Now that I’m 58 years old, I have earned the privilege of retrospection. Had you asked me when I was eighteen to list the top 150 things I thought I might be doing for a living at 58, writing would not have made the list. God’s got a weird sense of humor sometimes. “Jumpin’ Joe” Beyrle learned this as well.
Oftentimes, little things become big things. In the superb book Bravo Two Zero by Andy McNab, a group of SAS operators on the run during the First Gulf War commandeer a car. As they make their way toward Syria, they inadvertently get stuck in traffic waiting at a roadblock. Before they can do much about it, Iraqi troops make their way along the stalled row of cars and discover their presence. Things get all kinetic from there. It is a great read. Perhaps we will explore that further here sometime.
The fascinating bit to me, however, was how their relative seating positions in the car ultimately determined their fates. Two guys were initially sitting side-by-side, shoulder-to-shoulder. One man went out the left, while the other went out the right. One guy lived, while his counterpart died. It’s tough to hear stories like that and not suspect that a higher power is orchestrating men’s affairs. You can certainly see the vagaries of Providence at work in the amazing life of Joseph Beyrle.
Joseph “Jumpin’ Joe” Beyrle Origin Story
Joseph Beyrle was born on 25 August 1923, in Muskegon, Michigan. The third of seven kids born to Elizabeth and William Beyrle. Joseph’s parents had immigrated from Germany in the late 1800s. The boy was six when the Great Depression ravaged his family.
William Beyrle lost his job as a factory worker, and the family lost their home. They were forced to move in with Joseph’s grandmother. Two of his older brothers dropped out of school to work for the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) and make money to keep the family from starving. His older sister succumbed to scarlet fever when she was sixteen.
Like so many of his generation, in the early 1940s, with the entire world in flames, Beyrle joined the Army. He subsequently volunteered for airborne training at Camp Toccoa in Georgia. Upon graduation, Beyrle was assigned to the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division. Joseph Beyrle was a Screaming Eagle.
Beyrle to War
The D-Day invasion was not the largest airborne operation in military history. That would be Operation Varsity, which took place in March of 1945 and involved 16,000 American paratroopers. However, the American airborne component of Overlord, code-named Missions Albany and Boston, placed 13,400 skytroopers on the ground in the early hours of 6 June 1944. Sergeant Joseph Beyrle was one of them.
“Jumpin’ Joe” Beyrle was a specialist in radio communications and demolition. As the radios of the day were both huge and notoriously unreliable, he spent most of his professional energy blowing stuff up. By the time he actually went on to combat, Beyrle had undergone nine months’ worth of focused training conducted at Ramsbury, England.
As extraordinary as the mass parachute assault into Normandy was, this was not Beyrle’s first trip downrange. In April and May of 1944, the young paratrooper had made covert insertions into mainland Europe to deliver gold to Resistance leaders. However, on 6 June, it was game on.
Chaos, Inc
It has been said that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Joseph Beyrle was no exception. For starters, Beyrle’s C-47 Skytrain took fire as soon as it cleared the Normandy coast. This forced the pilot to maneuver the big transport plane both low and fast. When SGT Beyrle finally made his jump, it was from an altitude of 360 feet. To put that in perspective, training jumps in airborne school are conducted from 1,250 feet. At anything less than around 500 feet, one need not bother with a reserve chute. At that altitude, if something goes wrong, there won’t be time to do anything about it.
The D-Day night parachute drop was chaos personified. SGT Beyrle got separated from his unit after landing at Saint-Come-du-Mont. However, he quickly gathered his wits and blew up a nearby power station. He wandered about sowing mayhem for another few days before being captured by the Germans.
The Itinerant Paratrooper – “Jumpin’ Joe” Beyrle
The Germans evacuated their captured POWs as soon as possible. That helped disincentivize escape. However, SGT Joseph Beyrle was having none of that. Over the next seven months, Beyrle was shuffled among seven different German prisons. Along the way, he escaped twice.
