Sergeant York Captured 132 Germans in the Argonne and Went Home to Tennessee

The Army had a question for Alvin York, and York had an answer the Army did not like. The question, in the spring of 1917, was whether a twenty-nine-year-old Tennessee farmer and blacksmith, drafted under a brand-new law, would report for service. The answer, written on his draft form, was that he did not want to fight, because his church taught that a Christian should not kill. The Army considered his answer and rejected it. Sixteen months later this reluctant soldier did the thing for which he is remembered, and then did the thing for which he deserves to be remembered even more: he went home and refused to cash in.

That is a hard story to tell in a bumper sticker, which is exactly why it is worth telling at length. It is a story about conscience and duty, about the limits of what a government can ask of a man, and about what a citizen owes to a republic that is at war. Those are Founding questions. We should answer them with the text in front of us.

The man before the war

Alvin Cullum York was born on December 13, 1887, in Pall Mall, in the hills of Fentress County in the Cumberland country of northern Tennessee. His family was poor and large. His father was a blacksmith and farmer, and when his father died in 1911 the oldest sons took on the work of keeping a household going. The schooling was minimal, a few months a year at most. What the hills taught him instead was how to shoot. Young York was an exceptional marksman, honed in the mountain turkey shoots where a man's skill with a rifle was both entertainment and a measure of his standing.

He also drank, and he fought. By his own later account, the young York was a hard-drinking brawler, and nobody who knew him would have called him a candidate for sainthood. What changed him, according to the account most often given, was the death of a friend in a violent quarrel and a revival meeting in the winter of 1914 that left him converted. He joined a small denomination, the Church of Christ in Christian Union, and he took its teachings seriously, including its uneasiness about warfare. He gave up drinking and cursing. He sang in the choir. He became a man with strong convictions and a rifle.

That was the man who received a draft notice.

The conscientious objector claim

The law that drafted him was the Selective Service Act of 1917, passed on the authority of Article I, Section 8, Clause 12 of the Constitution, which gives Congress the power "To raise and support Armies." A challenge to the draft went to the Supreme Court and was decided against the challengers in January 1918, in the Selective Draft Law Cases, Arver v. United States. The Court held that the power to raise armies included the power to compel service, because a just government's duty to its citizens carries a reciprocal duty of the citizen to serve in case of need. I think that holding was correct. The duty of a citizen to defend the country is as old as the idea of citizenship.

The Act, however, was not written to run roughshod over conscience. It excused members of certain recognised religious bodies whose creeds forbade participation in war, and it offered those men noncombatant duty. That raises a hard question about how far the claim of conscience can go. The First Amendment says Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion, and the draft laws wrestled with the matter by creating an exemption of limited scope and leaving it to administrators to apply.

York's denomination was small and, as far as the draft boards were concerned, not among the established pacifist churches, and his claim was denied. He appealed it. He lost again. He went to training with the 82nd Division at Camp Gordon, Georgia, as an ordinary private, carrying his scruples in his pack.

I want to pause here because of how easily the next part of the story gets told wrongly. You will sometimes see it told as a conversion from pacifism to patriotism in a single afternoon, with some mocking tone about the simplicity of a country boy. The record does not support that. What happened was a long and serious argument, and the Army had the wisdom to let the argument happen.

Two officers and a Bible

York's company commander, Captain Edward Danforth, and his battalion commander, Major George Buxton, took the matter up with him. They did not order him to be quiet and they did not punish him. They sat down with the soldier and talked through the Scriptures. Both men knew their Bibles, and the conversation ranged over passages on the authority of the state, the duty to defend the innocent and the circumstances under which the Bible permits the use of force. They gave him a leave to go home to the mountains, think and pray.

Consider what that tells us about the Army of 1918, and about the country. An officer corps that could have simply said "That is an order" took a private's conscience seriously enough to argue with him on his own terms. They treated him as a man with a soul, not a number. The state was not abandoning its claim on his service, because it never would. But it did the honourable thing, which was to try to persuade him before it tried to compel him.

York came back from the mountains convinced. By his own later account, the reasoning that persuaded him was that a man could serve in a just cause and that stopping evil by force, where evil was killing others, was not the same as committing murder. You can quarrel with the theology; many sincere believers hold the pacifist view to this day, and their position deserves respect, as the Founders respected it. The fact is that York reached the decision through his own wrestling, and he went to France with a clear conscience.

