final credits - joe beyrle
The following summary has been excerpted from the Washington Post.
World War II paratrooper Joe Beyrle's gung-ho zest for leaping out of planes earned him the nickname "Jumpin' Joe." Was the only man to fight both for the United States and the Soviet Union.
A member of the 101st Airborne's Screaming Eagles, Beyrle was 20 when he parachuted into Normandy for the first time; he was wearing bandoliers packed with gold for the French Resistance.
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.
His captors marched Beyrle and his fellow American POWs toward a prisoner staging area, while Allied planes strafed the scraggly procession. Beyrle 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, Beyrle's parents in Muskegon, Mich., received the dreaded telegram about their son's "death."
Beyrle, meanwhile, was being hauled by train from one prison camp to another, where he endured interrogations, frequent beatings and near starvation. He finally managed to escape, after several attempts, in January 1945. He encountered a Russian tank unit led by a tough commander; he knew her only as "the major."
The Russian troops were hungry, desperate and barely under control. He recalled how the Russians seized the elderly German couple who owned the farm where he had been hiding, shot them and fed them to their pigs. A few days later, the troops ate the pigs.
Beyrle, looking for a way back to U.S. troops, fought alongside the unit for nearly a month, riding as a machine gunner on the back of a Sherman tank. After taking part in the destruction of his old POW camp, he was seriously wounded in an attack by German dive bombers and transported to a field hospital in what is now Poland.
He eventually made his way to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow but was placed under house arrest when he could not convince anyone that he actually was Joe Beyrle. Fingerprints finally established his identity.
On Sept. 14, 1946, he returned to Muskegon and got married in the church where his premature funeral Mass had been held two years earlier.
In a 1994 ceremony at the White House, then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin presented Beyrle with four medals for his service with the Red Army. In 2002, author and military historian Thomas Taylor told Beyrle's story in "The Simple Sounds of Freedom: The True Story of the Only Soldier to Fight for Both America and the Soviet Union in World War II" (Random House). In 2004, the designer of the AK-47 assault rifle, Lt. Gen. Mikhail Kalashnikov, presented a rifle to Beyrle in a ceremony at a Moscow Victory Day celebration.
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