Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 107- Joseph Beyrle

Episode Date: June 8, 2020

Joseph Beyrle is the only known American Soldier to fight within the ranks of the Red Army during WWII. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Sources: https://www.rbth.com/history/330871-joseph-beyerle-american-paratrooper-ussr-wwii https://ss.sites.mtu.edu/mhugl/2017/12/08/joseph-beyrle-dual-soldier/ https://www.warhistoryonline.com/featured/incredible-story-joseph-beyrle-american-fight-u-s-russian-army-wwii.html https://www.mlive.com/news/muskegon/2010/02/local_hero_joe_beyrles_possess.html

Hello, everybody. Welcome to yet another episode of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe, and with me today is Kerry Shockey, America's favorite labor lawyer and I think official local podcast union conciliary. How you doing, man? Oh, you know, I mean, living the dream here in Boston. You know, the Massachusetts National Guard prevented me from getting fucking cheese slices yesterday. So, you know, I mean, everything's great and And I'm feeling really good about the future of everything. And I definitely don't have a very tall glass of alcohol next to me right now. I love that there's a whole bunch of like either roided out or overweight dudes named Sully stopping you from getting like craft singles.

Right. Yeah. yesterday i had like i couldn't go to the one target that's open after like eight o'clock that sells groceries in the in the city of boston in order to like go buy some cheese singles to put on my pizza i ran it all right first of all why are you putting cheese singles on your pizza man all right so so there's the thing there's a thing you got me fucked up right now so there's there's something called beach pizza and it's known to everyone who grew up on the North Shore and the Seacoast of Massachusetts. From Portsmouth

to Boston-ish. It's a square slice of pizza that has a sweet sauce and when you order it, you order it with extra cheese and that means that you put a single slice of provolone on it. Interesting.

And it is, like, it doesn't exist anywhere else. I don't know how it started, but there's two companies. There's, like, it's kind of funny because growing up, there's, like, two places that sell it. There's Christie's and there's Tripoli's. And they're both right next to each other, other like on the beach waterfront in Salisbury and everyone has very strong opinions it's like Coke and Pepsi everyone has very strong opinions about

which one is clearly superior even though they're both basically the same shit and they and because and there's like it's one of the two like kind of signature dishes of the North Shore and as a result it's one of the two like kind of um signature dishes of the north shore and as a result it's like a real like uh it's like a deep townie cut and they sell frozen ones

and i wanted and so i bought some and i wanted to make some last night for dinner and all i wanted was a fucking cheese slice and they wouldn't give it to me just a cheese slice and they wouldn't fucking give it to me we have something pretty uh we don't really use the word townie in detroit but like you know we have coney island hot dogs or it's called coney's yeah you'll have in the city themselves uh you know you have your shitty suburb white guy versions like in in like you know water for pontiac or whatever but in detroit you have like lafayette coney and like all the other ones and there's probably somebody else from detroit saying lafayette coney fucking sucks they're all the same yeah well didn't uh didn't anthony bourdain do like a an episode about detroit where he had one of those

yeah i think he went to lafayette too uh he also got uh some barbecue out of uh my favorite barbecue joint which is also somebody's house that they run an illegal restaurant out of. I was going to say, wasn't it just like a dude fucking grilling in his front yard? Yeah, and you can go inside and you can get fucking some amazing beans and greens and shit. It's so good.

Thankfully, Detroit Police Department has drug dealers to rob and stuff, so they don't really notice. Right. Yeah, I'm really glad they don't really notice. Right. Yeah, I'm really glad they don't bother with that shit. You taught me something new about Boston and Massachusetts, a place I have yet to be. So have you ever heard of Joseph Byerly?

No. So we've been doing something. Normally this show is about idiots, failures, blunders. But, you know, there's a small subsect of our show that is also talking about crazy ass stuff that nobody's ever heard of, but totally happened. And that shows a firely. He follows something of a trend that we've done. We've talked about that, like a slightly apocryphal story of the korean conscript who fight ended up fighting for the japanese the soviet and the nazis uh before surrendering uh we talked about chen kai shek's

adopted son who fought for the nazis in austria um i forgot about that one that was a good one yeah yeah uh that one's pretty interesting because he's not good at his job but he just kind of coasted along because he's chang Kai-shek's adopted son. And he also like totally murdered somebody. I think it was like a houseworker and the Chinese Nationalist Party in Taiwan is like, well, we can't throw you in jail because of who you are, but you're kicked out of the party. Like, yeah, that's that's the kind of ethics I come to expect from nationalists. come to expect from nationalists uh you know there's uh tony lori who ended up fighting for the fins the nazis and then dying in vietnam uh shout out to the vietcong for making that a possibility um you know it's and of course we can't forget about our dear dear friend who

shit posted his way to a syrian death camp um oh fuck. Right. You know, we like to take our time of the day to talk about people who might be really, really badass, but also it's just because their story does not happen anywhere else. And that's what today's episode is, because through all of World War II history,

probably, I'm going to pull this out of my ass, one of the most studied conflicts in human history, nobody has been able to find a single American soldier who fought a long Probably, I'm going to pull this out of my ass, say one of the most studied conflicts in human history. Nobody has been able to find a single American soldier who fought alongside shoulder to shoulder with the Soviet Red Army. That is with the exception of when Joseph Byerly. And how he got there, I will say, is quite uncommon. You know, I just want to back up for a second and say when you. So because I've been because I have literally nothing else to do along with the rest of America over the past couple of months, I've been rewatching King of the Hill.

And all I could think of was, World War II is, in my opinion, the most studied subject in the history of warfare. All I could think of was Peggy Hill. The day before Thanksgiving is, in my opinion, the most heavy travel day of the year. Yeah. Some people would probably disagree with me, uh, on World War II being the most studied because,

you know, there's people who've been studying Napoleon's war since Napoleon's war, since those happened and the French war and legions, since those happened, Marx wrote about the French, uh, the French revolution. Um, so like people have been studying every conflict in legion since those happened. Marx wrote about the French Revolution. So people have been studying every conflict of history

since they've happened. But I think it's just because the advent of modern technology where the shit just gets thrown in your face. Before, the History Channel was all about aliens and pawn shops that are also kind of named after sex jokes. It was all World War II stuff. Yeah, I miss those days you know like uh like hitler's secret machines or there was even uh did you ever watch uh

was it battlefield back in the day i don't think so oh those were like i want to say it was like on pbs and they would just do like a single battle for like i don't know like an hour or two and they have like all these kind of like at the time this was like mid 90s at the time all these like kind of vaguely like futuristic graphics where it would like low swoop in over like the city of stalingrad and at the time it was like real and you know like it would show like you know the the armies moving around the map and i was definitely spellbound at the age of like eight. Oh, that's totally why I ended up going like shows like that is why I ended up going to college for history.

But my personal favorite, because it's the lowest, the most low effort shit you've ever seen was, I think it was a history channel. I don't, I don't want to give credit to the discovery channel because this might be the history channel where they were going over like ancient Roman battles, but they used Rome Total

War to show them. Like, come on, man! Fuck yeah. Do that now, but with Warhammer Total War, and then the Roman Legions and their dragon allies! Like, come on, dude! It was like that

show, like Greatest Warrior, whatever the fuck it was. Yes. I fucking love that show. You know what? I want to be in the writer's room where they're like, guys, I got an idea. As you hit your fucking meth pipe, because you've clearly been writing for six days straight. How about the Taliban versus the IRA?

