- 2 days ago
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
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
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00:00At 23 minutes past midnight on June 6th, 1944,
00:04Sergeant Joseph Byerly stood in the open door of a C-47 transport over the Normandy coast,
00:10watching tracer fire climb toward his aircraft from 300 feet below.
00:1420 years old, two secret missions into occupied France, zero combat jumps.
00:20German anti-aircraft batteries had already shredded six transports in the formation.
00:24By dawn, 1,200 American paratroopers would be dead, wounded, or captured.
00:31The 101st Airborne Division was jumping into a kill zone,
00:35and Byerly's plane was flying too low and too fast.
00:38The green light never came.
00:41Flack punched through the fuselage.
00:42The pilot banked hard, and Byerly went out the door at 360 feet.
00:47Standard jump altitude was 1,200 feet.
00:50At 360, his parachute had four seconds to open before he hit the ground.
00:55It opened.
00:56He crashed through the roof of a church in St. Combe-du-Mont and landed in the cemetery beside it.
01:01His stick was scattered across 15 miles of Norman farmland.
01:05He was alone, armed with a Thompson submachine gun, explosives, and a mission to destroy a power station.
01:12Most paratroopers who landed alone that night died alone.
01:16German patrols swept the hedgerows.
01:18Machine gun nests covered the crossroads.
01:21Snipers waited in the church towers.
01:23The smart move was to hide, link up with friendlies, survive until the beaches were secured.
01:29Byerly did not hide.
01:30He spent three days conducting solo sabotage operations behind enemy lines.
01:35He destroyed the power station.
01:37He cut communication lines.
01:38He moved through German-occupied territory like a ghost with a demolition kit.
01:43On June 9th, his luck ran out.
01:46Crawling through a hedgerow near Carentan, he stumbled directly into a German machine gun nest.
01:51Four soldiers, four guns, zero options.
01:55The Germans did not shoot him.
01:57They wanted intelligence.
01:58They wanted to know about the invasion force, the landing beaches, the airborne objectives.
02:04Barely gave them his name, his rank, his serial number.
02:07Nothing else.
02:08What happened next would define the next seven months of his life.
02:12The Germans noticed his dog tags.
02:15They noticed his surname.
02:16Barely.
02:17A German name.
02:18His grandparents had immigrated from Bavaria in the 1800s.
02:22To the interrogators, this made him something worse than an enemy soldier.
02:26It made him a traitor to his blood.
02:29They took his identification tags.
02:31They gave them to a German infiltrator, a spy who spoke English and would attempt to cross
02:36allied lines wearing an American uniform.
02:38That spy was killed three weeks later near the front.
02:42American soldiers found the body.
02:44They found the dog tags.
02:45They found the name Joseph Barely.
02:49On June 10th, 1944, the United States War Department officially declared Sergeant Joseph Barely killed
02:56in action on French soil.
02:58A telegram arrived at his parents' home in Muskegon, Michigan.
03:02His mother collapsed.
03:03His father, a factory worker who had lost his job during the Depression, who had stood in food lines with
03:09his children,
03:10who had watched one daughter die of scarlet fever, now learned that his son was dead in Normandy.
03:16The parish priest scheduled a funeral mass.
03:18The local newspaper printed an obituary.
03:21Friends and neighbors filled the church pews.
03:24They prayed for the soul of Joseph Barely, killed in the liberation of France.
03:29But Joseph Barely was not dead.
03:31He was sitting in a German interrogation room 400 miles to the east,
03:36watching his captors beat another American prisoner unconscious.
03:40If you want to see how Barely survived the next seven months in Nazi captivity,
03:44please hit that like button.
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03:51Back to Barely.
03:52The interrogators transferred him to his first prison camp in late June.
03:56It would not be his last.
03:58Over the next seven months, Sergeant Joseph Barely would pass through seven different German prisons.
04:04He would attempt escape three times.
04:06He would be beaten, starved, and tortured by the Gestapo.
04:10And somewhere in the frozen hell of occupied Poland,
04:13he would make a decision that no American soldier had ever made before.
04:19The German military prison system operated on a simple principle.
04:23Troublemakers went east.
04:25The further east a prisoner traveled, the worse conditions became.
04:29The closer to the advancing Soviet front, the less food, the less heat, the less chance of survival.
04:36Barely became a troublemaker immediately.
04:38His first escape attempt came in July 1944, somewhere in France.
