Behind Hitler's Lines (19 page)

It remains unexplained why the 101st considered Joe to be a POW when he was last seen, by Harwick, loose in the marshes. The appropriate status in those circumstances would seem to be “missing in action” (MIA). Probably someone like Jack Brown, after he escaped from Starvation Hill, later confirmed that Joe was again a POW.

Months passed, the summer months of 1944 when Patton won his fame racing across France. In September, with the Western Front approaching Germany's frontier, the battlefields of Normandy were being cleared of their dead, interred in temporary cemeteries. One such body, shattered by heavy-caliber fire, wore an American uniform and Joe's dog tags. The 101st was about to jump into the Netherlands. In Normandy there was no one from the 506th to confirm or refute that the mangled corpse was Joe's.

In Muskegon three pennants, each with a blue star, hung proudly in the living room window for view from the street, designating how many Beyrle boys were in uniform. Their father was supervising twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week, at Continental Motors. On his way to work he went down to the draft board that had produced the pennants. He brought a blue-star pennant with him. Very quietly he asked to exchange it for one with a gold star. The draft board workers, all local people, surrounded him in the love of tears. That's how death notices circulated in Muskegon, how “Gold Star Mother” became part of America's World War II lexicon.

Nothing needed to be said, for the pennant said it all. The
war effort was consumingly intense but paused with each appearance of a gold star. A priest was at the Beyrles' door before the tragic symbol had hung for an hour. Every one of the sisters who had taught Joe came around to speak about him. The Muskegon Catholic community was ethnically divided, each with its own parish and school: Irish, Italian, French, and German, the last being the smallest. They united to console the family. The Beyrles spoke at length with clerics they had never met, but it was the teaching sisters who said the most and what was most remembered.

Neighbors offered words too, and merchants Joe had worked for briefly, nearly unknown by the family. They gave near-eulogies but were frank, as if by describing Joe in living terms they were keeping him alive. He could have been a B or even an A student but didn't apply himself so long as he could get by with C's. Yes, the parents nodded, that was their son. Though he had been voted Most Obvious Temper, he was well behaved in school, Sister Angelique, the mother superior, assured them—Joe took out his temper in athletics. Please tell me more, Mom asked each sister, until memories were exhausted like those of a long-ago movie. To continue talking about Joe kept him here, where he'd started, where he had rooted, where he would return at war's end, under America's flag.

The parents could delay but not prevent his inevitable slipping away, but not before Muskegon paid its tribute in an expression of unity and finality. The
Chronicle
requested a picture for the obituary. His parents could not bring themselves to reopen Joe's bedroom, the door to his truncated past. Robert and Richard were sent in instead to retrieve Joe's high school diploma for the funeral mass and the best picture of him they could find. It was Joe in army khakis and tie, featured in a double obituary next to Muskegon Marine Sergeant Emery Reagan, Jr., twenty-four years old, killed on one of the Mariana Islands. Reagan was survived by a son he had never seen. Both his and Joe's pictures were called Hollywood handsome.

Joe's funeral mass was on September 17,1944, exactly one
year after he'd arrived in England. Saint Joseph's Church overflowed. In the homily the priest spoke of how there are words like
orphan
and
widow
for the bereaved, but no name for the parent who has lost a child. It wasn't meant for children to die first, but in war they do, and that must be accepted. Each note of “Taps” seemed a tug to let go, acknowledge he was gone, but Mrs. Beyrle clung to Sister Angelique's scriptural reading at the mass: “… though he were dead, yet shall he live.”

THE PRAYERS HAD BEEN
for the repose of Joe's soul. That was premature, as if a reproach from God that the faithful were praying too small. On October 23 Mr. Beyrle was called to the phone at work. He could hardly hear over the roar of his assembly line. A Major Reidy identified himself; he was in some personnel office at the War Department. In bureaucratic language but with a tremor in his voice, Reidy advised that a message had been received from the International Red Cross that Joseph Robert Beyrle, Serial Number 16 085 985, was a prisoner of war held by the Germans.

Dad had to sit down, as much from anger as shock. No, he replied, that message had been sent before. The War Department had corrected it. Joe had been killed in the cause of the liberating invasion. The secretary of war and General Marshall had so written.

This was a further correction, Major Reidy assured him, because this latest message was from the IRC, who never confirmed anything unless it came from the captor's government.

The switchboard operator at Continental noticed that Mr. Beyrle was shaking when he put down the phone. He told her why. A replacement supervisor was pulled off the line. Word traveled fast along it. Those who couldn't pat his back pumped their fists and turned renewed to tasks. No, Continental's vice president ordered, don't call home, Bill,
go
home. Mrs. Beyrle's reaction can only be imagined because no one else was there when he opened the front door at such an unexpected hour.

Celia recalled how men did not express emotion as openly
then as they do now, so Dad must have hidden his tears as he delivered the miraculous news. Mom would never say what she was thinking during that period of terrible confusion from September through November 1944. What she did every day was pray that Joe would survive, or not suffer before he died. It seemed those kinds of prayers shortened her life, as if fulfilling a covenant that if God sent Joe back alive, He could have her at any time.

No one in the family remembered eating anything for the next twelve hours. When Joe had been reported KIA, friends and neighbors delivered meals to the door for days. Now, during a miracle, no one knew what to do. Nor was there an army protocol for miracles, for on November 16 the Beyrles received a letter from Henry Stimson, secretary of war, that Joe posthumously had been awarded the Purple Heart medal:

A card from General Marshall added, “Your son fought valiantly in a supreme hour of his country's need.”