And somebody's like, do it. Do that shit. Go find extras. Oh, that was my favorite. but I just like that like they went from things that were like halfway reasonable like you know like oh dude like that one like even that was like all right I don't know whatever like to like you know

kind of you know you know terrorist you know like freedom fighter groups whatever the fuck you want to call them and how dare you put the terrorist label whatever the fuck you want to call them. How dare you put the terrorist label on the Taliban, you monster. But then towards the end, I think the last ever episode was like

zombies versus vampires. And it was like, alright, cool. So we're like three seasons in. Each season only has like eight episodes and you're fucking out of ideas. You've scraped the bottom of the barrel you've gone past like ninjas versus i don't know like the eta you have to go to fucking zombies versus vampires like what's their weapons they can bite and claw okay you're fired yeah like

and like well and then they would have like the the weird like dummy thing that would be you know like the the gel torso like oh like the old vampire thing that would be the gel torso. Like, oh, the old vampire could play with the fours of a thousand suns. And it was like, come on, guys. And there's always an expert somehow. So in your opinion, Mr. Vampire PhD, how hard can a zombie bite?

Well, about as hard as a person. Okay. hard can a zombie bite like uh well uh about as hard as a person okay it's just like some twilight ass shit they just have them like showing you know like oh and here we go to you know like uh i don't know whatever one of the fucking actors from twilight like so tell me uh in your professional opinion yeah it's uh the unfortunately the the vampire's night operations discipline is ruined when they sparkle so uh joseph byerly was born in in probably the worst time to be born as a white american and that is uh because his history reads like something of of something that they would write uh i don't know like a grimdark version of little house on the prairie he was born in 1923 in muskegon michigan the youngest of seven children i've never been

to muskegon haven't heard good things i'll just leave it at that he was born only a few years before the great depression and uh his early life quickly went down the hole uh at least as dark as it probably could be for a six-year-old white kid his dad lost his job at the local factory something of a trend for us michiganders yeah and that never happened again yeah thankfully they figured that whole thing out uh and then they were thrown out of their house because if there's only thing uh that's more eternal than people in Michigan losing their job at the factory it's that landlords are fucking bastards

accordingly so according to Joseph some of his earliest memories were standing in huge bread lines with his family and many times he walked away with nothing at all this is I assure you he was not raised in Venezuela but because this is i assure you he was not raised in venezuela uh but because this is the great

depression america things only get worse in order to take a job and send some money home most of the men in his family took jobs in the conservation corps um you know for people unaware of the conservation corps it was a job uh this program for to send people out to put them to work effectively it was one of many programs um in the new deal uh you know those things that they now call communism so and again there's like principally responsible if there's a if there's a national park that has you know like trails and oh yeah all sorts of other stuff near you particularly out west there's a fairly good chance that it came about because of the ccc oh i mean i i was i once worked for the bureau of land management as a wildland firefighter and

medic and one of our off-season jobs outside of like going to hospitals and you know keeping my training up was to re-clear these conservation core trails that have been there since the Great Depression so they did a pretty good job my whole job was pretty much just walking around and watch people like chainsaw some shit that had grown up in the way so like their work holds true but like

they were you know so this meant that he was pretty much left home alone with his sister who then died of scarlet fever Jesus fuck. Yeah, and because this is like the area like someone's getting struck down with some kind of horrible wasting disease like she's got like clopsy or something.

I don't fucking know. Just like all those sorts of things that just sound like something like you know, it was a terrible disease that killed thousands of people but also vaguely sounds like a noise like caption from a comic book. Clopsy! The doctors had to just quickly think of what it was called because somebody was vomiting blood out of their eyes.

Like, hmm, they got the flops. So this left his mom to be the main person in the house to take care of everybody who was still there but she was also working every single job she could so they didn't starve uh because you know you couldn't just like wire somebody money at the time it had to be mailed so you know they they had to fill in the gaps and also the conservation corps while a job program probably one of the most successful ones in American history. It still didn't pay a whole lot. So if you have to raise seven fucking kids,

you're going to need more money. So this pretty much meant that the kids all but raised themselves. Though they apparently did a pretty good job of it. A much better job than both of my parents at raising me. Would you say that they picked themselves up by their bootstraps?

Perhaps they had probably eaten their boots by now. They picked themselves up by their feet straps. Yeah, like Joseph did great in school, both in academics and sports. So much so that he was offered a full ride scholarship to Notre Dame to play basketball in 1942. Oh, wait, there were seven kids and he full-ride scholarship to Notre Dame to play basketball in 1942. Oh, wait, so there were seven kids and he got a free ride to Notre Dame? Huh. Weird. I wonder if there was some sort of connection there.

I do not think he was Catholic, actually. Really? Yeah. He doesn't seem to be a super religious person, nor was his family a very religious family. Nor is, from my understanding, Muskegon, Michigan a hotbed of religious fervor.

But Joseph turned it down. Because about six months before, the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. And Joseph was itching to finish high school so he could enlist in the army so he could go and fight them. And he did. He enlisted as soon as he could

and became a paratrooper. You know, back when paratroopers were still useful. Like tanks, right? Yes, pretty much. That's something like paratroopers are like, oh yeah, well you were a tanker, like you mean anything? I'm like, nah, we're fucking pointless too.

I mean, I think we can all agree that the only useful branch of the military was and continues to be the Coast Guard I am hard to disagree with you he completed training in Georgia in a camp that no longer exists I believe it's called Takua and unfortunately

for him he did not get to go and fight the Japanese he was sent to the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division famously known as the Choking Chickens Wait what? It's Screaming Eagles I deployed with the 82nd

Airborne no I was not airborne but I still get to make fun of the 101st Alright no that's fair I just didn't know if that was like specific to like the 506 or if it was just okay it makes more sense no it's a it's a really bad 101st uh joke there's a few other ones mostly they come down to the choking trick chicken or i think the the the the v the nva called them the screaming or the the yelling chickens or like the angry chickens. Cause they had never seen the Eagle before the, the laughing turkeys, the moaning vultures,

tempered pigeons. Is that what, what's that word that like people call each other and then get really upset about it on the, uh, Raka sign, right? Roka sand.

Oh, the, the, the Raka sands from their station in Korea, I think they are. I'm not really sure. Is that an airborne thing too? No, I think that's just another old army unit that's really steeped in its own bullshit.

I say a sublime who was once in 7th Cavalry. All right. I only ask because I've never really cared before, but had an idle thought in the moment. Because all army shit is fucking like, you know, it's all fucking Greek to me. It's like all the way that you guys have your various different patches that you wear.

Like, this is my combat patch, but this is my actual patch. But then I stay in the same unit, but then I'm under this command, so then I switch my patch. Yeah, it's real dumb. Also, army units are really proud of their history until you, like, flip back, like, huh, it says here you killed 50 Native Americans who went unarmed. Anyway, about

World War II. Listen, we're only counting history from, like, 1917-ish to about halfway through 1945. Well, what about this National Guard unit who shot strikers? Okay, so World War II.

Yeah, it's all real dumb. But he was really good at his job, and he was almost immediately promoted to sergeant and was really good with radios and demolition, which are two really fun activities that would not be really fun if you mix them up. I don't know. I mean, it could make a great podcast right there.

I mean, you'd make like one good episode because that's all you'd need. It's going to be the Behind the Bastards season finale. Much like guerrilla bomb makers, most podcasters are also missing fingers from fucking up one or two episodes. So Joseph was a really good soldier. He was a stud athlete, and that stood out pretty much immediately. He was faster, stronger, and bigger than everybody else. But he was also incredibly smart.