04:43A column of prisoners was being marched toward a rail station when American fighter bombers appeared overhead.
04:49The guards scattered.
04:51Explosions tore through the road.
04:53In the chaos, Barely ran.
04:55He made it 16 hours.
04:57German patrols caught him in a drainage ditch the following morning.
05:01They beat him with rifle butts and added his name to a list.
05:05Escape risk.
05:06Watch closely.
05:08Transfer east.
05:09The second escape came in October.
05:11By then, Barely had passed through four different camps, each one further from the Allied lines.
05:17He had learned to bribe guards with cigarettes, to trade information for food, to survive on watered soup and moldy
05:24bread.
05:24He had also learned that the Soviet army was advancing through Poland.
05:28If he could reach the eastern front, he might find allies.
05:32He and two other prisoners slipped out of a work detail and made it to a rail yard.
05:37They needed a train heading east toward Poland.
05:40In the darkness, they climbed into a freight car and waited.
05:43The train went west, directly into Berlin.
05:46German railway workers discovered them at a switching station in the capital.
05:50They called the Gestapo.
05:52What followed was the worst ten days of Joseph Barely's life.
05:56The Gestapo did not operate under the Geneva Convention.
05:59They did not recognize prisoners of war.
06:01They saw three men in American uniforms who had arrived in Berlin by train, and they drew an obvious conclusion.
06:09Spies.
06:10Saboteurs.
06:11Paratroopers sent to assassinate Nazi leadership.
06:14The interrogations began immediately.
06:17Barely was stripped, beaten, and hung by his arms twisted backward behind his body.
06:22His shoulders dislocated.
06:24His interrogators used whips, clubs, and rifle butts.
06:27They demanded information about American spy networks in Berlin.
06:30They demanded names of German collaborators.
06:33They demanded confessions to crimes he had never committed.
06:37Barely gave them nothing.
06:39He could not give them what he did not have.
06:42But the Gestapo did not believe him.
06:44The beatings continued for over a week.
06:46Sleep deprivation.
06:48Starvation.
06:49Mock executions where guards pressed pistols to his head and pulled triggers on empty chambers.
06:54On the 10th day, they lined Barely and his fellow prisoners against a wall.
06:58A firing squad assembled.
07:00The Gestapo commander announced that American spies would be executed for crimes against the Reich.
07:06The bullets never came.
07:08At the last moment, Wehrmacht officers arrived with paperwork.
07:11The German military had tracked the prisoners from their original camp.
07:15They had documentation proving these men were captured soldiers, not spies.
07:20The Gestapo had no jurisdiction.
07:22The prisoners belonged to the army.
07:24The argument lasted three hours.
07:26The army won.
07:28Barely was pulled from the execution wall and transferred to military custody.
07:32He should have felt relief.
07:34Instead, he felt something else.
07:36Rage.
07:37Seven months of captivity.
07:39Seven camps.
07:40Two failed escapes.
07:42His family thought he was dead.
07:44The war was grinding toward his conclusion, and he was rotting in a prison cell while other men fought.
07:49In late December 1944, the Germans transferred him to Stalag IIIc, a massive prisoner-of-war camp near the town
07:57of Alt-Druits in occupied Poland.
07:5912,000 prisoners, barbed wire, guard towers, machine guns, but the prisoners at Stalag IIIc had information the Germans did
08:08not want them to have.
08:10Soviet artillery was audible to the east.
08:12The Red Army was coming.
08:14The front was collapsing, and in the chaos of a collapsing front, a determined man might find opportunity.
08:21Barely began planning his third escape.
08:23This time, he would not go west toward the Americans.
08:26He would go east toward the guns.
08:30The escape came in the first week of January 1945.
08:34Soviet artillery had been pounding German positions for days.
08:38The guards were nervous, distracted, watching the eastern horizon instead of the prisoners.
08:44Barely had been saving cigarettes for weeks, trading, hoarding, building a currency that worked better than money in the collapsing
08:50Reich.
08:51He bribed a guard to look away during a work detail.
08:54He slipped through a gap in the wire that had been cut during the night.
08:57He crawled through frozen mud until he reached a tree line, then stood and ran east toward the sound of
09:03the guns.
09:04Two other prisoners escaped with him.
09:07Within hours, German patrols caught them both.
09:10Barely heard the dogs, heard the shots, kept running.
09:14He did not stop to help.
09:15He could not stop.
09:17If he stopped, seven months of survival meant nothing.