October 8, 1918

York's regiment, the 328th Infantry of the 82nd Division, was part of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, the largest American offensive of the war. On the morning of October 8, 1918, near the village of Châtel-Chéhéry in the Argonne Forest, the regiment attacked in the rain and mist. The ground was a nightmare of ravines and wooded ridges, covered by German machine guns.

A detachment of seventeen men, including York, then a corporal, was sent to work around behind the German line and silence the guns. They slipped through the woods and came upon a German headquarters, captured a number of prisoners, and then were caught by machine-gun fire from a hillside. In a few seconds nine of the Americans were down, six killed and three wounded, including the sergeant in charge. The command fell to York, the senior surviving corporal.

What followed has been argued over and re-argued ever since, and I will give you only what the official record states. York, in a position against the hillside, used his marksmanship against the German machine gunners. The Germans were firing from a position uphill. York fired with deliberate, accurate shots, and the German officer commanding the unit, who had tried a charge with a handful of men against him and seen them fall, eventually surrendered the battalion. York and the few men with him marched their prisoners back through the lines. The prisoners numbered, in the army's count, 132.

Here is the arithmetic of the official citation: 4 officers plus 128 men makes 132. I like that line because it is a figure that the Army itself set down, in black and white, and nobody has since improved on it.

The citation, read exactly

The Medal of Honor citation for Corporal Alvin C. York, as the Army wrote it, reads in its central lines:

After his platoon had suffered heavy casualties and 3 other noncommissioned officers had become casualties, Cpl. York assumed command. Fearlessly leading 7 men, he charged with great daring a machinegun nest ... the machinegun nest was taken, together with 4 officers and 128 men and several guns.

(Ellipsis mine; the full text is on the Army's and the Medal of Honor Society's sites.)

Read it once more and notice what it leaves out. It does not say he was a marksman. It does not say that he was a sincere Christian who had wrestled with the commandment against killing. It says what he did: he assumed command when the leaders fell, and he led. The word that deserves emphasis is "assumed." Command was not given to him. The structure of the unit gave out, and he stepped into the gap. For the reason that the republic's armies have always depended on it, let me say why that matters: the American soldier's habit of taking responsibility when the plan fails is not an accident of character. It comes out of a free society. A man raised to expect that someone else will tell him what to do in an emergency is a poor soldier, and a man raised to act for himself is a good one. For the full background on the award itself and how citations are written, see What the Medal of Honor Is, Who Awards It and How a Citation Is Written and Five Medal of Honor Citations Read Closely and What Each One Asks of Us.

He was promoted to sergeant, and the rank stuck to his name for the rest of his life. The Medal of Honor was awarded to him, and he was also decorated by France and other allied governments.

The steelman: was the story exaggerated?

Serious historians have asked hard questions about the numbers and the details, and conservatives should welcome them, because a legend that cannot survive checking is not worth keeping. Here is the strongest form of the skeptical case. The events of October 8 happened in a tangle of woods in a short time, in the middle of a battle, with no neutral observer. The count of prisoners is the Army's. The retelling of the incident grew in the years afterward, helped along by magazines and, later, a Hollywood film, until the figure and the narrative became more polished than the confusion that produced them. A hero's legend deserves scrutiny.

My answer has three points.

First, the legend was checked at the time. The account was investigated, and the Army did not give a Medal of Honor on a rumour. A formal inquiry was conducted afterwards, in which his officers walked the ground with him in 1919, and the main facts held. The prisoners existed; they were counted at the other end of the walk back. A hundred and thirty men do not vanish into a ravine.

Second, no part of the argument depends on the count. If it had been 100 prisoners or 150, the moral shape of the story would be the same: a man who did not want to kill, and who was a Christian in earnest, found himself in a position where inaction would mean the death of his friends, acted, and ended the killing sooner. The fact that he ended an ambush with the surrender of men who would otherwise have kept firing is, in a quiet way, the most humane thing in the account. It is a sharper point against the "warmonger" caricature than any speech.

Third, the skeptic's real target is exaggeration, and the answer to exaggeration is the record. I would rather have the plain citation with its modest vocabulary than any embroidered retelling. The text above says what the Army said, and the rest is commentary.