He excelled at everything he did. For instance, when there was no rifle range, they were training because this is World War II, and they're just popping training camps up as fast as they could to train soldiers. They had to march 30 miles to nearby Clemson University to use their rifle range which by the way is the most

Georgia thing I've ever heard before. The army base doesn't have a rifle range but the school does. Yeah that sounds about right. I mean you know for Georgia as a whole. But this didn't seem to tire him out at all and he shot expert every time he marched that distance. school does. Yeah, that sounds about right. I mean, you know, for Georgia as a whole. But this didn't seem to tire him out at all, and he shot expert every time he marched that distance.

See, you know, it's a little try-hard. I'm not gonna lie. It's a little bit too much. He's a show-off. I'd fucking hate him, for sure. I mean, excuse the pun, but in the legal world, we call him a gunner. He's trying a little bit too hard.

He's a little bit of a pick-me. I don't know how we feel about that. If it makes anybody who's listening feel any better, he doesn't seem to suck anybody else into his bullshit. He's a team player and he's really good at his job, but he doesn't try to make anybody else look bad.

I don't know. I still probably won't get along with them. Joseph admits being so good that during qualifications he'd routinely write down other soldiers names so that they would pass all right all right never mind he's there's hundreds of people yeah he because you know there's i've actually done something like this not that i was so good at something that i did a solid for somebody else but somebody else did that for me. I think I've told this story before where I got out of doing the rappel wall because I'm deathly afraid of heights.

I'm a nondescript tall white guy. I was even more nondescript when I was 17 because I had no tattoos. When a drill sergeant pointed at another tall, lanky white guy and they were like, Kasabian, did you do it he was like uh yeah and then I got it out of doing the rappel wall perfect so like cool

um though Joseph points out this was actually because the soldiers were afraid of hurting themselves uh and therefore missing out of the war so like he would do extra jumps for them off like the training tower uh so like because they didn't want to fall off like the training tower. So like, cause they didn't want to fall and like break their leg and then like miss out of like D day or whatever.

Yeah. So like Joseph would just like go do their jumps for them for a couple of dollars because paratroopers got paid a few more dollars a month and everybody else. I mean, it seems, it seems to be a strategy though that has like a, it's going to have an issue at some point,

you know, like, yeah, you know, like do all my training jumps before I go jump on Normandy. It seems, I don't know, a little sus. The good news is there's two ways that being a paratrooper ends. You either land or you die, so it's a self-correcting problem.

I mean, that's fair. You only fucked this up once. Hopefully. I mean that's fair you know you only fucked this up once hopefully you know the money was good especially for the day and especially as you know a sergeant who probably got paid like a hundred bucks a month but he also was never really afraid of anything at no point did he ever

attempt to do anything out of fear other than once he surrendered to save his own life because it wasn't because he was afraid it's because he didn't see a anything out of fear other than once he surrendered to save his own life because well he wasn't because he was afraid it's because he didn't see a way out of it so he graduated from training and was sent to england along with everybody else in order to prepare for the major operations that were you know upcoming through western europe joseph it turns out was pretty disappointed in the fact that he wasn't immediately going off to fight some nazis and said he settled in for nine more months of training.

After this training, he was so good at his job that he was thought of, if not the best paratrooper in the entire 101st Airborne, which I assume is like being the most rotten dumpster in Seattle. Sorry, as someone with an 82nd Airborne patch, I have to say that. I'll move on. I have no loyalty to any of these units at all. They're all garbage. Unfortunately for Joseph, he was about to learn what happens to someone in the US Army when they're

very, very reliably good at their job. That is, he started getting selected for special extra missions that he obviously could not turn down. Joseph and one other person were picked for being the best paratrooper in the entire division for a reason. See, jumping out of an airplane strapped down with hundreds of pounds of gear and landing safely enough so you don't badly maim yourself is probably kind of hard. And I have been told that it is. I do not plan on testing that myself. But apparently not hard enough for Joseph's commanders.

With D-Day coming up, the U.S. is leaning onto the French resistance to aid them in their coming invasion of their country. Helping them was pretty hard at the time, with the literal Gestapo attempting to hunt them down and kill them whenever they stuck their heads up. Wait, did they try to bait? I've heard of you debate them. their heads up wait did they did they try to bait i've heard if you debate them yeah it's actually when the higgins boats pulled up on d-day the the the ramps dropped and everybody in unison just said debate me you coward right just like you know kind of like uh the uh the rebel that yelled that the confederates would do like when they were charging the union you know just like just screaming as you like you know leave your foxhole, just debate me.

Yeah, and that's how we actually defeat the Nazis, is on the battlefields of intellect. Just calling down, just barrage after barrage of facts and logic. Yeah, that wasn't 88s. That was just a fucking logic bomb zooming past. They were just quoting lines of

Mein Kampf and we were firing back western philosophy just reading the fucking Federalist Papers just like over a loudspeaker just like just furiously spitting lines from the fucking constitution of the Nazis

and that is how ben shapiro got his combat patch right you know you know it was really unfortunate when his ss division surrendered uh now uh you know it was really hard to support the the resistance at the time because you couldn't just wire the money or carpet bomb thousands of guns over france though they did try that too could Could you tweet hashtag the resistance? Yeah, say what you will about that. I really support the French resistance until they started breaking windows.

Yeah, I mean, that's, you know, that's a little aggressive. Really, have they thought about the person that owns that building? It's a fucking shame. Yeah, I mean... Have they thought about just voting against the Third Reich? It's a fucking shame. Yeah, I mean... Have they thought about just voting against the Third Reich? Yeah, I mean, you know, like, you know,

and maybe they won't defeat them now, and maybe they won't defeat them in four years, but, you know, after, you know, maybe not for a thousand years, maybe not for 2,000 years, but 3,000 years from now, things might change, and I think they're going to look pretty foolish if they try to demand change quicker than that. Yeah, and the best way to defeat someone who wants to murder you is by

voting. Yeah. So, you know, the the army and, you know, everybody else in the allied forces had to find a pretty clever way of delivering this stuff. Since around October of 1943, when they had made plans for Operation Overlord, the U.S. Army Air Corps and their allied counterparts flew thousands of secret squirrel missions over occupied France. They dropped trainer teams that instructed the various groups of French freedom fighters on the finer aspects of guerrilla war. They brought them weapons, ammo, radios, but also gold. It might sound kind of ridiculous, but the resistance could use gold for various things like smuggling or bribes. Because, you know, it's kind of hard to

stockpile paper money during a war as everybody's economy is literally carpet bombed out of existence, but gold will hold its value for the most part. Wait, sorry. Maybe I've just had a little bit too much to drink. I missed the part where this was like a daytime ad on CNN. Yeah, it's actually the full

point of this episode is to get everybody to buy the lions led by donkeys gold right like food and food buckets yeah we're uh we're no longer sponsored but uh if you would like to buy gold medallions from the lions led by donkeys podcast i'll promise they are 0.0000001% gold. Now, in case you're wondering that the gold missions, probably the most ridiculous of those, that is the one that Joseph got picked for. The small problem with this,

there's no good way to drop gold from an airplane. It's World War II. You can't just drop it off at a plane and expect that they'll land in the right place. They couldn't even do that with their bombs. So they'd have to figure out a way to get this gold to the resistance unfortunately that's where joseph came in the plan that they came up with was exactly the kind of thing that you'd expect a room full of officers to come up with why don't they just

strap a bunch of gold to soldiers and chuck them out of a plane it's like a smart bomb full of gold jesus fuck it's like how uh was it was it the one good, like the older brother of JFK died because they were like, oh, we're going to create radio guided, you know, like plane bombs. And it was like, all right, so what we need you to do is we need you to, you know, we need you

to take off and fly it like halfway there and then jump out. We promise it'll be fine. And then the fucking thing blew up, and everyone thought that it was some sort of surprise. Thankfully, that did not portend to worse things for the Kennedy family. Right.