09:20For two weeks, he moved through occupied Poland in winter.
09:24Temperatures dropped below zero.
09:26He had no map, no compass, no food beyond what he could scavenge from abandoned farmhouses.
09:32He navigated by sound, following the rumble of Soviet artillery, sleeping in barns and drainage ditches, avoiding roads where German
09:40units retreated westward in chaos.
09:42His body was failing.
09:44The Gestapo torture had left permanent damage.
09:47His shoulders ached constantly from the dislocations.
09:50His ribs, cracked during the beatings, had never healed properly.
09:54He was malnourished, frostbitten, running on willpower and rage.
09:58In mid-January, he saw them.
10:01A column of tanks moving through a village.
10:03Not German tanks.
10:05Soviet T-34s.
10:06Their hulls painted white for winter camouflage, red stars visible on the turrets.
10:12Barely had exactly one chance to not get killed.
10:15Soviet soldiers shot first and asked questions never.
10:18An unknown figure approaching their lines in the middle of a war zone was a target, not a refugee.
10:24He raised his hands above his head.
10:26In one hand, he held a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes.
10:30American cigarettes.
10:32Unmistakably American.
10:33He walked toward the tank slowly, shouting the only Russian words he knew.
10:38The tankers did not shoot.
10:40They surrounded him with rifles raised, shouting questions he could not understand.
10:44A political officer arrived.
10:46A commissar who spoke broken English.
10:49Barely explained.
10:50American paratrooper.
10:52Prisoner of war.
10:53Escape from German camp.
10:55Wanted to fight.
10:56The commissar said no.
10:58Regulations required him to evacuate escaped Allied prisoners through proper channels.
11:03Moscow would decide what to do with an American soldier behind Soviet lines.
11:08Barely refused.
11:09He had not survived seven months of captivity, torture, and a two-week trek through frozen Poland to sit in
11:16another camp waiting for bureaucrats.
11:18He wanted a weapon.
11:20He wanted revenge.
11:21He wanted to kill Germans.
11:23The argument attracted attention.
11:25The battalion commander arrived to investigate the commotion.
11:29Barely found himself facing a Soviet officer unlike any he had expected.
11:34Alexandra Samusenko was 23 years old, the only female tank commander in the 1st Guard's tank army,
11:41and she had destroyed three German Tiger tanks at the Battle of Kursk 18 months earlier.
11:46She had lost her husband to the Germans.
11:48She had lost her entire family.
11:50She understood revenge.
11:53Samusenko overruled the commissar.
11:55The American would stay.
11:56He would fight.
11:58Her battalion was advancing west toward Berlin, and they needed every soldier who could hold a weapon.
12:03The Soviets issued Barely a uniform, a PPSH-41 submachine gun, and an assignment.
12:10He would serve as infantry support for one of the battalion's tanks.
12:14The tank was American-made, an M4 Sherman provided through the Lend-Lease program.
12:19Sergeant Joseph Barely, 101st Airborne Division, United States Army, was now a soldier of the Soviet Red Army,
12:27riding an American tank toward Germany.
12:29No American had ever done this before.
12:32None would ever do it again.
12:34Somewhere behind them, Stalag 3C still held 12,000 prisoners.
12:39Barely's battalion was heading directly toward it.
12:43The Eastern Front was nothing like Normandy.
12:46In France, there were rules.
12:48Prisoners were taken.
12:49Civilians were spared when possible.
12:52The Geneva Convention meant something, even if imperfectly applied.
12:56In Poland, there were no rules.
12:57The war between Germany and the Soviet Union had killed 20 million people in four years.
13:03Villages burned.
13:05Entire populations vanished.
13:07Wehrmacht soldiers and Red Army troops slaughtered each other with industrial efficiency,
13:12and neither side expected mercy.
13:14Barely adapted quickly.
13:16His demolitions training made him valuable.
13:19Soviet sappers showed him their techniques, and he showed them his.
13:22The Americans used different fuses, different charges, different methods for destroying bridges and fortifications.
13:29The exchange worked both ways.
13:31Within days, Barely was placing explosive charges on German bunkers alongside men who spoke no English.
13:38The battalion pushed west through January 1945.
13:42They moved through terrain that looked like the end of the world.
13:45Frozen fields littered with burned vehicles.
13:48Towns reduced to rubble.
13:49Bodies stacked along roadsides, German and Soviet and civilian, too many to bury in frozen ground.
