Joseph Beyrle – My Father - by Ambassador John Beyrle

Welcome to an exhibition celebrating the life of Joseph Robert Beyrle, the only American paratrooper to fight in both the U.S. and Soviet armies against Hitler during the Second World War.  The Joe Beyrle you are about to meet lived a life shaped by the love of family and faith in God during a childhood of deprivation; a life scarred and forever altered amid the horror and suffering of battle and imprisonment; a post-war life of restored peace and family stability, given new focus by his wartime experiences.  Joe did not consider himself a hero, or an extraordinary man, although he found himself at the epicenter of a heroic, extraordinary chapter of history of the world:  the deadliest and most destructive war ever fought.   He considered himself a patriot and a soldier, an ordinary man who had a duty to volunteer to join his country’s army – not solely to defend his homeland, but also to help Allied nations thousands of miles from American soil already fighting for their lives and freedom against a common enemy.  Joe Beyrle’s unique encounter at the climax of the war with the most decimated of those allies, soldiers of the Soviet army making their final advance on Berlin, without any doubt saved his life -- and gave direction to my own, pointing the way to my current position as American Ambassador to the Russian Federation.  Please allow me to introduce you to the Joe Beyrle that I knew:  my father.

The central focus of this exhibition is Joe’s truly unbelievable wartime story.  Following more than a year of rigorous training as a member of the elite, newly-formed American parachute infantry, Sergeant Joseph Beyrle, 20 years old, jumped into Normandy before sunrise on D-Day, June 6, 1944, but was captured by German troops before he could make contact with other members of the Allied invasion force.  He spent the next seven months in German prisoner of war camps.  Two attempts to escape ended in recapture, including a brutal interlude of torture at the hands of the Gestapo.  His third try, from a camp near the Oder River, was luckier:  running to the east, he encountered a Soviet armored battalion of the Second Byelorussian Front.  Refusing offers to be evacuated to the rear, Joe convinced the commanders to let him stay and fight with the unit for what he hoped would be a short advance to Berlin – only 70 kilometers away – where he hoped to reunite with American forces approaching from the west.  But that short advance saw some the deadliest fighting of the war for the Red Army, and Joe was seriously wounded and evacuated to a Russian field hospital.   During his recuperation, Marshal Georgiy Zhukov inspected the facility, and made a point to meet the escaped American prisoner who had chosen to join the Soviet forces.  Wounded beyond hope of seeing further action, my father asked for help in traveling to the nearest US Embassy to secure safe passage back home.  Marshal Zhukov obliged this request, producing a letter of transit that Joe (who knew almost no Russian) could not read -- but which succeeded in facilitating a journey across Poland and Byelorussia that ended at the gates of the American Embassy in Moscow in early March, 1945.  Here this improbable odyssey took its most unimaginable turn: Embassy officials attempting to confirm Joe’s identity with Washington were informed that he had been reported killed in France, one month after the Normandy landings!  His family had received the dreaded “killed in action” telegram, and held his funeral service in the Catholic Church that they faithfully attended every Sunday.  Joe was held briefly under house arrest in the Metropol Hotel in Moscow until the erroneous report was corrected.  He was repatriated to the United States, enjoyed an emotional reunion with his family, and celebrated V-E day in Chicago.

To understand the strength of body and spirit that sustained my father through these ordeals requires, I think, a better appreciation of the hardships that shaped his childhood.  Joe was only six years old when the Great Depression struck the United States.  His father, a factory worker, lost his job, and the family of nine was evicted from their home and forced to move in with Joe’s grandmother.  Some of his earliest memories, he told us, were of standing in line with his father to bring home food handed out by the government.  One of his brothers dropped out of high school and moved to another city to work in a government conservation program, sending home enough money to allow the rest of the family to stay together.  An older sister died of scarlet fever at age 19.  Throughout these hardships, Joe’s parents clung to a dream, struggling and sacrificing to ensure that he would be the first member of his family to graduate from high school.  As the Depression eased, the future looked brighter for Joe; his athletic talent won the promise of a scholarship to nearby Notre Dame University.  But the peaceful world for Joe Beyrle and millions of Americans changed irreversibly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, followed by Hitler’s declaration of war against the United States.  By the summer of 1942, he enlisted in the parachute infantry – choosing that specialty, he often told us, because the additional fifty dollars a month that paratroopers were paid put a lot of food on his family’s table.

