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  Praise for Behind Hitler's Lines

  “Remarkable… Without a doubt, one of the most incredible stories you will ever read.”

  —The Roanoke Times

  “Every once in a while, a true story comes along that reads like fiction. [This book] is a remarkable true story about a remarkable American soldier. It grabs you on page one and never lets go. That Joe Beyrle survived the horror of the German stalags and the Gestapo to escape and continue fighting against Hitler with the Russian army is a testament to the training and professionalism of the Screaming Eagles of the 101st Airborne Division—and to the courage and fierce determination of the kind of men who served in that storied unit.… One of the most gripping tales of war you will ever read, and it will be read for generations to come as a tribute to the inextinguishable love of country and love of freedom of one resilient American, Joe Beyrle.”

  —SENATOR CARL LEVIN, chairman of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee

  “It is a tale of courage and daring, torture and escape, of going to hell and coming back, of survival against the worst odds: a soldier imprisoned; a paratrooper forced to the ground.”

  —The Grand Rapids Press

  “Amazing … This is not just another war story. It is a history lesson about courage, fear, perseverance, revenge and redemption.”

  —Muskegon Chronicle

  Also by Thomas H. Taylor

  NONFICTION

  RANGERS, LEAD THE WAY

  LIGHTNING IN THE STORM

  WHERE THE ORANGE BLOOMS

  FICTION

  A-18

  A PIECE OF THIS COUNTRY

  BORN OF WAR

  Books published by The Random House Publishing Group are available at quantity discounts on bulk purchases for premium, educational, fund-raising, and special sales use. For details, please call 1-800-733-3000.

  In June 1994, on the fiftieth anniversary of D Day, President Clinton looked out on the American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer in Normandy and spoke these dedicatory words:

  THESE ARE THE MEN WHO GAVE US OUR WORLD.

  THE SIMPLE SOUNDS OF FREEDOM WE HEAR TODAY

  ARE THEIR VOICES SPEAKING TO US

  ACROSS THE YEARS.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  FOR CHAPTERS DESCRIBING COMBAT G? WHICH JOE WAS NOT involved, I'm indebted to Ed Albers and Mark Bando, the latter author of The 101st Airborne from Holland to Hitler's Eagle s Nest (Motorbooks International), from which the stories about Charles Eckman and Ross Goethe were derived. For maps I've relied on Rendezvous with Destiny, an eight-hundred-page hardback published by the 101st Airborne Division Association.

  Phil Wallace published his pre-D Night letter to his wife through the association's quarterly, The Screaming Eagle, from which Dutchman Robert Postman's remembrance of September 17 was also taken. The most senior 101st officers of World War II, still living, are Harry Kinnard and Julian Ewell, both retired lieutenant generals, lieutenant colonels at Bastogne. They graciously provided me elucidating insights about the realities during that epic siege.

  Then of course there was my father, whom I plied for 101st lore when I became a Screaming Eagle veteran after Vietnam. He died in 1987. For the many honors and titles he received, including command of all United Nations forces in Korea and the chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the only emblem he directed to be engraved on his headstone was the Screaming Eagle.

  Good fortune for me was doubled when Owen Laster of the William Morris Agency offered this manuscript to Bob Loomis of Random House. Their combined appreciation of Joe's singular place in the American experience of World War II was invaluable.

  Any author's spouse must be gratefully acknowledged for patience, support, and understanding. No less so for me, as I grappled to put in words what was sometimes too much for words. So, as is her due, I give the last word to Pam. Joe, in turn, is indebted to his wife, JoAnne, and I am too for her unique ability to decipher and transcribe Joe's handwriting.

  CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  MAPS

  FOREWORD

  A NOTE ON MILITARY ORGANIZATIONS

  1. THE EUROPEAN THEATER OF OPERATIONS

  2. JUMPIN'JOE

  3. ON BOTH SIDES OF THE WALL

  4. DNIGHTEVE

  5. HIDE-AND-SEEK

  6. INTHEORCHARD

  7. HIGHWAY 13

  8. GOOD COPS, BAD COPS

  9. MUSKEGON

  10. ANGELS DON'T SPEAK GERMAN

  11. THESTALAGS

  12. IV-B

  13. MARKET-GARDEN

  14. ADOGANDAMOLE

  15. BERLIN

  16. BASTOGNE

  17. GESTAPO VERSUS WEHRMACHT

  18. AMERICANSKITOVARISH!

  19. BACKTOIII-C

  20. EVERYONE IN HELL IS GRINNING

  21. TO MOSCOW

  EPILOGUE

  FOREWORD

  WORLD WAR II REUNIONS ARE SMALLER, THE VETERANS ALARMINGLY fewer as actuarial predictions become morbidity statistics. The 101st Airborne Division holds its reunions at different locations each year in August, the month of the division's birth in 1942. These veterans are the Screaming Eagles, and their casualties to age are said to have “soared.” I'm a second-generation Screaming Eagle—my father commanded the division during World War II and I fought with it during Vietnam—so naturally my interest in the 101st is intense, so much so that I wrote a history of its campaigns in the Gulf War and a biography of the longest-serving Screaming Eagle in Vietnam.

  I continued to browse reunions in search of a remarkable war story, especially from the Big One: “Let me hear from you old guys before you soar!” I'd say. Despite this urging the response most often was bemusement from a septuagenarian as he studied his shoes. He wasn't ready to relive that war and never would be; or he deflected the thought with an increasingly popular laugh line: “The older we get the better we were!”

  Eventually the vets began mentioning Joe Beyrle (pronounced “buy early”). Did I know he had fought longer with the Soviet army than with the American? No one, to my knowledge, had even fought with both. We were introduced at a snowbird reunion in Kissimmee, Florida.

  It didn't take a long interview with Joe to realize that his is one of the most extraordinary American adventures of World War II. A true story, beyond doubt in all matters of importance, with only small indulgence needed for accuracy of times and places. There is corroborating evidence from other POWs; where there is not, Joe's modesty speaks for his veracity. Diaries and journals in POW camps were of course forbidden by the Germans, and any attempts to keep such records were punished and noted in a prisoner's file. Ironically, Joe was able to capture those records from his former captors.

  In relating his story my most difficult contemplation was perspective. What was predominant, what was key in his experience? Luck and its fickleness seemed the theme. Was Joe's luck ultimately good or bad?

  Good! He is not just alive—after his burial—but leading a satisfying life. His health concerns are more reminders of that than pain from the past, even though they carry dire medical labels like beriberi, amoebic dysentery, frostbite, skull fracture, and multiple wounds. Survivor's guilt, usually a major ingredient in the psyche of ex-POWs, is no evident part of Joe.

  In Normandy on the fiftieth anniversary of D Day, Jack Smith of ABC asked Joe why he allowed himself to be captured. A flicker of reflection revealed a half century of mulling that question. “Preservation” was his answer. Preserving life, at least temporarily, made better odds than dodging submachine-gun bullets fired from six feet away. So stark a choice cannot be second-guessed even in light of its consequences.

  From that inevitable choice concatenated unimagined misery. A fellow POW said that those w
ho saved their lives lost their ego—a salutary exchange if ego is the root of all evil. But ego is also the stem of individuality. Joe survived as an individual, with an individual outlook, individual obstinacy, individual daring, and individual faith. That personality, plus inordinate luck he pushed beyond reasonable limits, got him through situations that killed all of his closest buddies.

  He is an exemplar of what Tom Brokaw has called the Greatest Generation. Joe's thoughts of that generation are not his focus today; instead it is his family, the rising generation, his children, their families. He would not dedicate this book to anyone in particular but approved the dedication in the World War II yearbook of the 101st Airborne: “To the memory of our buddies, living and dead, the many rich and varied experiences we shared; and to hope that we may, in some measure, abide by and help to preserve the way of life for which we went to war.”

  No veteran more deserves the way of life Joe now enjoys. This book is a way of paying last respects to him and those like him who gave us our world.

