CHAPTER NINE
THE WAR HAD ALREADY BEEN A FEARFUL ORDEAL FOR JOE'S parents, William and Elizabeth. Son John was wounded on New Guinea, eventually to receive a medical discharge. Bill, in the air corps but on the ground in England, had unknowingly been Joe's cover for the paymaster jumps. The youngest boys, Robert and Richard, lived at home waiting to be caught up in the draft, which lowered the bottom of the age barrel to seventeen as four theaters of war—northern Europe, the Mediterranean, China-Burma-India, and the Pacific—demanded an ever-expanding pipeline to replace tens of thousands of Johns and Joes.
General Marshall made it his practice to submit regularly to President Roosevelt the number of Americans KIA in the previous twenty-four hours. One day that list included Marshall's stepson, killed in Italy. Before V-J Day fifteen million youths would find themselves in uniform; three hundred thousand would appear on Marshall's lists.
Celia, the remaining Beyrle daughter, married and had two children before Joe went off to war. Besides her, both his grandmothers were in Muskegon to help tend the home fires, where Dad was even more the central family figure. On the living room wall he displayed a world map pinioned with national flags to show fluctuations of the war. From newspapers and radio he became the authority and interpreter of all that happened overseas. As such he was also a buffer between alarming news and the women's worries.
Despite censorship and because of brother Bill, the family knew Joe was with the 101st and were sure he had taken part in the “mighty endeavor” of Overlord. Like everyone else, they had heard Roosevelt's D Day invocation with that phrase and like all of America had stood silent as bells tolled from every church. The Beyrles hurried to Saint Joseph's to offer prayers. It was so crowded they had to stand.
THEN BEGAN THE LONG wait of dread. Pre-D Day V-mail had been held up in case the invasion was significantly delayed, but in mid-June letters began trickling back to the States. In Muskegon, a town then of some thirty thousand, the arrival of V-mail was widely and quickly known. There was none from Joe.
The first communication about him was official, a telegram dated July 7, fully a month after D Day, from the War Department (today the Department of Defense). Mrs. Beyrle couldn't open it; she had to ask Richard.
“Joe's a prisoner of war, Mom.”
She sat down with a shudder, read the telegram several times herself before calling her husband at work. The parents reminded each other that they should be thankful and bless God. Then Mom made fitful calls to find out how food could be sent to Joe, whom she remembered as ever hungry. There was a War Department phone number for such requests, but of course they were futile. Only letters could be sent to Joe; and besides, in his case no POW address had yet been provided by the International Red Cross (IRC). That would come, she was assured, once Joe was delivered to a permanent prison camp, what the Germans called a stalag.
In September, by telegram, came a crushing correction: Tech-4 Joseph Robert Beyrle, Serial Number 16 085 985, previously reported captured on 10 June 1944, had instead on that date been killed in action. Mrs. Beyrle, whose health had weakened since Pearl Harbor, was bedridden for several days. The reason for the contradictory official reports was that Joe's identity had been stolen by the Germans.
Thanks to Captain Harwich's escape from the marshes, word reached the 101st of Joe's first capture. Paperwork on the status of casualties was not sorted out till the division returned to England in July, at which time Joe was reported captured on 10 June and his family so informed. Then-telegram from the War Department included the caveat that his POW status had not yet been confirmed by the IRC, that is, that the preoccupied Germans hadn't completed their paperwork either.
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:
We profoundly appreciate the greatness of your loss, for in a very real sense the loss suffered by any of us in this battle for our country is a loss shared by us all. When the medal, which you will receive shortly, reaches you, I want you to know that it goes with my sincerest sympathy and the hope that time and victory of our cause will finally lighten the burden of your grief.
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
… based on a report of death submitted from the theater of operations and, at that time, believed to be correct. In view of more recent reports showing that your son is a prisoner of war, I am happy to advise that award of the Purple Heart is erroneous.
I would appreciate your returning the decoration and certificate to this office for cancellation. Inclosed are government franks for your use in mailing them postage-free.
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.
Dear Mrs. Beyrle:
Reference is made to payment of the six months' death gratuity made to you in the amount of $861.60 on 12 October 1944 in the case of your son, Technician Fourth Class Joseph R. Beyrle.
Information received from the Adjutant General is to the effect that your aforementioned son is a prisoner of war, and that previous notification of his death was in error….
Therefore it is respectfully requested that you make refund to this office in the amount of $861.60, by personal check or money order drawn in favor of the Treasurer of the United States, using the enclosed envelope which requires no postage.
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.
No other regiment in Overlord had lost a larger percentage of officers than the 506th. As the bulk of Currahees dribbled back around the Fourth of July—more than three weeks after General Taylor had promised, before D Day, that they would be relieved—Sink was intent on reestablishing his chain of command. Regenerate the regiment, integrate our replacements, and revive Currahee standards, he directed. Eyewash and horseshit, this amounted to for the troopers, including battalion guard mounts.
There had not been such formality since Toccoa. Mounting the guard fell to Sergeant Engelbrecht of Third Battalion, to which Albers had been assigned. Engelbrecht ordered Ed to fall out in class-A uniform, and though only a private he was to be corporal of the guard. Ed went to his duffel bag, unopened since the Queen Elizabeth. The contents had been stirred, and his two dress shirts were missing. With trepidation he reported the loss to Engelbrecht, who swore like a trooper, a paratrooper. Gruffly he directed Ed toward the I Company supply room.
“Turn out in a nice pressed shirt, Albers.”
Luteran, the supply sergeant, was uneasy. The only source for such items of uniform was the duffel bags of Blues who had not made it back from Normandy. There were several hundred, stacked in bins marked KIA, MIA, POW. No one but duly designated officers was authorized to open these bags, which regulations required be sorted through for personal effects to be returned to next of kin.
“Make it snappy,” Luteran muttered, trying to remember which of the casualties was about Albers's size. He retrieved a bag, flung it on the counter for Ed to open. “This guy's shirt might be a little big,” said the supply sergeant, glancing at the door. “Try it.” At the top of the bag was a dress shirt neatly folded, if not pressed. Ed held it up by the sleeves to drape on his body. “Good enough,” he heard Luteran pronounce, but Ed's attention was on the name stenciled inside the collar.
“Did you know ‘Buy-early’ Sarge?” he asked with wide eyes.
“Sure did. Company radio operator. How did you know how to say his name right?”
“Where was he from?”
“Someplace in Michigan.”
* Tanin was killed two days after jumping into the Netherlands.