People often ask me whether my father’s contact with the Soviet Army influenced me to focus my studies and diplomatic career on Russia.   My sister Julie and brother Joe are asked how it felt to have a decorated war hero as a father.  In reality, as children we knew only the barest outlines of his wartime experiences: that he was a paratrooper who had been taken prisoner in the war, and was somehow freed by Russian troops.  Like many veterans, he found it impossible to share with his children -- or even with other adults -- the horrors he had survived.   But what we never heard, we could plainly see:  the scars from beatings and gunshots; his instinctive reaction to push us under a table one day when he heard a rocket from a fireworks display falling toward our house; the tears in his eyes whenever he heard the National Anthem played.  My father returned from the war to our hometown of Muskegon, Michigan, determined to recapture the peaceful world he had left behind only three years earlier.  He married my mother, JoAnne, and raised a family, like millions of other veterans.  But what he had lived through -- both as a child and as a soldier -- gave new focus and broadened meaning to his life.  He volunteered to serve as a chairman for the Muskegon chapter of the American Red Cross, as a way to show his appreciation for the Red Cross food parcels that had kept him alive in German POW camps.  He was a leader of the “Old Newsboys,” a charity that raised money to ensure that the poorest children in our town always had extra food and presents at Christmas.  In the 1960’s, he raised money and organized volunteers to send Christmas presents to hundreds of American soldiers from our area who were serving in Vietnam: a transistor radio, a wallet, anything to let them know their service was not forgotten.  Above all, we could always feel that special bond he shared with his fellow World War Two veterans.  He served as a case worker for the Disabled American Veterans organization, helping ex-G.I.’s get the medical treatment to which their service entitled them.  (Only after his death in 2004, as we went through his files, did we find letters written decades earlier from grateful veterans – or their widows, or children – thanking my father for his efforts.)  There were summers, when other families took vacations at the beach or visited historical sites, when we drove hundreds of miles with him to attend reunions of the men he had fought and trained with -- the veterans of the 101st Airborne Division.

The full extent and significance of Joe Beyrle’s experiences with the Soviet Army became clear to us only over time.    At first, he spoke about it very little.  In fact, in 1945 the American military issued a general order forbidding escaped or liberated US prisoners from speaking publicly about their contact with Soviet forces -- out of fear that the Wehrmacht would begin killing Allied POWs rather than see them bolster the ranks of the devastated Red Army.  Later on, Cold War politics intervened.  By the 1950’s, the anti-communist hysteria of the McCarthy era ensured that my father -- by nature a reticent man with keen political instincts – did not advertise that he had volunteered to fight alongside the Red Army at the end of the war.   He began to speak more openly only in the 1970’s, with the advent of détente, and my own first visits to Leningrad and Moscow on student and cultural exchange programs.  While working as a guide on an American exhibition in Moscow in 1979, I telephoned my father from my hotel – the Metropol -- and learned, for the first time, that he had stayed there 34 years earlier.   By the time he flew to Moscow to visit me, I had learned enough detail about his experiences to succeed in arranging a meeting with General Pavel Batov, the legendary Soviet commander who was then the head of the Soviet War Veterans Committee.  That meeting – reported in Ogonyok magazine in an article entitled “American Soldier in a Soviet Tank” – first brought Joe Beyrle’s story to a wider Russian audience.  Sadly, though, our efforts to find any Soviet veterans who remembered his brief service with their unit proved fruitless: as we know, entire Soviet regiments were wiped out in the final, deadly assault on Berlin in the spring of 1945.  Nonetheless, he never gave up hope, visiting Russia five times between 1979 and 2004, always on a program involving meetings with other veterans, always hoping to find someone from that tank unit from the Second Byelorussian Front. 

