Why one American paratrooper escaped 7 Nazi prison camps and joined a Soviet tank battalion — while his family attended his funeral back home. This World War 2 story reveals how Sergeant Joseph Beyrle became the only American soldier to fight for both the U.S. Army and Soviet Red Army.
June 6, 1944. Sergeant Joseph Beyrle, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, jumped into Normandy at 360 feet under heavy fire. Captured days later, he spent seven months in seven German prisons. He escaped twice. The Gestapo tortured him for ten days, dislocating his shoulders, before a firing squad was stopped at the last moment. Every regulation said escaped POWs should evacuate through proper channels. Soviet commanders said he couldn't stay.
They were all wrong.
What Beyrle demanded that January morning in Poland wasn't safe passage home. It was a weapon and revenge. Captain Aleksandra Samusenko — the only female tank commander in the 1st Guards Tank Army — overruled her commissar and gave him a Soviet uniform, a PPSH-41, and a position on a Lend-Lease Sherman tank heading west toward Germany.
What happened next made Beyrle the only soldier in history to receive combat h