13:56Barely rode on the back of his Sherman tank, gripping the PPSH-41, scanning the tree lines for ambushes.
14:03The infantry support role was brutal.
14:05When the tanks engaged German positions, the foot soldiers advanced through the crossfire.
14:10When German aircraft appeared, the men on the ground had nowhere to hide.
14:14The Soviet soldiers accepted him with surprising speed.
14:18They did not care about politics or nationality.
14:20They cared about whether a man could fight, whether he would hold his position when the shells started falling.
14:26Barely proved himself in the first engagement.
14:28He did not run.
14:30He did not freeze.
14:30He moved forward with the assault wave and used his submachine gun the same way he had used his Thompson
14:36in Normandy.
14:37The Russians called him their American.
14:40They shared their rations with him.
14:42Black bread, buckwheat porridge, vodka that burned like gasoline.
14:47At night, around fires built in the ruins of German farmhouses, they toasted to Stalin and Roosevelt.
14:53To the alliance that was crushing Hitler from both sides.
14:56Barely learned fragments of Russian.
14:59Enough to understand orders.
15:01Enough to warn comrades of incoming fire.
15:04Enough to share stories about home.
15:07About Michigan.
15:08About the family that thought he was dead.
15:10The Soviets found this hilarious and tragic in equal measure.
15:14They had all lost someone.
15:16Mothers.
15:17Fathers.
15:18Brothers.
15:19Children.
15:20The German invasion had torn through their homeland like a plague.
15:24A man whose family merely believed him dead was lucky by their standards.
15:29By late January, the battalion had advanced nearly 100 kilometers.
15:34German resistance was crumbling.
15:36Entire units surrendered rather than face Soviet tanks.
15:40Others fought to the death, knowing what awaited them in Russian captivity.
15:44The advance slowed only when supply lines stretched too thin or when Wehrmacht reinforcements arrived from collapsing sectors.
15:53Barely's commanding officers noticed his effectiveness.
15:56Word spread through the division about the American paratrooper who had escaped from a prison camp and volunteered to fight.
16:02Some officers thought he was insane.
16:05Others thought he was exactly the kind of soldier this war required.
16:09A few quietly arranged for extra ammunition and rations to reach his unit.
16:14On the 28th of January, reconnaissance reported a large German installation directly in the battalion's path.
16:21A prisoner of war camp.
16:2312,000 Allied soldiers behind barbed wire.
16:27Guard towers.
16:28Machine gun positions.
16:30A skeleton garrison of older soldiers and rear echelon troops, most of the combat units having already fled west.
16:37The camp was Stalag 3C, Barely's camp.
16:41The place where he had planned his final escape less than a month earlier.
16:45His battalion received orders to liberate it at dawn.
16:50The assault began at dawn on January 29, 1945.
16:55Soviet tanks rolled toward Stalag 3C from three directions.
16:59Artillery softened the perimeter.
17:01Machine guns raked the guard towers.
17:03The German garrison, outnumbered and outgunned, collapsed within two hours.
17:08Barely entered the camp he had escaped three weeks earlier.
17:11The barbed wire was torn apart by tank treads.
17:14The guard towers were burning.
17:16Prisoners poured out of the barracks.
17:18Thousands of men in ragged uniforms, blinking in the winter sunlight.
17:21Unable to comprehend that liberation had finally arrived.
17:25They stared at the Soviet soldiers.
17:27They stared at the tanks.
17:29And some of them stared at the American in a red army uniform, carrying a Soviet submachine gun, shouting in
17:35English for medics and food.
17:37The prisoners who recognized him thought they were seeing a ghost.
17:41Barely had escaped in early January.
17:43The Germans had reported him killed during the pursuit.
17:46Now he was back, wearing the uniform of a different army, liberating the camp that had held him captive.
17:52There was no time for reunions.
17:54The battalion had orders to continue west.
17:57German forces were regrouping ahead.
17:59The window for rapid advance was closing.
18:02Barely helped organize the evacuation of the sickest prisoners, directed Soviet medical teams to the worst cases, then climbed back
18:09onto his Sherman and rejoined the column.
18:11The push continued through the first week of February.
18:14Resistance stiffened as the Soviets approached German territory.
18:18Wehrmacht units that had been retreating suddenly turned and fought.
18:22Counterattacks struck the flanks.
18:24Luftwaffe aircraft appeared over the battlefield in numbers not seen since the previous summer.
