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“Joe Beyrle: Hero of Two Nations” opens Monday at the Strategic Air & Space Museum, near Ashland, Neb. The exhibit will be open to the public until Dec. 16.
The medals Joe Beyrle pinned to his chest were the first clue that he had survived an extraordinary journey through World War II.
On his left side, Beyrle wore a Purple Heart — the one the U.S. Army awarded to his parents when everyone believed he was dead.
And on his right side he wore ... are those Soviet medals?
"He used to say that his war story was a two-drink story," Joe Beyrle Jr. said of his father. "Because he couldn't tell you in one."
The story of Beyrle, who died in 2004, is the only documented case of a soldier who fought with both the U.S. and Soviet armies during World War II. Starting Monday, an exhibit honoring the once-unknown veteran from Muskegon, Mich., will open at the Strategic Air & Space Museum near Ashland, Neb. There also will be a number of private events, including a UNO panel discussion featuring the Russian ambassador to the United States, the U.S. ambassador to Russia and two former U.S. ambassadors.
The current U.S. ambassador, by the way, is career diplomat John Beyrle, Joe Beyrle's youngest son.
"It's just a neat family story that will maybe bring people in and help them reconnect with the broader history of World War II," said Scott Tarry, director of the Strategic Air & Space Museum.
Beyrle's one-of-a-kind war story began when he jumped out of a U.S. transport plane and parachuted into occupied France on June 5, 1944, the day before D-Day.
Beyrle, then 20, was lucky to survive the jump. Many of his fellow paratroopers were cut down by German gunfire before they could reach the ground.
But his luck ran out when the jump ended. Beyrle crashed into the roof of a church in a tiny French village. He found himself cut off from his fellow paratroopers and far behind enemy lines.
Beyrle followed orders and blew up a power substation, without help. Within hours, though, he found himself surrounded by a dozen Nazi soldiers.
Thus began Beyrle's seven-month ordeal in and out of POW camps.
He was beaten by the Gestapo, Hitler's notorious secret police, and was repeatedly interrogated by the Wehrmacht, Germany's regular armed forces, according to his biography. He escaped twice, only to be recaptured.
During that time, a case of mistaken identity led U.S. military authorities to wrongfully notify Beyrle's parents that he was dead. They held a funeral for their son in Michigan.
Beyrle's third escape attempt is what sent him into the Russian history books.
He broke out of a prison camp in Poland in January 1945, stumbled down a creek bed and finally hid in a barn until he heard the rumbling of approaching tanks, according to his biography and other oral and written histories.
It was a Soviet tank unit.
Using hand signals, a soggy pack of American-made Lucky Strike cigarettes and the only Russian he knew — "Ya Amerikansky tovarisch!" (I'm an American comrade!) — he convinced the Soviets that he was an ally.
Then he convinced the Soviets that he wanted to stay with them as they advanced on Hitler's retreating army.
This is how a Michigan boy came to fight with the Red Army in Poland. Beyrle did so for a month, before being wounded during a battle.
He woke up in a Russian hospital, where Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov, the most famous USSR general of World War II, came to meet the young American. Beyrle returned home to Michigan in April 1945.
In 1946, he was married in the same Catholic church that had held a funeral Mass for him two years earlier.
Beyrle's other son, Joe Beyrle Jr., remembers a father who talked very little about the war, even when he put on a T-shirt that showed the bullet wound in his bicep or donned swimming trunks that exposed shrapnel wounds on his legs.
For decades, until the collapse of the Soviet Union, Beyrle also talked very little about his time with the Red Army. The Soviets had been American allies during World War II, but by the 1950s, the Cold War had erased any good feeling from the Allied victory.
"The Russians were our mortal enemies, right?" said Joe Beyrle Jr. "But he didn't feel the same way about them. He saw them as individual human beings rather than this totalitarian system of government out to destroy us."
Before his death, the senior Beyrle traveled several times to Russia, meeting that country's World War II veterans. Several gave him Soviet WWII medals, which Beyrle proudly pinned to his chest.
His final days also allowed him to tell his children — including daughter Julie Schugars — more of his war story.
The traveling exhibit, which is coming to the Strategic Air & Space Museum after four stops in Russia and two elsewhere in the United States, seeks to provide a sense of the scope of the war.
Nearly 27 million soldiers and civilians living in the former Soviet Union died during World War II, a loss of life much greater than any other single country suffered.
Some 416,000 U.S. soldiers died, while more than 600,000 were seriously wounded. One out of every 15 Americans who served in World War II either was killed or seriously injured.
Today, many American high school students believe the United States fought against the Soviet Union during World War II, rather than with it, said Gregg Guroff, president of the Foundation for International Arts and Education, which is bringing the exhibit to Ashland.
"The Cold War sort of dimmed our senses of what the (U.S. and Russian) relationship really is and has been for the past 200 years," Guroff said. "The exhibit has been enormously popular. ... It seems to strike a chord in people in both countries."
Contact the writer:
402-444-1064, matthew.hansen@owh.com
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