The refusal

Now we come to the part of York's life that, to my mind, is more admirable than the battle. He came home in the spring of 1919 to a hero's welcome. He was feted in New York City with a formal banquet. The offers began at once. Vaudeville wanted him on the stage. Advertisers wanted his name and face. Promoters of every kind laid out sums that would have made a poor mountain farmer rich in a week.

He turned them down. His reasoning, as he gave it, was that he had done what a soldier is asked to do and did not think it a thing to sell. He wanted to go home, marry, and farm. He did marry, Gracie Williams, in June 1919 in a ceremony performed by the governor of Tennessee, and the couple settled in Fentress County. Admirers, through a Rotary-organised fund, helped him acquire a farm. It was not charity. It was a country's thanks.

This is where the conservative case for York becomes personal. The republic of the Founders was meant to be a place of citizen-soldiers, men who answered the call, did the job, and went home to their plows. George Washington was the model: he gave up his commission and went back to Mount Vernon, and the story of that renunciation is in George Washington Gave Up Power Twice and Changed What Leaders Could Be. A republic does not need Caesars. It needs Cincinnatus, the farmer who takes up the sword when the country needs him and puts it down when the country does not. York was that kind of man in a century that had mostly forgotten the type.

The school in Fentress County

York had something he regarded as more important than a farm. He had, by his own account, a keen sense of how little schooling he and his neighbours had received. The mountain counties of Tennessee had few good schools. He turned his fame into a public cause, and in the 1920s he founded the Alvin C. York Institute, a school for the children of the Cumberland hills, in Jamestown in Fentress County. The school dates its founding to 1926, and it took in students who otherwise would have had little chance of an education, and it was later taken over by the state of Tennessee and operated as a public school, and it exists to this day.

I think that is the most reliable measure of the man. He could have taken the money. He built a school. The faith that had first made him reluctant to fight now made him generous, and the same strength of character that had held a line in the Argonne now held a school together through years of poor funding. He remained a modest, devout man in Tennessee until his death in September 1964.

He also lent his name, late in life, to a film about his story, with Gary Cooper in the title role, and he insisted that it be a decent one. The film was released in 1941, in the months before the country went to war again. It is a good film, by the standards of its time, and it is not a bad introduction.

What York teaches us

Let me put the lessons in numbered form, as I promised.

One: a free country asks a great deal of its citizens, and it should ask honestly. The Constitution gives Congress the power to raise armies, and the Supreme Court upheld the draft. A citizen owes the republic his service. But a decent government, like the officers who sat down with York and the Bible, treats the citizen as a conscience and not as a resource.

Two: conscience and duty can meet. York's struggle was real. The conclusion he reached was a reasoned one, and the Army's willingness to argue with him is a model for how a free people should talk about hard questions.

Three: virtue shows in what you do with success. He turned down the money, took the farm, and built the school. A man whose fame is a burden he carries for others is the kind of man a republic can trust.

Four: the citizen-soldier is the Founders' answer to the standing army. The men of the 82nd Division were farmers, mechanics and clerks, and they went home. The tradition survives because men like York kept it alive, and it is the same tradition we honour in The Harlem Hellfighters Spent 191 Days Under Fire and Came Home Heroes and The Navajo Code Talkers Built an Unbreakable Code From Their Own Language.

The case in brief

1. Alvin York, a Tennessee marksman and devout Christian, claimed conscientious objection under the 1917 draft, was refused, and was persuaded after long talks with two officers who took his conscience seriously.
2. On October 8, 1918 in the Argonne he assumed command when the leaders fell, and the Medal of Honor citation records that the machine-gun position was taken with 4 officers and 128 men, which is 132 prisoners.
3. The Constitution lets Congress raise armies, the Supreme Court upheld the draft in 1918, and a decent government still argues with conscience before overriding it.
4. York refused fame and endorsement money, farmed in Fentress County, and founded a school for mountain children in 1926.
5. His life shows the citizen-soldier ideal: serve when called, go home when done, and use what you are given for others.

What you can do: read the full text of a Medal of Honor citation on the Army's records site, then call a veteran in your family or church and ask them to tell you what service asked of them.