Have only successes from there on out. Yeah. So how much gold could you really slap on a guy? I mean, they couldn't have been that crazy. Uh, just kidding. 500 pounds. They run 500 pounds of gold.

Christ. No, I just, you know, like a casual quarter ton of gold on you. There's Larry, like, you know,

fucking have at it. Good luck, buddy. Uh, at that point, the parachutes, it slowed them down as much as they stopped them from plummeting to their deaths.

Like just short of. But in either case, Joseph landed just fine. His his. So did his partner, for that matter. So did they like try? So did they try this beforehand? Like, did they like did you have like a trial run of like, oh, you know, we're going to attach 500 pounds of lead to you and just kind of like see what the parachute does i think they were just operating off like well the manufacturer says this can hold this much weight so here you go good and you know during a total war where you

know your mom is sewing parachutes together right yeah like oh well really hope no one dropped the fucking stitch because because you're gonna drop a lot more. Yeah, you know that guy that was too dumb for conscription? He packed your shoot, so good luck. Jesus, fuck. The problem is, this is the French countryside, literally thousands of

miles away from Adelaide lines. And it isn't like they're gonna be able to send a helicopter or something to exfil him out of his top secret French resistance mission. Instead, he was smuggled from safe point to safe point across Europe until he finally made his way back to the UK. The entire process took around a week

and he almost died twice. Perfect. Fucking nailed it. And then because this is Joseph goddamn Byerly we're talking about, his commanders decided he did such a good job on his first mission that he should go on another one, and he did. I mean, so

was there anything left behind about him just having a death wish? Because this feels like a death wish sort of situation. You know, it says that he volunteered, but I don't think he had much of a choice. It was like, oh, they're doing this again. Okay.

But also, he just really seems like have you ever met anybody that definitely he's like they're incredibly smart but they just don't fear anything that that's what i think of him because he's clearly not surviving these situations through sheer dumb luck he's really really good at what he does but like even the smallest lizard part of your brain is like would scream at you not to do this well i'm just like thinking of like all the other times i've ever read anything about the french resistance and it's you know like oh you know they trained for three years and then they parachuted like directly into a german foxhole and were immediately like tortured by the ss until they were killed you know what i mean like i just like i I feel like there's gotta be like some element of dumb luck involved

because I don't know. I mean, like as good as you are, like there's just gotta be, there's something there. I think that a lot of the dumb luck comes like when D-Day comes up with like, I happen to not be one of the people that,

that dropped into a tree and got machine gunned by a passing fucking German patrol. That part, I will say he kind of had that luck, but we'll get there. So he went through that entire process all over again and once again got smuggled over to a friendly airstrip and in the course of the week he made

his way back to the UK. These missions end up being something of a cornerstone of the future successful invasion of Western Europe. But almost single-handedly bankrolling the entire French resistance was not good enough for him. After surviving the next mission, he, like many other paratroopers, were packed into

planes and sent off into the skies above France for their part in Operation Overlord. Being a demolition expert, Joseph's mission was to go forth and blow shit up. Unfortunately, Joseph was met with the realities of the airborne landings on D-Day, probably one of, if not the most successful clusterfuck

in US military history. In the decades since, many people have attributed the absolute mess that had become the airborne landings in France to several different things. I'm not going to try to re-litigate that, but as far as the American landings go, it's almost entirely due to

aircraft inexperience. The aircrew inexperience. But as far as the American landings go, it's almost entirely due to aircraft and experience. The air crew and experience. Maps were bad and communication was nearly impossible due to, well, World War II communication systems. But also a strict code of radio silence during the mission. But it all really boiled down to them cutting corners in the crush and rush of war. A large percentage of American pilots had their training cut short, and in many cases had simply never flown at night before that. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Stop. Stop. What? Yeah, a lot of the pilots had never flown at night. And also, since this is the U.S. Army Air Corps, it's not the Air Force quite yet, and they're doing bomber missions, right? Those missions have the best pilots on them the the best pilots are bombers they're they're fighters

yeah yeah so this is all like the guys who graduated like got a c in the class like end up as the transport pilots yeah the transport pilots were the bottom of the barrel uh and many of them had their train their their shitty training cut short and some of them had never flown at night which if anybody is unaware the dj landings were at night uh because they're the the night before the the beach landing what also i feel like in general like even to get your private pilot's license right now like i i don't have fucking have one but it was actually a girl i went to high school with who like actually had like her like light plane license i'm pretty sure you have to like fly at night that's like generally just like a thing that you do you know the the the pilot

training that most pilots got um through most of aviation history in the military was largely dog shit and cut short uh because for a really long time even though these guys are pilots which we all now consider you know well he knows how to, well, he knows how to fly a helicopter. He knows how to fly a jet. He's probably smart, right? You know, he has an most of the time they have, you know, aviation or engineering degrees. Back then, they were just people that like, you know, they didn't come from a proud history of pilots because planes had been around for like 20 years or whatever you know that they're at this point they're just throwing

enough shit to the wall it sees what sticks and especially when you need thousands of pilots really really fast like here's a plane well i guess actually thinking about like so if the top like if the a students were the fighter pilots and the B students were the bomber pilots and the C students were the transport pilots, the D students were probably the glider pilots. Which is a humbling thought.

It was actually the glider pilots were most of them came from the same group as airborne airborne people but they weren't technically considered airborne like have you ever seen we were soldiers

uh yeah fucking years ago so the sergeant major Plumlee in that was actually had no combat landings ever as a paratrooper he was a glider pilot which arguably is more insane so yeah it's like a controlled crash you know you're just kind of like yeah you know you're like well you know hopefully you don't hit too

many trees on the way down and two there's two different models uh of gliders from my understanding that landed on d-day and one of them was suicidally incompetently built um oh yeah it wasn't one like of them crashed wasn't one of them just like theally incompetently built um oh yeah it wasn't one of them crashed wasn't one of them just like the weight distribution was just like totally the fuck off i think so i don't want to say for sure because somebody who went to like did their phd and glider operations he'd be like actually and yet i didn't study this shit so like from statistically one one of the models was cartoonishly bad, like 50% losses or higher.

So I'm standing here right now that the reason why that was was because one of the weight distributions was bad. And if you wrote your PhD on the subject, I want you to slowly flame my Twitter account over the course of the next two decades to show me that I was wrong. Yeah, they probably will. They probably will, but it'll be funny. Yeah, absolutely.