  Thomas H. Taylor

  A NOTE ON MILITARY ORGANIZATIONS

  AT THE BEGINNING OF JUNE 1944, THE 101ST AIRBORNE Division numbered about 14,000 soldiers. As one of four infantry regiments in the 101st, the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment had an initial strength of about 2,500 paratroopers, divided into three battalions of equal size, each with three rifle companies of about 200 men.

  German divisional strength varied widely throughout the war. In Normandy the Screaming Eagles were opposed by the big 709th Division (14,000 coastal defense troops) and the 243rd Division, which was half that size. Dreaded panzer divisions rarely fought with their full complement of 160 tanks.

  Russian divisions were even smaller than German, and were replaced by whole new divisions when they took heavy casualties. Joe guesses that the Russian tank battalion he fought with numbered about 400 men and women, not quite twice the number of his American company.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE EUROPEAN THEATER

  OF OPERATIONS

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1943 U-BOATS TOOK A HEAVY TOLL OF ALLIED shipping, so the 101st Airborne Division would be in peril and out of their element while crossing the Atlantic, but at least the enlisted men now knew their destination: northern Europe, to open a second front against Nazi Germany. That basic mission had been concealed till they reached Camp Shanks, thirty miles upriver from New York City, the division's staging area for embarkation. They'd had to remove the Screaming Eagle shoulder patch and wear regular GI shoes instead of the distinctive paratrooper jump boots, their pride and talisman. An officer tried to explain the reason: “The Axis has to be kept guessing.”

  German spies were thought to have infested New York City, and it was a strategic secret that the 101st would be committed against Hitler rather than Hirohito. Initial betting had been otherwise. It had been the Japanese who attacked Pearl Harbor; Germany declared war on the United States four days later, the only time in World War II they bothered with such a formality.

  The stay at Camp Shanks was only long enough for inoculations and inspections before it was time to go, time for “the arsenal of democracy,” as Churchill called America, to push another seven thousand soldiers across the sea to join the Allied counteroffensive that had already reconquered North Africa and knocked Mussolini's Italy out of the war. Feeling like lemmings, Screaming Eagles jammed onto Hudson River ferries, which converged on a pair of troopships at Manhattan's piers. At one was the great French liner the Normandie, gutted and blackened by fire. The name meant nothing to most paratroopers, for they'd yet to learn where Normandy was.

  Awaiting Joe Beyrle was the HMS Samaria, decrepit and sooty, hardly resembling the cruise ship she had been for the Cunard line. His squad, within an endless walking serpentine, shouldered ponderous duffel bags as they staggered up the gangplank, then descended to search for space below the waterline. They would sleep there in eight-hour, “hot hammock” shifts, as the number of soldiers embarking was more than twice the capacity of the ship. They were accustomed to the tubular constriction of an airplane, but the Samaria's massive gray perpendiculars were alien and intimidating. Soon they returned to deck, uncharacteristically subdued some mumbling about the previous night's send-off by New York girls when they had been allowed a last pass to the city, but for most it was time to just lean on the rail, look down on dockside, take it all in, and think.

  Joe thought mostly about the last year, how he had come so far from Muskegon, the pleasant town of his childhood on the east shore of Lake Michigan. From Kalamazoo's induction center the army had swept Joe away to Georgia, eventually to march him across the state like one of General Sherman's infantrymen. He was an infantryman, a bullet launcher, but also trained as a radio operator with a subspecialty in demolitions. He spent a few weeks in Panama, then moved on to North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky for large-scale maneuvers, then back to North Carolina again and finally to bleak Camp Shanks. There had been so much travel and training, so much of the school of the soldier, that homesickness had become a memory like an adolescent disease.

  With straining hawsers, a cluster of small tugs gathered around the Samaria to tow her from the pier. On the waterfront men in suits stopped to watch a ritual that over the previous year had been so often repeated but was never routine, that of soldiers crammed afloat setting off to war, an army going to sea. Some civilians waved slowly with their hats, igniting a response on board. Under steam, the Samaria made way by the Statue of Liberty, passing a ferry whose deck began to undulate with waving passengers, a further sign that the USA was behind them in support, as it soon would be in distance.