At times, his encounters with Soviet veterans became as intensely emotional as the reunions my father attended with American veterans.  In 1992, after a banquet at the airborne training base in Ryazan, I was his interpreter as we sat until late in the evening, talking to a veteran of the Battle of Kursk and his grandson.  My dad, who always carried around pocketfuls of chocolates and souvenirs, gave the boy some candy  -- and presented his grandfather a baseball cap and some souvenir pins from his Airborne regiment, the 506th Parachute Infantry.   The next morning, as our bus was loading for departure, the boy ran up with a small package – “a present for you from Grandpa.”  We opened it as the bus pulled away from the base: it was a Soviet Order for Valor, and an Order of the Red Banner.   Shocked, but with no way to return such sacred awards, my father kept them on display in our home in Michigan for many years. On his final trip to Moscow, seven months before his death in 2004, I found he had attached them to the vest he wore, alongside the Russian commemorative medals and awards he had received from the Russian government, including from President Yeltsin in a ceremony at the White House in Washington in 1994.  I told him I thought that mixing the medals that were gifts with medals he was awarded would lead to misunderstandings.   For him, though, the only point was that he had no intention to mislead anyone.

Today, some seventy years after the start of the war that remains the defining event of the 20th Century, remembrances of the fighting, and how it changed our world, are with us at every turn.  For Russians and Americans, however, those remembrances stand in different contexts.   It was a war that the vast majority of Americans in the 1940’s experienced only vicariously, through ration cards, letters home from Europe and the Pacific, and radio reports and newsreel footage.  Nonetheless, it was a war that prompted Joe and millions of Americans like him to leave their peaceful, unremarkable lives to join a global cause.  My father was often asked why he volunteered.  His explanation was consistent and simple:  “We knew that Hitler was a threat that had to be defeated, and we had a responsibility to be part of that fight.”   The Americans who joined that fight, who shipped out overseas and spread around the world to fight in places like Iwo Jima or Anzio or to ferry supplies to Murmansk, came face to face for the first time with men, women, and children who had also been living peaceful lives  -- but for whom war was far from an abstract, vicarious experience.  This reality had a profound effect on how those Americans would view the world for the rest of their lives.  My father tried to describe to me what he found when he arrived in Warsaw, carrying Marshal Zhukov’s letter, searching for an American Embassy:  “you couldn’t imagine the scene -- nothing but smoke and rubble.”   He painted an even starker picture of his long ride across Byelorussia in late February, 1945.  More than a year after German troops had been repelled, he said, bodies were still stacked up in the snow “like cordwood,” awaiting burial before the spring thaw.  But perhaps his most vivid memories were his encounters with Russian prisoners, held in camps adjoining but distinctly separate from Allied POW camps.  “Their conditions were brutal,” he recalled.  “We were hungry -- but they were literally starving to death.”  Few Americans carried that perspective with them.

President John F. Kennedy, in 1963, observed that “no nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union suffered in the course of the Second World War.”  My father was intensely proud of the contributions of American and Aliied forces to our common victory in that war.  But he never failed to express his highest respect for bravery and generosity of the Soviet forces he fought with, who took him in when he was hungry and defenseless, and saved his life when he was gravely wounded.  And he never forgot the death and suffering that he witnessed in January and February of 1945.    My father is a unique symbol of the partnership between the Russian and American people – and his wartime service and unique contact with the Soviet army has had a strong influence on my work during my three diplomatic assignments to Moscow.   But Joseph Beyrle was more than a symbol or a metaphor to me, of course.  It is my hope that this exhibition will acquaint you with the Joe Beyrle that I knew: the loving father and generous man who just happened to live one of the most extraordinary and unique stories to come out of the Second World War.