And you know, like one of the, a very, very, very good historian, Max Hastings wrote extensively on this. Yeah. He said that the pilots were just absolutely the biggest liability in the entire allied army. Pilots got lost. They simply read their altimeters incorrectly

and otherwise simply botched what we'd consider very simple pilot skills uh so yeah not good um i refuse to accept that because i was told that this was the greatest generation and there are uh a lot of boomers lately who've been telling me that because their great granddaddy fought in world war ii um that uh you know we need to respect all the troops forever. I'm just going to need you to take that back. I feel a little bit for him as somebody who loves studying early tanks that nobody knew what they were

doing and the officers went to cavalry school to ride horses and shit. Weird, the tank broke down we don't know how to make this devil explosion engine work we should probably just keep breathing the co that the co2 that comes directly out of the engine into the crew compartment and now i'm so sleepy i mean it's like the same thing like uh if you look at a lot of places where um coast guard stations used to be they used to be at different places and harbors

because you'd actually have to row your fucking happy ass out into the surf in order to like you know go pick up people off of like the boats that were breaking up on the shoals offshore and like and so that like once like the engine came around i was like oh cool we don't need to like be like right on the edge of the fucking harbor anymore because we don't need to like you know be able to actually like swim out swim the fuck out there we could just start an engine. Yeah, one of the biggest hamstrings of militaries throughout time or military adjacent organizations

as the Coast Guard is, I guess, technically now is tradition is stupid. But caught up in all of this was our boy Joseph. He was packed into a C-47 with the rest of his unit and began to take fire. The pilot quickly got lost and many of the planes around him were shot out of the sky. He noted when they began taking fire, from his estimation, they were about 700 feet up,

which is pretty goddamn close to the ground. But Joseph realized that this whole plane in the middle of a flak storm thing was not going to get any better for him. So he waited as long as he could, but seeing that the plane was now only about 390 feet above the ground, he knew he needed to jump or he was never gonna he just simply wasn't gonna be able to. He was gonna die. So he jumped, and he came down

like a goddamn meteor, slamming into the roof of a nearby church. That's fine. Well, he was unhurt, which is shocking. But unfortunately for him, he was also,urt which is shocking but unfortunately for him he was also like he landed completely by himself he does not know if anybody from his plane survived

and he landed by himself on top of a church right next to like the steeple of the church which was full of Germans that were manning a machine gun that was firing into the paratroopers. And they then began shooting at him.

That's fine. He turned and ran across the roof, only drawing more fire. And while he thought that he should climb the steeple and attempt to assault them, he decided that he should just run instead. So it's a pretty large church, and the only way to get off it is just slide down the roof

and fall to the ground again, which, again, he was unhurt. The guy's fucking indestructible. He grabbed all of his gear, which certainly weighed more than him, and sprinted off into the darkness and hid in a cemetery until the Germans stopped shooting at him and left him alone. Perfect. I'm assuming they thought he died. But just because Joseph was alone did not mean he was going to forget that he was given a mission as a demolitions guy it was his job to blow up some bridges that led towards the omaha beach area to ensure the germans can roll some tanks

as in as a counter-offensive once the beach landings had begun there was however a slight problem because of misdrops like many paropers, he had no fucking idea where he was or how far he was from his area. And because he wasn't, like, a stick commander, he didn't have a map. Knowing that he wasn't going to get his bearing anytime soon, he decided to start freelancing. He saw a nearby power station,

thinking rightfully that German troops in the area were probably using that power station to power searchlights and communications equipment in the area. So he decided that that power station thinking rightfully that German troops in the area were probably using that power station to power searchlights and communications equipment in the area. So he decided that that power station had to go. He ran over there unopposed because the Germans probably would not suspect a single guy running around with a backpack full of bombs. So he just started blowing up random chunks of the French countryside as he

went. And it worked. He blew up the power station completely French countryside as he went. Uh, and it worked. He blew up the power station completely unopposed. Nobody ever took a shot at him. Uh, he had no idea where he was, uh, or where he was going. And he only found out the name of the town that he had landed in after the war was over. Perfect. Uh, figuring out that he, that so far this had worked so well, he should just keep doing it.

And he began looking around for more targets to blow up. Joseph also kind of thought that he shouldn't try to sneak around for fear that he would move too slow because he, by himself, he couldn't fight off anybody if he got ambushed. He only had his rifle with limited ammunition and some

explosives. So he didn't want to get bogged down in a firefight that other groups of paratroopers would be able to fight through like other paratroopers had entire offensives and took towns on their own uh he he he was literally by himself and that was he couldn't do it so he just started running just sprinting through thick hedgerows of the normandy countryside looking for shit to blow up you know just living his best life. I mean, frankly, the last tour that I took through France is basically the same thing.

I mean, I'm also pretty sure that this was essentially probably the training of a certain French foreign legionnaire who shall remain nameless. He's guest on the show. This is going really well and he did blow up

a few other things but then he burst through a hedgerow one too many and literally tripped into a Nazi machine gun nest. They had him dead to rights and he kind of knew

he was fucked. He may have enjoyed blowing up Nazis but he was smart enough to know that he was not getting out of the situation alive. So after a few seconds

of thinking about how he was totally going to suicide bomb them or karate knife fight, parafu these guys, he just surrendered instead. Um, thankfully for Joseph, they ended up,

uh, he ended up serving to members of the Wehrmacht rather than the SS who had a tendency to execute paratroopers on D-Day. Uh, and they actually took him to a, uh, uh, a prisoner center,

like a, uh, a POW collection area. Freedom center. And these guys... People's Freedom Center for the Reich. Right. And actually according to Joseph, the soldiers were pretty cool

in that they just kind of took his stuff and didn't rough him up in any way. They just let him back to the prisoner holding area. So what I'm hearing here is that they treated him better than most riot police, for instance, might treat a protester. Absolutely. And much like that, they were also Nazis. So, like...

So, I mean, you know, just like same, same. You know, I mean... Yeah. He had more rights, which is legitimately true. he had more rights, which is legitimately true. And the prisoner holding area came under artillery bombardment because the Allied forces were just kind of throwing shit to the wind. They didn't know where that's where the holding area was. And Joseph used that as a cover to try to escape,

but he didn't get very far. That will become one of many escape attempts that he will attempt throughout his time in world war two. Uh, but once he started, uh, being interrogated and his dog tags were taken during interrogation, uh,

he called his, uh, interrogator. And this is his, his words, quote, a cock sucking son of a bitch. All right.

Uh, the, the, the interrogator then ordered a soldier to beat the hell out of him uh and he woke up several days later with what he called a noticeable dent in his skull uh something that remained with him until death uh because tbis don't go away uh i don't know how big this was but according to his daughter uh uh he never talked about the war but she said that he that she could put an entire finger like uh lengthwise in the dent and it would cover it so he put he

suffered a pretty serious skull fracture and received no medical treatment whatsoever so well joe as a uh as a um as a recipient of a significant amount of head trauma, how's that going to work out for somebody? I will say his is the best case scenario. So about the dog tags, that was pretty interesting. There's conflicting stories about why they took his dog tags, and that is not normally a procedure for processing POWs. Joseph didn't know what they intended in using them for, but he would eventually.

The Germans were attempting to use captured American uniforms and equipment to try to blend into American lines and cause chaos. They did this immediately following D-Day and again, more successfully during the Battle of the Bulge a few years later. However, whoever was carrying Joseph's

dog tags did not get far. They got shot and left dead in the field. Eventually, graves registration troopers came around, saw the body, saw a dead guy in an American uniform wearing Joseph Byerly's dog tags, and just kind of took it at face value. So the dead German was buried in France under Joseph's name, and a few months later in September, his family received the news that their son was dead. But Joseph was not dead.

The same day that Joseph's family held a funeral for him in Muskegon, he was being processed as a German POW into Stalag Luft 3 prison camp near Poland. In fairness, being alive at the German Luft 3

was probably better than either being alive or dead know the german you know luft 3 was probably better than you know either being alive or dead in muskegon i mean it's kind of kind of push if we're honest yeah this podcast is a hard anti-muskegon stance uh all six people who live there will be deeply unhappy we're gonna lose the entire muskegon audience i know watch like 80 of my patrons uh are all live in muskegon they were like gonna have like a joke of savian like fucking uh they gave you the key to the goddamn city burn me in effigy now now joseph staying in the camp was not good he was what the germans would call a hard prisoner to keep and his punishment was being beaten and tortured nearly every day he never

listened to the guards and constantly mouthed off he didn't work and was constantly caught trying to escape in one situation he got shot in the shoulder by a tower guard while attempting to help another pow steal potatoes from a farmer's nearby farm uh due to the distance from the shot uh the tower guard could not pick out who exactly he shot, so he disappeared into the crowd like, I don't know what he looked like. The rest of the prisoners hit him and tended to his gunshot wound on their own with no medical equipment.