The Krauts had moved him far to the east, and Beyrle knew he was close to the advancing Soviets. After his second escape, Beyrle and a few buddies inadvertently boarded a German train headed for Berlin. He had originally thought the train had been destined for Poland. A German civilian recognized the Allied prisoners as being suspicious and notified the Gestapo.
Beyrle and his comrades were picked up in short order and badly beaten. The Gestapo goons declared the men to be spies and were making ready to execute them. Fortunately, German military officials intervened and relocated Beyrle to the Stalag III-C POW camp in Alt Drewitz.
By early January 1945, “Jumpin’ Joe” Beyrle was getting stir crazy yet again. He escaped east in hopes of connecting with the advancing Red Army. On this, his third try, he successfully pulled it off.
Swapping Uniforms
Wandering across a war zone in one of the most frigid winters in European history, SGT Beyrle happened upon a Soviet tank brigade. With his hands raised, he offered the skeptical Russians a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes and shouted, “Amerikansky Tovarisch!” (American Comrade!). The Russians held their fire and escorted him to meet their battalion commander, Aleksandra Samusenko.
Samusenko was herself a legend. The only female tank battalion commander of the war, Samusenko fought in Finland with the infantry before training as a tanker assigned to the 1st Guards Tank Army. While there, she was decorated with the Order of the Red Star after her tank engaged and destroyed three German Tiger I’s.
Samusenko folded the lost American into her unit, making good use of his demolition skills as they advanced deep into Germany. The woman had already lost her entire family to the war. With the conflict winding down, Samusenko was eventually crushed under the tracks of a German assault gun during the East Pomeranian Offensive.
The War Must Go On
Samusenko’s tank battalion eventually liberated Stalag III-C, the camp from which SGT Beyrle had escaped in the first place. However, in early February, Beyrle was wounded in an attack by German Stuka dive bombers. He was medically evacuated through the Russian system until he eventually ended up at Gorzów Wielkopolski in Poland. While recovering, Beyrle met Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov. Zhukov was incredulous that an American soldier could have been wounded while serving with Soviet forces. As a result, the famous Soviet Marshal saw to it that Beyrle received the appropriate travel documents to get him to the American embassy in Moscow.
That’s all great, but Beyrle had been reported as killed in action four days after D-Day. His family had already attended his funeral mass in Muskegon, and reports of his demise had been widely distributed in the local newspaper. Embassy staff placed him under guard until they could verify his identity via fingerprints.
The Rest of the Story for “Jumpin’ Joe”
SGT Joseph Beyrle finally made it back home on 21 April 1945, nearly a year after having been declared dead. The following year, he married JoAnne Hollowell in the same church where his funeral mass had been conducted back in 1944. The same priest officiated both services.
Like so many of those great old heroes, Joseph Beyrle came home ready to make a new life for himself. He took a job with the Brunswick Corporation and worked there for 28 years, retiring as a shipping supervisor. He and JoAnne raised three children. Beyrle died in 2004 at age 81 in Toccoa, Georgia, the same place where he learned to be a paratrooper. He was buried alongside his fellow heroes at Arlington.
READ MORE HERE: Dr Dabbs – The Battle for the La Fière Bridge: “I Know of No Better Spot to Die”
Ruminations
SSG Joseph Beyrle’s list of military decorations is unique. In addition to his airborne wings, Beyrle earned the Bronze Star, the Purple Heart, and the WW2 Victory Medal. He was awarded the French Croix de guerre as well as the Soviet Order of the Red Banner. He was also decorated by the Russians for participating in the liberation of Warsaw.
When “Jumpin’ Joe” Beyrle first walked into that Army recruiting office and volunteered for the paratroopers, there is no way he could have imagined the places that decision might take him. Beyrle infiltrated occupied Europe twice, jumped into Normandy, cycled through seven different POW camps, and was very nearly executed by the Gestapo in Berlin. He later earned international fame fighting alongside the Soviets in their march toward Berlin.
Later in life, Beyrle was formally recognized by both Presidents Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin during the 50th anniversary of the D-Day invasion. His son, John Beyrle, was eventually named Ambassador to Russia. Having killed Germans alongside both the Americans and the Russians, Joseph Beyrle was a legendary warrior.
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