The Greatest One-Man Army Story Ever Recorded.
If you Google the most incredible story of all time, this narrative I’m about to share with you emerges all over the internet. 🌐 After going through it, I completely understand why. However, before we delve into it, this might be one of my last articles on Medium. 📝 From where I stand, it takes a considerable amount of time to conduct this research and write these stories, and the enthusiasm is dwindling.😰 If you’d like to support the account, kindly leave a comment, follow, and stay tuned to newsletters, your tip💸 is highly appreciated as it encourages me to write more. 🙏 Now, let’s dive into today’s story. 🚀
The United States formally entered World War II on December 8th, 1941, after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii at the time. Joseph Byerly was a senior at his high school in Muskegon, Michigan, and he had a scholarship to attend Notre Dame University the next year. But after his graduation in 1942, he decided he didn’t want to go to college so long as other kids his age were going off to fight the war, and so he enlisted in the army and immediately volunteered for one of the most dangerous units: the parachute infantry.
Joseph completed a brutal accelerated training regimen that included exhausting PT and blistering heat, extended forced marches, grueling full kit runs up mountains, as well as both American and British jump schools. By 1943, Joseph was fully trained and stationed in England and was eager to put his training to the test.
But the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France, also known as D-Day, was still a few months away. However, Joseph didn’t want to wait that long, so he volunteered for an incredibly dangerous mission that the OSS was recruiting paratroopers for. The OSS was the predecessor to the CIA. Volunteers would parachute in the middle of the night into Nazi-occupied France with a backpack full of gold. Once they hit the ground, they’d meet up with the French resistance and give the gold to them. The resistance would do their best to protect these volunteer paratroopers and hopefully give them a ride back out to England. But by no means was it a guarantee because many of these volunteers were killed in the process. This was some hardcore deep cover spy work that the OSS would tell their volunteers: If you get caught on this mission, you’re gonna get tortured, and you’re gonna get executed.
Joseph would successfully complete this insane mission and then he liked it so much he did it again. Shortly after his second successful OSS mission, word came down that D-Day was set to take place on June 6th. Joseph’s unit was told they were going to be parachuted into France the night before to destroy bridges, cut power supply lines, and generally soften up defenses before the main invasion happened just a couple of hours later at Utah Beach.
So in the dead of night on June 5th, Joseph and his unit were flying over France when they were struck by enemy fire, and so as their plane is literally falling to the ground, Joseph leaps out the door when he’s only 400 feet off the ground and he manages to survive the jump as the parachute inflated just in time. But he landed on top of a church where a Nazi sniper was up in the steeple taking shots at all of the other paratroopers, and when the sniper saw Joseph on the roof, he began taking shots at him, and Joseph managed to dodge the rounds before slipping off the roof and running out of sight.
Once on the ground, he slammed a mag into his M1 carbine and then began a one-man mission so incredible that there is a plaque inside of the church he landed on. That looks like this:
Alone with no idea where the rest of his unit was, Joseph took off running from the church and once again had to dodge more sniper fire. He eventually made it to the town’s power substation, which he blew up with thermite, cutting the power to the town. From there, he went building to building, killing every Nazi he came across, including an entire squad of Nazi infantry that he ambushed with grenades. At some point, Joseph made his way over to one of the bridges leading into the town that, if he blew up, would prevent Nazis from sending reinforcements to Utah Beach. However, as he crawled through one of the hedgerows, he fell headfirst into a Nazi machine gun nest. When he turned around, there were a bunch of machine guns pointed at his face, so he surrendered.
Joseph was marched deeper into France to a POW holding area, and as soon as he got there, explosions ripped out all around him. It wasn’t clear if it was German artillery or American aircraft, but whatever it was, it was killing both Germans and American POWs. Joseph took shrapnel to the leg, was blown into a ditch, and despite being in excruciating pain, he took this as an opportunity to escape. He got up and ran away for 12 hours, remaining uncaught behind enemy lines before he was ultimately caught again.
This time, they put Joseph in the back of a covered locked truck to keep him from escaping, and they decided to send him to Saint Lo and decide what to do with him there. On their transit to Saint Lo, an Allied aircraft strafed the vehicle that Joseph was in. Joseph survived the attack, leapt out of one of the holes in the side of the truck, and attempted to escape again but was caught. The Nazis finally got Joseph to Saint Lo, and as soon as they got there, the Americans launched an all-night bombing campaign on the city. Once again, Joseph narrowly survived.
A recurring theme of Joseph’s story is that he is repeatedly almost killed by his own teammates. For the next few days, Joseph was interrogated 20 to 24 hours a day, but he didn’t give them any information. He repeatedly called them sons of [ __ ] until they got so fed up with him that they beat him to a pulp. He was knocked unconscious and kept in the hospital for several days.
