find the Red Army, which was a short distance away. After the second escape (in which he and his companions set out for Poland but boarded a train to Berlin by mistake), Beyrle was turned over to the Gestapo by a German civilian.

Beaten and tortured, he was released to the German military after officials stepped in and determined that 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.

Beyrle was taken to the Stalag III-C POW camp in Alt Drewitz, from which he escaped in early January 1945.

He headed east, hoping to meet up with the Soviet army. Encountering a Soviet tank brigade in the middle of January, he raised his hands, holding a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes, and shouted in Russian, “Amerikansky tovarishch!” (American comrade!).

Beyrle was eventually able to persuade the battalion's commander (Aleksandra Samusenko, reportedly the only female tank officer of that rank in the war) to allow him to fight alongside the unit on its way to Berlin.  Beyrle began a month-long stint in a Soviet tank battalion, where his demolitions expertise was appreciated.

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.

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 two years earlier.  Beyrle worked for Brunswick Corporation for 28 years, retiring as a shipping supervisor.

His unique service earned him medals from U.S. President Bill Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin at a ceremony in the Rose Garden of the White House marking the 50th anniversary of D-Day in 1994.

Beyrle died in his sleep of heart failure on December 12, 2004, during a visit to Toccoa, Georgia, where he had trained as a paratrooper in 1942. He was 81. He was buried with honours in Section 1 of Arlington National Cemetery in April, 2005.

Questions followed from the audience.  This talk was warmly appreciated.

Sandra Ragalsky 

for Crediton u3a