On November 28 a brigadier general sent Mr. Beyrle the ultimate good-news/bad-news advisory. Joe's Purple Heart had been awarded

Shortly there was more, this time from the army's Office of Special Settlement Accounts, which for reasons defying research was in 1944 located at 27 Pine Street, New York City.

The Beyrles were never so happy writing a check as when they dutifully made refund to the secretary of the treasury, Mr. Morgenthau, better known to Joe, after the interrogators' indictment, as an archvillain in the global Jewish conspiracy to rule the world in league with the Bolsheviks.

THERE WAS A MUSKEGON
youngster named Ed Albers, a sophomore at Saint Jean's when Joe was a senior at Saint Joseph's. They were athletic rivals, especially in basketball, where people would remark on their similar physiques. As teenagers of the Catholic community they hung out in the same social group, often at the Hubb Recreation Center, an approved pool hall.

Ed's dad had the curious distinction of having been the first American POW to be captured by the Bolsheviks when a regiment of U.S. infantry was sent to Archangel as part of an interventionary force in the Russian civil war. He was treated pretty well, as his captors were eager to win over proletarians in America. The draft soon blew Ed into uniform. His dad
was stoic, only wishing at the bus station that he could go in Ed's stead. “Be a good soldier” were his parting words before another Greyhound took another Muskegon boy off to Fort Custer, which would later become a camp for German POWs.

From there Ed went to the San Diego County coast, where he was trained as a 40mm antiaircraft gunner bound for the Pacific. Week after week there was nothing to his duties except digging gun emplacements in ground so hard that shovels constantly struck sparks. One day Ed entered the company orderly room to ask for Merthiolate for blisters that had popped on his callused hands. On the bulletin board next to duty rosters he saw a newly tacked poster. It showed an exultant paratrooper—tommy gun cradled in one arm, the other gripping his parachute riser—descending from a Venetian blue sky. The poster was captioned
JUMP INTO THE FIGHT
?
Ed was more than ready to jump out of an antiaircraft pit. The army quickly obliged, and within days of volunteering for the Airborne he was on a train to Fort Benning, Georgia, for parachute training.

On June 1,1944, he embarked on the
Queen Elizabeth,
one among seventeen thousand troopers, quadruple the ship's peacetime capacity, so the swimming pools had been drained and filled with stacks of bunks, a desirable location for being airy. Ed was not so lucky; his assigned bunk was way down on R Deck, the most remote bowel of the ship, formerly quarters of busboys, the last living area below the waterline and the depth at which U-boat torpedoes were aimed. So Ed moved his sleeping bag to the promenade deck, even though it was a kaleidoscope of crap and poker games, but he had to leave his duffel bag on R Deck, where unbeknownst to him it was rifled.

In mid-Atlantic, weaving along the main deck, he heard “Hey, Albers!” It was a buddy from antiaircraft training on the other ocean.

“Tim! Whaddya doin' here?”

“Manning this forty-millimeter.”

“You still in the army?” Tim was in dungarees.

“Yeah, but I'm workin' for the navy. This is the ninth time I've crossed the pond.”

“Any action?”

“Nope. But I'm ready to shoot a U-boat if it surfaces!”

Outrunning any U-boat by a factor of three, the
Queen Elizabeth
zigged and zagged at thirty-five knots, speed rather than a convoy, her protection, and steamed into Liverpool on June 5, the originally scheduled D Day. Before she moored, a scow came alongside to take off priority cargo— less than a tenth of the passengers—fifteen hundred paratroopers. Arbitrarily, half were assigned to the 82nd (Ed's bunk mate became Major General Gavin's jeep driver), half to the 101st.

The 506th rookies pitched pup tents on a cow pasture near Ramsbury, where they were all temporarily assigned to Second Battalion under Lieutenant Tanin, the “rear detachment” commander.
^*
All other Currahees were fighting and dying in Normandy. Out on the pasture Lieutenant Tanin was like a personal trainer, a brutal one pushing the rookies to get in shape as never before. He formed them up and announced they were reinforcements rather than replacements; in other words, they would be going in shortly to tip the battle rather than replace casualties from it. For at that point in the second week of June there were only estimates of casualties as Screaming Eagles literally kept coming out of the woods after scattered drops. So as the war for Western civilization raged two hundred miles away, Ed and his cohort did calisthenics by day, pulled guard by night, and kept their powder very dry.

England bubbled with news and rumors as the Allied foothold strengthened and expanded during the ides of June. For the reinforcements it was a singular sensation to be part of a team winning world-class laurels but not to have met their teammates. That began to change as the wounded and escaped POWs like Brown and Harwick returned to England before the rest of the division. The reinforcements (a term soon to be dropped) felt like freshman pledges to a fraternity whose seniors suddenly appeared for the first time, then as
suddenly disappeared to carouse off campus. They looked at one another, the faces of veterans and those who had not yet seen the elephant, then quickly parted as the vets took London passes to forget, the rookies to wonder and aspire. David Webster, he who had pleaded that D Night never arrive, described them in reflection as half of a symbiosis: “And so we went forward together, one regiment, filled up with replacements, the dead as fine and strong a part of us as the living men, so fresh and new, who had come to take their place.”

In their introduction there was a provisional schism expressed in how the vets called themselves “originals,” those who had been Currahees since Toccoa. With some wariness they began training with the replacements, who by and large were physically heftier and showed more stamina, facts from which originals excused themselves by reason of lingering exhaustion from Normandy. The predominant attitude developed among originals was that these new guys hadn't shown them yet but looked like they could.