18:29The Junkers Ju-87 Stuka dive bombers were obsolete by 1945 standards.
18:35Slow, vulnerable, easy targets for modern fighters.
18:38But against ground troops without air cover, they remained deadly.
18:42The Stuka siren, designed to terrorize infantry during the dive, still worked exactly as intended.
18:49On February 3rd, Barely's battalion was advancing through open terrain when the air raid siren sounded.
18:55Six Stukas appeared from the east, diving toward the tank column.
18:59Anti-aircraft guns opened fire.
19:01Tank commanders buttoned up their hatches.
19:04The infantry scattered.
19:05Barely was 50 meters from his Sherman when the first bomb hit.
19:08The explosion threw him sideways.
19:11Shrapnel tore through his legs.
19:13A second bomb landed closer.
19:15The concussion wave slammed him into frozen earth.
19:18He lay in a crater as the attack continued.
19:21Bombs walked across the field.
19:23Tanks burned.
19:24Men screamed.
19:25The Stukas made three passes before Soviet fighters arrived and drove them off.
19:30When the medics found him, Barely was unconscious and bleeding from multiple wounds.
19:35His left leg was shattered below the knee.
19:37Shrapnel had penetrated his back, his arms, his abdomen.
19:41The Soviet field surgeons did not expect him to survive the night.
19:45They evacuated him to a military hospital in Landsberg-Andervarta, 60 kilometers behind the front.
19:52The facility was overwhelmed.
19:54Wounded soldiers filled every bed, every corridor, every available space.
19:59Surgeons worked around the clock, amputating limbs, extracting shrapnel, fighting infections with limited antibiotics.
20:06Barely survived the first night, then the second.
20:10His body, hardened by seven months of captivity and abuse, refused to quit.
20:15The Soviet doctors operated three times in the first week, removing shrapnel fragments, cleaning wounds, fighting to save his leg.
20:22He was the only non-Soviet patient in the hospital.
20:26Word of the Americans spread through the staff.
20:29Nurses visited his bedside to see the paratrooper who had escaped German captivity and fought with the Red Army.
20:35Doctors discussed his case in hallways.
20:37Eventually, word reached someone with the authority to investigate.
20:41A visitor was coming.
20:42The most powerful military commander in the Soviet Union wanted to meet the American soldier in Ward 7.
20:50Marshal Georgi Zhukov was the most celebrated military commander in Soviet history.
20:55He had saved Moscow in 1941.
20:58He had broken the German siege of Stalingrad.
21:00He had crushed the Wehrmacht at Kursk in the largest tank battle ever fought.
21:04Now he was leading the final Soviet offensive toward Berlin, and somehow he had found time to visit a wounded
21:11American in a Polish hospital.
21:14Zhukov arrived at Landsberg in mid-February with a small entourage of staff officers and translators.
21:20The hospital commander escorted him through the wards, showing the marshal the price his army was paying for victory.
21:26Hundreds of wounded, dozens dying.
21:29The human cost of the advance measured in missing limbs and shattered bodies.
21:33The American was in Ward 7.
21:36Barely could not stand.
21:37He could barely sit upright.
21:39But when the most powerful general in the Soviet Union walked through the door, he attempted a salute from his
21:44hospital bed.
21:46Zhukov stopped the gesture.
21:48Through an interpreter, he asked Barely to tell his story.
21:51All of it.
21:52From the beginning.
21:53Barely spoke for 20 minutes.
21:55The interpreter translated in fragments.
21:58Zhukov listened without interrupting.
22:00The D-Day jump.
22:02The capture.
22:03The seven camps.
22:04The Gestapo torture.
22:05The escape through frozen Poland.
22:08The month fighting with Soviet tanks.
22:10The liberation of his own prison camp.
22:12The Stuka attack that had nearly killed him.
22:15When Barely finished, Zhukov was silent for a long moment.
22:19Then he spoke directly to the American, waiting for the translation.
22:23The marshal said he had never heard a story like this.
22:26He said Barely had earned the respect of the Soviet people.
22:29He said the alliance between their nations was built on men like him.
22:32Soldiers who fought regardless of flags or borders.
22:36Then Zhukov asked what Barely wanted.
22:39The answer was simple.
22:40He wanted to go home.
22:42His family believed he was dead.
22:44His mother had mourned him for eight months.
22:46He needed to reach the American embassy in Moscow and prove he was still alive.
22:50The problem was documentation.
22:54Barely had nothing.
22:55No identification.