Cool. Joseph's a hard motherfucker. I mean, that is metal as hell, right? Like, don't worry, we got you. Bite on the stick. We're gonna burn this shit closed with the stinger that we made right like just once again like going back to like i don't know some fucking civil war shit like they're like oh no it's fine like yeah just a bite on the stick and like i don't know we'll bleed you with leeches i guess i don't know

something listen sergeant byerly your humors are all off. We're going to have this guy adjust your neck. It's going to be great when society collapses and we go back to that, except it's just vibes. Like, I don't know, your vibes are off. We're probably going to have to bleed you a little. Just give us your wrist.

Marianne Williamson energy. You're going to line this energy crystal up with your chakras. I'm missing my legs. Shut up. Just shoving just crystals into the fucking wound. Joseph was doing what every soldier thinks they would do if they were captured, but almost nobody ever does. That is like whenever his guards told him anything, he learned German, like words in German, just so he could swear at his guards told him anything he would he learned german like words in german just so he could swear at his guards which is like a level of spite i respect deeply uh and he would only like he would

either swear at them or just tell him his name rank and serial number and he refused to work which like most of what they were doing is like working on farms and stuff um but everybody else normally just kind of goes at that to make their lives easier because they see people like joseph get their fucking ass kicked and shot constantly uh eventually joseph did break out though he was joined by his friends brewer and quinn who would think like you think this is some like great escape type shit but it wasn't the case according to joseph all he did to break out was bribe a camp go to three packs of cigarettes man that would have made such a like you know less impressive movie than fucking steve mcqueen jumping over a fence with a motorcycle yeah and also like it's it's

impressive to think about this much like american pow camps these are all like german soldiers they're not i don't know like they're not just like a paramilitary. Like they're just supposed to be professional. So they're like three cigarettes. Good enough for me. I mean, based on everything that you've ever said in any of your episodes, that kind of makes sense. It does. And I guess people, there's a lot of value in lucky strikes or something.

I don't know. They just walked away from their post and let him cut a hole in the fence. And then he ran for it. Now, while the Germans, for obvious reasons, much like us, didn't want their prisoners to discover the location of their camp within Germany. But the prisoners all did anyway, through intel and bribes, through camp guards like I just talked about. But they learned that they were actually damn near Poland rather than in the middle of Germany. So they knew, well, we can't run west. We'd be running across the entire length of Germany.

We have to run east and try to meet the Soviets. So they made plans to jump on a train and make for the Soviet advance, which was getting closer and closer by the day. As a group of escaped POWs, they't just like go to a train station right um they had to pick a line uh by direction of travel which you think would be relatively easy but they fucked that up uh the train that they jumped on was actually going towards berlin not poland uh so when they ended up in an empty like train, they got out of the train, immediately realized that they screwed up and ran into a civilian who's like, yeah, yeah, I'll take care of you. And then they immediately called the Gestapo on them. It's not like a fucking Indiana Jones trope.

Probably. I feel like that's like the one with Sean Connery, where it's like, oh, where are we going? It's like, we're not going away from Berlin. We're going towards it. I'm not steeped in Indiana Jones lore as I should be other than the sword fight. I mean, and you're not even an officer, so there's no reason you should even be steeped in the sword fight. Yeah, yeah. so there's no reason you should even be steeped in this sword fight.

Yeah, yeah. But for obvious reasons, the Gestapo did not think this group of POWs was POWs. Why the fuck would they have ended up in the middle of Berlin? They thought they were spies. Because what kind of dumbass POW stumbles their way into literally the heart of Nazism?

The Gestapo did Gestapo things for them for days and days at a time before convincing them, uh, that these guys were in fact spies, even though by Joseph admit Joseph's admission, he never said anything cause he didn't know anything. Uh, and he, by the end, he's like, I really wish they just would have killed me cause they fucked him up pretty bad. Uh, you know, Gestapo stuff after days of being tortured, the Gestapo decided they were going to shoot them.

And that is when they are rescued by the most law and order ass way in human history something that I'm sure you will appreciate officers from the Wehrmacht confronted the Gestapo and said that since they were POWs the Gestapo had no jurisdiction to execute them

and then they were just handed back to the Wehrmacht oh it makes me think of watching fucking Downfall. But isn't that like the most German thing ever? Like, ah, you got me. You're technically correct. The best kind of correct. Yeah, I mean, one of my best friends lives in,

like, you know, my sister whose wedding I went to last year. She's actually a law professor in Augsburg, Germany, like deep in the South, kind of near Switzerland. And everything that she tells me about from Germany exactly fits with that conception of the way the German society functions. I mean, I lived in Germany for a very small amount of time when I was 17 and in the army.

So I don't get to enjoy Germany. But it says something of like how deeply bureaucratic the evil like you know the banality of evil or whatever that's like you've actually like every gestapo officer there has definitely killed at least 50 people but oh nope can't kill this one they've got paperwork move along now what was it did you watch uh was it the captain or whatever the fuck it is yet i have not it's the one about like the the german army deserter who um like starts uh pretending to be like an ss captain like he like finds like a dead officer and starts wearing the uniform and like ends up like you know just like

becoming like ending up in control of like a fucking like ss death camp essentially just because he like in the latter days of the war just because everything is so fluid and no one knows who anyone else is and like and part of the whole trope of that movie is essentially just that like you know so much of that society was just based on certain social cues and like deference to authority and like that whole thing and so as a result like you know if he just comes in and blusters a little bit there's no one who's actually going to question the fact that he's you know the person in charge you know that uh it reminds me of our british free corps episode where a guy walked up it's like yep i'm a field marshal and the nazis like

yeah all right uh but like also imagine like stealing valor to try to get like a discount on a car or something and you end up like oh you're a captain come on over we have a job for you and you you steal valor accidentally into becoming a concentration camp commander yeah i mean essentially that's like what the whole thing is he does it like just so he doesn't get shot and so he can get some extra rations and then just ends up you know like being in charge of like where you're gonna like group massacre and bury prisoners you know normally i don't have a problem with stealing valor i'm willing to make an exception for this guy this guy sucks uh but like you know when you escape for a pow camp you you there's bad things

waiting for you when you get recaptured uh and and the pows were handed back to the wehrmacht and they're thrown in solitary confinement and routinely tortured. But as soon as they could, they started planning another escape, and they got the chance on another technicality. The Red Cross showed up to do an inspection on the POW camp, and one of the things they couldn't do was have POWs in solitary confinement. So they had to immediately release them as a pr move so the red cross wouldn't notice uh but they use that to pretty much escape immediately perfect in january of 1945 the same three people paid some of their fellow prisoners to stage a fight and then use the confusion to hide inside some empty barrels

that are due to be transported off of the camp because this is some solid snake shit. As they're being transported out, the wagon that they were on that had the barrels on it hit a rut in the road and overturned, spilling them out into the middle of the street in broad daylight. Once they fell out of their barrels like a cartoon, they were directly within gun sights of the tower guards who immediately opened fire on them, killing Brewer and Quinn. Joseph took off running into the woods. He jumped into an icy stream and waded upriver, hoping to throw the dogs off that he knew the Germans would eventually use to track them. After a few days,

he realized that he was pretty much home free and once again began heading east. After freezing his ass off for a night, he decided that he would sleep off the cold night in a loft of a nearby barn. As he settled in, armed men who were clearly not German approached the farm. He thought they might be Russian soldiers, like the scouting party of the coming advance. And he was about to come down and be like, hey, I found you. But then he watched them murder the farmers and stealing everything in sight.

