Joseph Beyrle missed his own funeral.

He was busy surviving the war that everyone back home believed had killed him.

Before he returned to Michigan, the young American paratrooper would escape German captivity, fall into the hands of the Gestapo, join Soviet troops advancing toward Berlin and arrive at the American Embassy with a problem few soldiers could imagine.

The Americans needed convincing that he was alive.

Beyrle’s extraordinary journey began in Muskegon, where he graduated from high school and enlisted in 1942. He volunteered for the airborne and joined the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division — the Screaming Eagles.

His specialty was communications and demolition. His nickname was “Jumpin’ Joe.”

According to his son, he earned it partly by accepting money from fellow trainees to make parachute jumps in their places. Before D-Day, he also completed two clandestine missions delivering gold to the French Resistance.

Then came the jump that changed everything.

In the darkness of June 6, 1944, German antiaircraft fire hit his transport over Normandy. Beyrle bailed out at low altitude and landed at the church in Saint-Côme-du-Mont.

Separated from his unit, he continued fighting. He destroyed a power station and carried out sabotage before German soldiers captured him.

For most men, that would have ended their combat service.

Beyrle kept trying to get back into the war.

Over the following months, he endured repeated transfers between German prisons and prisoner-of-war camps. Escape attempts ended in recapture. During one attempt, he and fellow prisoners boarded a train expecting to travel toward the advancing Soviets.

Instead, they ended up in Berlin.

A civilian reported them, and the Gestapo took custody. Beyrle was beaten, tortured and accused of being an American spy. Accounts of his captivity describe German military officers intervening before the prisoners could be executed, insisting that they belonged in military custody.

In January 1945, he escaped again.

This time, he headed toward the artillery.

Somewhere beyond the gunfire were Soviet troops. Reaching them offered a chance of survival — provided they recognized him as an ally before shooting.

When Beyrle encountered a Soviet tank unit, he approached with his hands raised and a packet of Lucky Strike cigarettes.

“Amerikansky tovarishch!” he shouted.

American comrade.

He had survived the introduction. Now he wanted a weapon.

Rather than wait to be sent back to American forces, Beyrle persuaded the Soviets to let him fight alongside them. His demolition skills gave him something useful to offer, even when words failed him.

He joined their advance toward Berlin. But he would not reach the German capital with them.

A German air attack wounded him, ending his unlikely second stint in combat. Soviet personnel evacuated him to a hospital.

According to accounts of his service, Marshal Georgy Zhukov learned about the American patient, met him through an interpreter and arranged papers that would help him reach his own country’s representatives.

At the American Embassy in Moscow, another obstacle awaited.

The Army had reported Joseph Beyrle killed in action.

His identification tags had been recovered from a dead German soldier. Back in Michigan, his family had mourned him. His obituary had appeared in the newspaper. A funeral Mass had been celebrated.

Now someone claiming to be that dead soldier had arrived from Soviet territory.

Embassy officials placed him under guard while they checked his identity. Fingerprints finally confirmed what the exhausted paratrooper had been trying to tell them.

He was Joseph Beyrle.

And he was very much alive.

He returned home in April 1945.

The following year, he married JoAnne Hollowell in the same church where his funeral Mass had been held — with the same priest officiating.

Decades later, his wartime service earned recognition from both countries whose troops he had fought beside. Presidents Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin honored him in 1994.

Beyrle died in 2004, aged 81, while visiting Toccoa, Georgia, where he had trained as a young paratrooper. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. He is remembered as the only known American soldier to have fought in combat with both the U.S. Army and the Soviet Red Army during World War II.

His family’s connection to Russia did not end there.

His son, John Beyrle, became the U.S. ambassador to Russia, serving from 2008 to 2012.

The father had reached Moscow carrying papers from a Soviet marshal and needing to prove his identity.

The son arrived with credentials from the president of the United States.

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