22:57No military papers.
22:58No proof of citizenship.
23:00The Germans had taken his dog tags in Normandy.
23:03The Soviets had issued him a temporary soldier's book, but it identified him as a member of the Red Army,
23:09not the United States military.
23:10Without proper papers, he could not travel.
23:13Without travel, he could not reach Moscow.
23:16Without Moscow, he could not go home.
23:19Zhukov solved the problem with a signature.
23:21He ordered his staff to prepare official documents identifying Joseph Barely as an American soldier under Soviet protection.
23:28He authorized travel permits for Moscow.
23:31He assigned a military convoy to transport the wounded American when he was strong enough to move.
23:36The marshal shook Barely's hand before leaving.
23:38He wished him safe travels and a long life.
23:42He said their countries would remember this war differently, but they should never forget they had fought it together.
23:48Three weeks later, Barely was evacuated from Landsberg.
23:52His leg had been saved, though he would walk with a limp for the rest of his life.
23:56Soviet medics loaded him onto a truck heading east, away from the front, toward Moscow.
24:02The journey took nine days.
24:04Barely traveled through the wreckage of German-occupied Poland,
24:07through Soviet territory scarred by four years of total war,
24:11through landscapes of devastation that stretched to every horizon.
24:15In late February 1945, the convoy reached Moscow.
24:20Barely was delivered to the gates of the American embassy on Mokovaya Street.
24:24He was wearing a Soviet uniform.
24:26He was carrying Soviet military documents signed by Marshal Zhukov.
24:30He was claiming to be a dead American paratrooper who had spent the last month fighting for the Red Army.
24:36The Marine guards at the gate did not believe a word of it.
24:41The embassy staff had seen desperate men before.
24:44Moscow, in 1945, was full of refugees, deserters, con artists, and Soviet agents attempting to infiltrate American facilities.
24:53A man in a Red Army uniform, claiming to be a dead paratrooper, fit the profile of a provocation.
25:00They detained him immediately.
25:02Marine guards escorted Barely to a holding room in the Metropole Hotel across the street.
25:07They confiscated his Soviet documents.
25:10They photographed him.
25:11They asked questions designed to expose inconsistencies in his story.
25:15Barely answered everything.
25:17His serial number, his unit, his commanding officers, the name of the church in Saint-Côme-du-Mont where his
25:24parachute had caught the roof,
25:26the date of his capture, the names of the prison camps, details that no Soviet agent could possibly know.
25:32The embassy staff remained skeptical.
25:35The story was too extraordinary.
25:37A paratrooper declared dead on D-Day, captured by Germans, tortured by the Gestapo, escaped to join Soviet tanks, wounded
25:45in combat,
25:46personally assisted by Marshal Zhukov.
25:48It sounded like propaganda.
25:50It sounded like fiction.
25:52They cabled Washington for verification.
25:54The War Department confirmed that Sergeant Joseph Barely, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division,
26:03had been declared killed in action on June 10, 1944.
26:08A funeral mass had been conducted.
26:10Benefits had been paid to his family.
26:12The case was closed.
26:14The embassy requested fingerprints.
26:16Every American serviceman was fingerprinted during enlistment.
26:20If this man was Joseph Barely, his prints would match the records at the War Department.
26:25The results came back in 48 hours.
26:27Perfect match.
26:28Ten points of identification on each finger.
26:31The man in the Metropole Hotel was exactly who he claimed to be.
26:35The embassy scrambled to process his paperwork.
26:38Medical examinations, debriefings, new identification documents, arrangements for transport home.
26:45The War Department issued a correction.
26:47Sergeant Joseph Barely was officially upgraded from killed in action to alive and returning.
26:53On April 21st, 1945, Barely landed in the United States.
26:58He had been gone for two years.
27:01He had been dead for 10 months.
27:03He was 21 years old, walked with a permanent limp, and carried shrapnel fragments in his body that would remain
27:10there until he died.
27:12Two weeks later, Germany surrendered.
27:15Barely celebrated Victory in Europe Day in Chicago, surrounded by strangers who had no idea what he had survived.
27:23The homecoming in Muskegon was quieter.
27:26His mother cried for three days.
27:28His father, the man who had stood in depression breadlines, who had buried one child and mourned another, said almost
27:36nothing.
27:36Some experiences exceeded the capacity of words.
27:40The following year, Barely married Joanne Halliwell.
