Beyrle hid in a hayloft near a farmhouse for a few days until around Jan. 15, when a Soviet tank brigade came by.
“I went down with my hands up and said, ‘Amerikansky tovarishch, Amerikansky tovarishch,'” Beyrle recalled, using two of the few Russian words he knew: American comrade. Beyrle managed to convince the brigade’s wary commanders to let him fight alongside them on their march to Berlin, and thus began his one-month stint in the Soviet tank battalion. —Carl Schreck
—U.S. Soldier Ended Up in Soviet Army (The Moscow Times)
A great piece of feel-good journalism… all the more amazing when one considers how many decades the US and the USSR spent locked in the cold war.
I think this story feeds my American ego, which conditions me to feel superior to the enemy.