For the next three months, Joseph was starved, beaten, interrogated some more, and moved to multiple POW camps. He’d be forced to do backbreaking labor all day, surviving Allied bombing runs at night. He constantly weathered hunger, disease, and exhaustion. At one point, he was locked inside a boxcar with 50 other guys, barely able to move, and it was strafed by Allied planes. Joseph was one of the very few people to survive that.
In September 1944, Joseph was moved to a Russian POW camp in Poland that held about 12,000 Russian men and women POWs. As soon as he got there, he immediately began planning his escape. Two months later, on a freezing night in November, Joseph, along with three other American POWs, managed to cut the barbed wire and sneak out of the camp. They snuck into a railway station, hopped on a train car they believed was headed for Poland, but unfortunately, they got on the wrong train and ended up in Berlin, the capital of Nazi Germany.
One thing you don’t hear much about when it comes to World War II is that there was actually a large number of Germans that hated Hitler and totally disagreed with the Nazis. They organized a German underground resistance designed to help the Allies during the war. When Joseph and the other three American POWs arrived in Berlin, still wearing their POW uniforms, a member of the German resistance saw them and immediately brought them into hiding. However, after only a week, the infamous Nazi secret police, aka the Gestapo, discovered them and arrested them.
Over the next 10 days, Joseph and the other three American POWs experienced firsthand how awful the Gestapo really were. They were constantly interrogated while being beaten, kicked, walked on, strung up by their arms backward, hit with whips, clubs, and rifle butts until they drifted into unconsciousness. As soon as they started to come to, it would start all over again. After those 10 days, the Gestapo turned Joseph and the other three American POWs over to the German army, which put them in the brutal prison camp called Stalag Luft III.
Upon arrival, Joseph was immediately sentenced to 30 days inside a four by five-foot pine box that was too small to stand up or lay down in. Fortunately, he only had to endure seven days because a Red Cross operative from Geneva intervened on his behalf. It took months for Joseph to get his strength back after being inside this box. As soon as he did, he began plotting his next escape.
One night, Joseph, along with his three American POW buddies, managed to break through a prison wall and made a mad dash for freedom. Nazi prison guards saw them and opened fire. All three of Joseph’s friends were killed as they ran, but Joseph got away, only to hear the faint barking of the German shepherds the Nazis had sent to hunt him down. In the freezing cold of Poland in January, Joseph leapt headfirst into a partially frozen river and swam over two miles down it before getting out and running blindly into the woods. Somehow, miraculously, he managed to reach Soviet lines before he froze to death, and there he spoke with Battalion Commander Alexandra Samasenko, the only female tank commander in all of World War II. Even though Joseph spoke very little Russian, he convinced her to let him join her unit.
She gave him a gun and some ammunition and told him what their next objective was: to liberate the same POW camp he had just escaped from. Joseph fought alongside the Soviet Red Army across the Eastern Front for a couple of months, but when a German dive bomber blew up the tank he was riding on, he was evacuated to a Russian field hospital. There, he received a visit from Georgi Zhukov, the most important Soviet military commander in World War II, who was intrigued by the only non-Soviet in the hospital. He sat with Joseph, learned his story through an interpreter, and then provided Joseph with official paperwork that would allow him to rejoin American forces.
In February 1945, Joseph was sent to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. Unfortunately, when he finally met a friendly American face after nearly a year of fighting behind enemy lines, they didn’t believe his story. They told him that Joseph R. Byerly had been killed in action on June 10th, 1944, and that they had already had a funeral mass in his honor in Muskegon, and his obituary had already been printed in the paper. Despite Joseph painstakingly going through his story over and over again, the ambassador just could not believe what he was hearing. Worried that Joseph might actually be a well-trained German spy, the ambassador sent him to Odessa to have his credentials verified. However, Odessa had the same problem and couldn’t verify him, so they sent him to Egypt. Egypt faced the same problem and couldn’t verify his credentials, and so they sent him to Italy where they finally used fingerprints and confirmed that Joseph R. Byerly was, in fact, the person he claimed to be.
On April 11, 1945, Joseph returned home. Needless to say, his parents were very surprised to see him because they were convinced he had died ten months earlier. One year later, Joseph got married in the same church that held his funeral mass when everybody believed he was dead. Joseph was given the Purple Heart and then, in the 1990s, received additional presidential awards from U.S. President Bill Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin. Joseph was also given a custom-made AK-47 from the inventor of the AK-47.
Joseph died in 2004 at the age of 81, and his son went on to become the U.S. ambassador to Russia under George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
