Robert Bennett Byerly was born on March 20, 1918, in Passaic, Passaic County, New Jersey. He was the son of Francis Parkman Byerly and Laura D. Byerly.

He was a graduate of the University of Chicago, and before the outbreak of the war, he worked as a journalist and schoolteacher. He was in Paris when Germany invaded France in 1940, but was allowed to leave to go to the United Kingdom as he was an American citizen. On Apr 1941, he enlisted in the Canadian Army's Royal Canadian Corps of Signals. A skilled radio operator and linguist, he received advanced wireless training in England in 1943. He was commissioned in the Canadian Army and recruited to the United Kingdom's Special Operations Executive. He was given a new identity as "Robert Antoine Breuil" and served as a Lieutenant during World War II. He was an American-born Canadian soldier

On February 7, 1944, Robert was one of four SOE agents who parachuted into Chartres, France to carry out a mission. However, the Germans intercepted the SOE's radio transmissions and captured the agents just after they landed. Byerly and the other agents were interrogated at Chartres and then transferred to a Gestapo prison at 3 bis Place des États-Unis in Paris, but having been captured immediately upon their arrival, they had little knowledge of local underground resistance activity.

In July 1944, Robert was transported from Paris, most likely to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp in Poland. He was not seen or heard from again and was reported as missing and presumed executed. In the absence of any further information regarding his whereabouts, his date of death was recorded in his SOE personnel record as May 8, 1946 (a year after hostilities ceased in Europe) but the Canadian Virtual War Memorial lists his date of death as May 8, 1945. Byerly is listed on memorials at Gross-Rosen, the Valençay SOE Memorial in France, and the Brookwood Memorial in England.

Source of information: www.wikipedia.org