  With Sandy Hook still abeam, the troopers were issued life vests to be worn at all times except in hammocks. It was also time to go below; no cigarettes were allowed on deck as a total blackout went into effect while the ship's engines slowly thumped en route to join a convoy forming off Long Island. Dusk settled into a darkly rising mist as if America were receding into the past.

  The past was the civilian world, what it had been for soldiers who were wrested from it, what it had made of them. In June 1942 Joe graduated from Saint Joseph High School with twelve other seniors, who voted him Best Informed, Most Obvious Temper, Class Shark, and Best Dressed. That last title may have been awarded by sarcasm because he owned but one threadbare suit and was color-blind, likely to wear mismatched socks unless his mother noticed. Fortunately she did before the graduation prom held at the Muskegon Women's Club, chaperoned by nuns. Music was on records, nothing but waltzes and two-steps—jitterbugging was considered too controversial for a Catholic-school dance.

  A shark meant an opportunist, and Joe was that. In the Depression, opportunity for him included sweeping out a barbershop for pocket change or fighting for choice discards from a grocery store. Such rummaging became his talent after “standing in line with my brothers, for nine family members, waiting to receive surplus government handouts. At the age of twelve that hit me like a blacksmith's hammer.”

  From then on opportunity meant an escape from ignominy. That's what the army provided him more than anything else.

  As smokers left the Samaria's decks there was enough room for Joe and his two best buddies, Jack Bray and Orv Vanderpool, to wedge together on the rail, their life vests pressing one another like adjoining cocoons. No doubt there was something Sergeant Duber wanted them to do, but he would have to find them in the darkness among unidentifiable pods of whispering troopers. Vanderpool, a laconic Californian, kept glancing over his shoulder, while Bray had to be muted lest Duber detect his Cajun accent. He was nostalgic, most immediately for last night in New York, secondly for his hometown of New Orleans. It seemed probable now that the 101st would be visiting France, where Bray looked forward to using his French connection.

  Soon troopers from the “first seating”—a euphemism from the Samaria's cruise-ship history—surged on deck grumbling and still hungry after their first meal offish that tasted like it had been pickled during World War
I. What went with the fish smelled worse; the oily stench so pervaded the ship's interior that the first seating brought their blankets on deck. Advice for the second seating was break out your K rations, as those tasteless bricks would be the best food for the next couple of weeks.

  The first week at sea was one of sullen nervousness, with officers seething against the inability to exercise, except for calisthenics, and train, except for target practice at crates thrown overboard. They saw their men as Olympic athletes at the peak of fitness, losing their edge during the listless transit to venue. Preparation for combat had emphasized how scattered they would be after their parachutes drifted apart; now the troopers were suffocatingly crammed together. There had been a cadence chant when they'd run in formation back at Fort Bragg: “GI beans and GI gravy. Gee, I wish I'd joined the navy.” No such envy anymore.

  Nevertheless, the 101st was in the war now while not yet into it. U-boat alerts put the convoy into zigzagging maneuvers. Day and night, like overworked sheepdogs, destroyers wove between the lumbering transports. One of them developed engine trouble and turned back for Newfoundland with a regiment of paratroopers aboard. Watching ships change position was one of the few things for men to do, but the main relief from idleness was interminable gambling as the weather cooled over iron-gray seas that rocked so slightly that dice rolled true when bouncing off bulkheads. As constant as the thumping of the ship's engines was the clickety-clack of crap-shooters wherever three or more could huddle.

  They themselves were chips in the greatest gamble taken by the U.S. Army to date, that of creating airborne forces made up of paratroopers and glider riders. In 1940 General George C. Marshall had been stunned by the success of German paratroopers in capturing the island of Crete from a larger force of first-rate Commonwealth troops. German losses were so high that Hitler, hardly the type to count his dead never again attempted a large-scale airborne operation. Nor did Stalin, for whom loss of life meant even less, though he produced more such units.