It turns out they were bandits passing themselves off as partisans. Whoops. Good. but then he watched them murder the farmers and stealing everything in sight. It turns out they were bandits passing themselves off as partisans. Whoops. Good. Which is super common in the Eastern Front. Yeah. The line between gang of roving like rapists and murderers and partisans

blurred more often than not. But he stayed up in the loft. Probably a solid choice there. And the next day, he started hearing tanks approach the farm. So he did the first thing that came to mind when he saw the tanks. He simply walked down there and flagged them down.

He didn't exactly know any Russian other than two words. So he held up two packs of Lucky Strikes and approached the first tank using the only two words that he knew. He shouted, American and Comrade. Somehow this totally worked. I actually do the same

thing every time I see the anti-fast super soldiers approach my house. Yeah, yeah. I jump out of my window with Lucky Strikes and, I don't know, a copy of the Communist Manifesto. Decluttered works of uh uh luxembourg yeah somehow this totally worked and nobody shot the guy who seemingly appeared out of

nowhere and didn't speak their language uh a very un-soviet soldier thing to do the soviets did have somebody in their column who spoke english and brought him forward to translate for him joseph quickly explained to him that he was an escaped POW and that, in his words, quote, I want to go with you and defeat Hitler. Alright. The first Soviet tank commander thought this is just about the funniest thing he had ever

heard, but told him no. But he would bring him back to the rear area. But word of the random American that they found popped up that quickly spread throughout the tank column. Before long of the random American that they found popped up that quickly spread throughout the tank column before long, the commander came to see what was going on. That's when Joseph met Guards Captain Alexandria Samusenko, the only female tank commander in the entire first Guards tank army. She's also commonly known as the first ever woman of any nation's armor branch to become

an officer. And I couldn't find anything to disprove that. Samusankha herself had one hell of a path leading her to that moment. She enlisted in the Red Army as a private in infantry and fought her way through the insanity of the Winter War on foot. She survived that and requested... Yeah, she survived that and transferred to

armor where she earned herself a commission as World War II started. There's also a... I don't want to say it's not true but it seems incredibly unlikely a story that she fought in the spanish civil war uh on the sides of the republicans seems incredibly unlikely because she would have been about 13 uh 13 or 14 though she did enlist in the red army at 15 so like it's possible all right i'll back it uh but someone did ask her about like barcelona and she said she'd never been there so it seems unlikely um as the nazis steamrolled into the ussr samu senko's native belarus was one of the most ravaged areas

in the entire in the entire part of that insanely violent front of an insanely violent war. In short order, she lost her husband and entire family to the Nazis. When she jumped that hurdle, she survived the battle of Kursk, the largest tank battle in human history, and almost certainly the largest that will ever happen. During that battle and only that battle, she became a tank ace and destroying three Tiger I tanks without her tank being blown up from underneath of her,

which is incredibly uncommon. For her heroic, she was awarded the Order of the Red Star and promoted. And that's how she ended up where she is now. So they both should have died about 16 times by now. Joseph, it turned out, pled his case to the right person. He again

told her that all he wanted to do was join them on their march towards Berlin. Like, I just want to do hood rat stuff with you guys. She shrugged and was like, yep, come aboard my tank. So that tank happened to be a Lenz-Lise American-made Sherman tank. So there he was, an American

skank from a Nazi POW camp, aboard a Soviet woman's American-made tank in Poland. Life comes at you fast. Perfect. Just absolutely, like, fucking top-notch. Yeah, he jumped aboard her Sherman and quickly they joined forces to absolutely wreck Nazi shit across Poland.

Before long, he also probably had... I don't know how this hasn't been turned into a movie, and if it has, I haven't found it, but Joseph lived every POWs dream that he, along with his new Soviet friends stormed the gates of Stalag Luft three and liberate his own former POW camp. I mean, I feel like it's one of those things where probably like through the cold

war and even to now, I mean, the Soviets don't want to do it because it features an American. The Americans don't want to do it because it features a Soviet. Well, I think one of those things is true because the Soviets definitely loved Joseph Byerly, but we'll get to that point.

Using his skills with explosives, he quickly made friends by breaking into the camp's vault and robbing it blind with them. Hell yeah. I mean, nothing brings communism and capitalism together like looting from fascists. I mean, I feel like that was almost the... What's that fucking movie? Kelly's Heroes.

It was almost the moral of Kelly's Heroes. Yeah. He also quickly joined them in a time-honored tradition of executing camp guards as they attempted to flee into the woods. My man. You know he knew those guys personally guys personally like what's up peter just shooting him in the back you motherfucker deny me my fucking bread ration now you motherfucker yeah yeah i was really wanting this part to be like where joseph and alexander just fall in love in the weirdest tank-based romance known to man. But that was not to be, unfortunately.

Instead, Joseph was badly wounded in a German dive bomber attack and he was evacuated. The next time he woke up, he was in a Soviet field hospital somewhere in Poland. Also, small side note here, he was awarded the Liberation of Warsaw Medal by the Soviet Union.

The less said about the Soviet Liberation of Warsaw, the better uh we're just gonna move right past that that's an episode unto itself yeah we're just uh just tankies you're free to get mad about it you're gonna eventually get mad about it but you know not not at the moment yeah it turns out they're asking for it i'm just kidding don. Don't isolate that. And canceled. Well, and so it was nice to be with you on the last episode of Lions Led by Donkeys. The donkey to tanky pipeline. So as if his last couple of weeks, he'd been at that tank column for several weeks to maybe a couple of months.

It's not entirely clear. But if that wasn't weird enough, he woke up the same day legendary Soviet Marshal Georgi Zhukov was walking into the field hospital for an inspection. Just randomly meeting all the heavyweights of the Soviet military. If he had just high-fived Vasilis Zaitsev

and played one-on-one horse basketball with Stalin, his life would have been complete. I mean, what are we all? So Zhukov was walking through greeting each soldier and he was very confused and he ran into a random dude who happened to speak no Russian. Joseph had

picked up some Russian, but it was very clearly that something was off. That was when someone told him Joseph's story. Zhukov asked him if there was anything he could do for him. And Joseph pointed out that he had lost all of his identification. And if there was anything he could do for that, because they didn't have ID cards and he had no dog tags. So Zhukov promised that he would do what he could. The next day, his aide arrived to the hospital and gave him a letter in Russian, explaining to him that it didn't matter if he could read what was on that letter, but it would be his passport across the Soviet Union

into Moscow. So for the next several weeks, Joseph bounced from one truck to another, through the Red Army's vast logistics train to get all the way to the capital of the USSR. At which point, a Soviet officer walked him over to the American embassy and dropped him off, I'm assuming with a sick high five with an explosion noise afterwards, embassy staff looked at him like he was insane. Remember he had no idea on him and Joseph Byerly was legally dead. Uh, because after he explained who he was,

they had the wonderful job of explaining to him like funny, you've been dead for a year. I mean, you know, we've all had hangovers like that i mean you know the whom's among us yeah uh they stationed an armed guard to watch them as they looked into it but because joseph was joseph he attempted to beat the guard up and rejoin the russians perfect but because he just got his brain scrambled by a german dive bomber he admits he was too weak to fight the guy, and he got beaten down. Now, the U.S. Embassy finally did their job and confirmed their identity

