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Informationen zum Autor Thomas H. Taylor , a veteran of the 101st Airborne Division, was awarded the Silver Star, two Bronze Stars for valor, the Purple Heart, and five other decorations for his service in Vietnam. A graduate of St. Albans School and West Point, he left the army in 1968 to take a master’s degree in sociology and a Juris Doctor from the University of California, where he won the Carothers Prize for literary composition; in the same year, he was designated a Bread Loaf Fellow at Middlebury College, Vermont. He lives in Washington, D.C. Klappentext "Remarkable... Without a doubt, one of the most incredible stories you will ever read." - The Roanoke Times "Every once in a while, a true story comes along that reads like fiction... It grabs you on page one and never lets go." - Senator Carl Levin, Chairman of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee As the twentieth century closed, the veterans of its defining war passed away at a rate of a thousand per day. Fortunately, D-Day paratrooper Joseph Beyrle met author Thomas H. Taylor in time to record Behind Hitler's Lines, the true story of the first American paratrooper to land in Normandy and the only soldier to fight for both the United States and the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany. It is a story of battle, followed by a succession of captures, escapes, recaptures, and re-escapes, then battle once more, in the final months of fighting on the Eastern Front. For these unique experiences, both President Bill Clinton and President Boris Yeltsin honored Joe Beyrle on the fiftieth anniversary of V-E Day. Beyrle did not strive to be a part of history, but history kept visiting him. Twice before the invasion he parachuted into Normandy, bearing gold for the French resistance. D Day resulted in his capture, and he was mistaken for a German line-crosser - a soldier who had, in fact, died in the attempt. Eventually Joe was held under guard at the American embassy in Moscow, suspected of being a Nazi assassin. Fingerprints saved him, confirming that he'd been wounded five times, and that he bore a safe-conduct pass written by marshal Zhukov after the Wehrmacht wrested Joe, at gunpoint, from execution by the Gestapo. In the ruins of Warsaw his life was saved again, this time by Polish nuns. Some of Joe's story is in his own words - a voice that will be among the last and best we hear firsthand from World War II.CHAPTER ONE THE EUROPEAN THEATER OF OPERATIONS in the summer of 1943 u-boats took a heavy toll of allied shipping, so the 101st Airborne Division would be in peril and out of their element while crossing the Atlantic, but at least the enlisted men now knew their destination: northern Europe, to open a second front against Nazi Germany. That basic mission had been concealed till they reached Camp Shanks, thirty miles upriver from New York City, the division’s staging area for embarkation. They’d had to remove the Screaming Eagle shoulder patch and wear regular GI shoes instead of the distinctive paratrooper jump boots, their pride and talisman. An officer tried to explain the reason: “The Axis has to be kept guessing.” German spies were thought to have infested New York City, and it was a strategic secret that the 101st would be committed against Hitler rather than Hirohito. Initial betting had been otherwise. It had been the Japanese who attacked Pearl Harbor; Germany declared war on the United States four days later, the only time in World War II they bothered with such a formality. The stay at Camp Shanks was only long enough for inoculations and inspections before it was time to go, time for “the arsenal of democracy,” as Churchill called America, to push another seven thousand soldiers across the sea to join the Allied counteroffensive that had already reconquered North Africa and knocked Mussolini’s Italy out of the war. Feeling like lemmings, Screaming Eagles jamme...