27:44The ceremony took place at Holy Trinity Church in Muskegon, the same church that had hosted his funeral mass.
27:51The same priest, who had prayed for his immortal soul, now blessed his marriage.
27:56The congregation included neighbors who had attended both services.
28:01Barely never sought publicity.
28:02He returned to civilian life, took a job at the Brunswick Corporation, worked as a shipping supervisor for 28 years.
28:10He raised three children.
28:12He attended veterans' reunions.
28:14He rarely spoke about the war unless directly asked.
28:18The recognition came late.
28:20In 1994, the 50th anniversary of D-Day, President Bill Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin held a joint ceremony
28:29at the White House.
28:30They invited veterans from both nations to attend.
28:33Among them was a 70-year-old retired shipping supervisor from Michigan.
28:38Barely stood in the Rose Garden while two presidents pinned medals on his chest.
28:43American decorations for his service in Normandy.
28:46Soviet decorations for his service with the Red Army.
28:49He was the only man in history to receive combat honors from both nations for the same war.
28:55His son, John, watched from the audience.
28:5820 years later, that son would return to Moscow in a very different capacity.
29:05Joseph Barely died on December 12, 2004.
29:08He was 81 years old.
29:10He passed in his sleep during a visit to Toccoa, Georgia, the same town where he had trained as a
29:15paratrooper 62 years earlier.
29:17His body was returned to Washington and buried with full military honors in Section 1 of Arlington National Cemetery.
29:24The woman who had saved his life did not survive the war.
29:28Alexandra Samusenko was killed on March 3, 1945, less than a month after Barely left her battalion.
29:35A Soviet tank crushed her during a night movement near the village of Zulzefitz, 70 kilometers from Berlin.
29:42She was 23 years old.
29:44She never saw the victory she had fought for.
29:47Barely learned of her death years later.
29:49He spent decades trying to locate her grave, to honor the commander who had given him a second chance at
29:55war.
29:55He called her a symbol of Soviet courage, a woman who had lost everything and kept fighting until there was
30:02nothing left to give.
30:03The legacy spread slowly.
30:05In 2002, historian Thomas Taylor published a biography titled The Simple Sounds of Freedom.
30:11The book documented every detail of Barely's journey, from Muskegon to Normandy to the frozen plains of Poland.
30:19Veterans who had doubted the story found confirmation in military archives, Soviet records, and declassified documents.
30:26In 2005, the village of Saint-Côme-du-Mont unveiled the memorial plaque on the church where Barely had landed
30:33on D-Day.
30:34French officials, American veterans, and Barely's family gathered to honor the paratrooper who had crashed through their roof and changed
30:41history.
30:42A permanent monument was dedicated at the same site in 2014.
30:46The Russians remembered him, too.
30:48In 2010, Moscow's Strogonov Palace hosted an exhibition called A Hero of Two Nations.
30:55The displays included Barely's Soviet uniform, his military documents signed by Zhukov, photographs from his time with the tank battalion.
31:03The exhibition traveled to three other Russian cities before crossing the Atlantic to the National World War II Museum in
31:09New Orleans.
31:10But the most remarkable continuation of Joseph Barely's story came through his son.
31:15John Barely joined the United States Foreign Service after graduating from college.
31:19He specialized in Russian affairs, learned the language fluently, and rose through the diplomatic ranks over three decades.
31:27In 2008, President George W. Bush appointed John Barely as the United States Ambassador to Russia.
31:33The son of the only American to fight for the Soviet Red Army now represented his country in Moscow, 63
31:40years after his father had arrived at that same city wearing a Soviet uniform and carrying papers signed by Marshal
31:47Zhukov.
31:48Ambassador Barely served until 2012.
31:51He walked the same streets his father had traveled as a wounded soldier.
31:55He met with Russian veterans who remembered the Great Patriotic War.
31:58He honored the alliance that had defeated fascism, even as the relationship between the two nations grew complicated in new
32:05ways.
32:06Joseph Barely never called himself a hero.
32:09He said the real heroes were the men who never came home.
32:12The paratroopers who died in Normandy.
32:15The prisoners who starved in German camps.
32:17The Soviet soldiers who fell by the millions pushing west toward Berlin.
32:22He survived, he said, through luck and stubbornness and the kindness of strangers who had no reason to help him.
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32:45Stories about paratroopers who refuse to quit.
32:48Real people.
32:49Real heroism.
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33:18This man deserved to be remembered.
33:20And you are helping make that happen.
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