by asking him some things about Muskegon, which I'm assuming is pronounced Muskegon correctly. But he was so messed up from the bomb, they couldn't just send him back to his unit. He couldn't just continue fighting in World War II yeah so they decided that he would be sent home against his wishes mind you just like well if you're gonna send me home i'll just go fight with the soviets um and his son to his credit says like yeah his dad definitely would have died in the battle of berlin because he he wouldn't have known any better uh and would have just been murked

but he took a long route back to the u.s., which included a ride on the HMS Samaria, which happened to be the same ship he took to the U.K. in 1943. Small world. So he made it back to Michigan April 21st, 1945. In 1946, the same priest that presented for his funeral officiated his wedding. Jesus, what are you married so quickly? Well, heiated his wedding. Jesus. Who did he marry so quickly? Well, he was never married

the first time, but he did the normal soldier thing and got married probably to the first person who was nice to him. Yeah, alright. Fair. Now with the war over, Joseph nor his family was going to forget about his deep deep romance with the Red Army. He traveled back to the USSR six

different times to celebrate Victory Day with them rather than with the Red Army. He traveled back to the USSR six different times to celebrate Victory Day with them, rather than with the US. He's also awarded for his brave service to the Red Army. He is awarded the Order of the Red Banner, an honor that he shares with Leon Trotsky, Vasily Arkhipov, Georgi Zhukov, and Vasily

Zaitsev. He is also the only American to ever be awarded that decoration that I could find I could not find any other American that's ever given this he's also given the aforementioned liberation of Warsaw medal and whenever he went on his victory day marches in

the Soviet Union and then Russia because he kept going he wore all of his Soviet medals with his American medals and he looks like a North Korean general with all of his bling. That fucking rules. That's so fucking good. And then while visiting the USSR, he made sure to stop and pay tribute to his,

what I'm going to call his long lost love, Captain Samuelsenko, who died fighting in Poland before the war was over. He laid flowers at her grave. Joseph died in 2004, but his family continues and still does have a very close relationship to Russia, because

his son John was the U.S. ambassador to Russia from 2008 to 2012. Meaning if there was some kind of time machine, his own dad would try to beat up his own son's armed guards to escape his embassy that's just fucking amazing and the the soviet uh or now the russian uh uh military museum in saint petersburg has an entire display data dedicated to joseph uh byerly uh it's fucking perfect it's so good uh i believe muskegon has one as well but i'm gonna say uh you know if i'm gonna be honored in a military museum i think the

one in st petersburg is probably gonna be a lot more impressive sorry muskegon right there's gonna be like at least like a bust of like your head and shoulders and like probably some like patriotic music going on in the background like it's gonna to be it's going to be pretty fucking tight yeah yeah they definitely didn't skimp and like his son went and gave like a speech at it too um so shocks we do something on the show called questions from the legion and every once in a while um when we have guests on i try to include them like uh if it's a normal guest or someone I'm interviewing, I generally leave them out of it and don't bring them into the fold. But you're familiar with our show.

So we have a question of the Legion, which normally works. If you donate $1, you get access to the show's Discord. And then you get to ask us a largely innocent question at the end of the show. Largely innocent is doing a lot of fucking work in that phrase right there. True, because we get some weird ones every once in a while. I'll ask two, because you are who you are, so you can answer one of these questions. This one's from

the discord does anybody in massachusetts actually know how to fucking drive uh so similar to the way that we talk um the way that we drive is actually the right way to drive and the rest of you are doing it wrong um so just just so we're clear on this whole thing, we are very offensive drivers. And by offensive, I don't mean offensive as in something is offensive, but rather offensive versus defensive. But there is very much an inner logic to the way that we drive. It is very aggressive, but it's aggressive with like a purpose. So like, for instance, being someone who has lived and moved to the Pacific Northwest, you know, that whole thing, like, I'm like I five in Seattle where like people will just get in the left lane

and just stay there kind of regardless of what speed they're going. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's something we don't fucking stand for here. That's just like, not something we like abide by. Like if you're in the left lane, you're expected to be going at least, if not more than 15 miles over the speed limit. Speaking of the Pacific Northwest,

I think Seattle drivers are some of the worst I've ever experienced, and that's including Kabul. It's real bad. And that's the thing. Everyone says, I mean, don't get me wrong, you have to actually learn how to,

I don't know, you actually have to learn how to drive in boston and you know and part of it is also too like there's no there's a lot of people who drive here who aren't actually from here because we have so many colleges universities so like in particularly in like september and then in may you get like the like shitty dad drivers who like inevitably have like new jersey license plates and are trying to get to their daughter's commencement at like northeastern and they're just kind of like you know they they don't really know they can't really figure out how to drive around the city they're like trying to follow the gps

but it's like a little delayed and you know and inevitably some dickhead much like myself is uh immediately behind them just like riding their fucking ass because like, I actually have somewhere where I want to be and I can't deal with like, Oh, well, you know, like, uh,

maybe we could take this left or maybe we could take the next lift. Like, you know, fuck that shit. So, and I, I've learned to survive driving in Seattle by learning, uh,

from the locals. And that is don't use your turn signal don't look just throw yourself into traffic everybody else will stop every time i go out there like every time i go out there to like go visit my parents it's like just such a fucking nightmare like i can't it's like a school of fish you have to just stick with everybody or you'll die or like you know it's interesting in that it's kind of a lot like learning how to drive drive in Michigan where you have to pay attention to the guy in front of you simply because you have to watch where he swerves because he's the one seeing the potholes coming up. Well, then, I mean, I guess the best way I can describe it is driving in Boston. People are just aggressive, you know,

like and just in general, like the way that we are Boston. Yeah. But I mean, like generally, like in the Northeast, like people are just aggressive like you know from like philadelphia to like you know portland maine um and you know both in the way that we drive in the way that we act like it's just kind of like generally like a you know slightly more aggressive outlook but as it turns out i kind of prefer that to the way that ends you know the way that like the pacific northwest and like california operate where it's passive-aggressive. I'd rather someone just fucking cut me off and then speed off and do whatever than the kind of Seattle thing

where you're trying to pass somebody on the right and they just kind of gradually speed up over time so you can't actually pass them on the right because it would offend their sense of order. Oh, man. So, Shox, thanks for coming on the show. Short notice, an emergency off-the-bench replacement for Nick. Thank you for doing that.

Everybody, thank you for listening to the show. Shox, do you have anything you'd like to plug, your Twitter twitter of your sick law beefs um i mean you can follow me at shocks because i've been on uh i've been on twitter longer than fucking anybody ever should um i think it's like fucking like 13 years or so now um and i guess too if given recent events if anyone feels the need to throw any money at anything that isn't

someone in the Bethay universe so if it isn't Hell of a Way to Die and if it isn't Lions Led by Donkeys and if it isn't Trash Futures or anybody else donate to the National Lawyers Guild if you ever watch a protest the folks who are in the green

caps, all-around protesters who are yelling at cops for doing all sorts of illegal shit, those are National Lawyers Guild members. It's a leftist labor organization or not labor organization, lawyer organization that

does a lot of really good work for legal observing and they definitely deserve your money. That's a really good point. Yeah, if you donate to any bail fund, you donate to any nonprofit or whatever that benefits our comrades in the streets and you DM or email me your proof to do that, I'll send you a free digital copy of a book of your choice.

So put up or shut up, put your money where your mouth is or hit the street, guys. And until then, we'll see you next time.