The All-Americans
Alvin York at home in East Tennessee
One hundred years ago, a thirty-year-old, red-headed farmer reached a turning point in his life. For the past few months he had agonized over a brutal choice: fight alongside the millions of doughboys shipping overseas to Europe and the Western Front; or refuse, and accept possible punishment at the hands of his countrymen. By March 1918 Alvin C. York could wait no longer. He made his choice somewhere in the misty, remote hills of his native East Tennessee—unknowingly deciding the fates of hundreds of his fellow men.
The All-Americans
A devoutly religious draftee from Fentress County who had sought conscientious objector status and been refused, York was assigned to service in February 1918 with the 82d “All-American” Division. Based at Camp Gordon, Georgia, the division had originally consisted entirely of southerners. In recent months, though, the military authorities had diluted it with draftees from all across the United States, including thousands of recent immigrants including many who barely spoke English. York enjoyed watching and getting to know this diverse collection of men, but also sought quiet time to study his Bible.
York was a hard-working man used to tilling and trekking the rocky soil of the Tennessee mountains. He took to training easily, and as an avid hunter he felt comfortable with a rifle and proved a crack shot on the firing range. Officers looked on him as in many ways an ideal soldier—respectful of authority yet brimming with the individual initiative that General John J. Pershing craved. And although he was a self-professed man of God, York instinctively carried the fighting spirit of his Scotch-Irish people of the Upper Cumberland along the Tennessee-Kentucky border.
God and War
But would he fight? Although every inch the soldier, York made no secret of his internal conflict. Despite studying the Bible, praying and conversing with his fellow Christians, he just could not make up his mind whether God’s law permitted a man to kill in a war. Moreover, like many young men he just couldn’t figure out why the country wanted him to fight. “I wish you would tell me what this war is about,” he asked his captain, E.C.B. Danforth. The captain explained, and so did the battalion commander, Major G. Edward Buxton. But despite speaking and reading the Bible with York, neither man could bring him over the edge.
Men in the barracks were less forgiving. All of the All-Americans were draftees, but once in camp they embraced their duty to go to war and kill as many Germans as they could. Some outsiders questioned whether the All-American Division was really American at all. The immigrants, many of them originally hailing from Germany and Austria-Hungary, seemed suspect. But that just made them all the more eager to prove themselves. To them York was an embarrassment. They chewed him out every chance they got. One of them, a former Irish bartender, even threatened to kill York if he went on with his nonsense about not wanting to fight.
It was partly to escape this atmosphere and find a place where he could commune with God that York requested and received a ten-day leave of absence that coincidentally began on March 21, the same day that the Germans launched their final major offensive on the western front. York could not have been unaware of the Allies’ increasingly desperate plight on the Western Front as he wandered the mountains of home to try and make up his mind.
The Decision
Storytellers speaking on York’s behalf later described his final decision as an epiphany. God, they said, filled him with a “peace which passeth all understanding” and he returned from the hills as if he were a witness to the Transfiguration. “I am going to war with the sword of the Lord and of Gideon,” he is said to have explained to his mother. “I have received my assurance. I have received it from God himself—that it’s right for me to go to war, and that as long as I believe in Him, not one hair of my head will be harmed.”
As he returned to Camp Gordon at the beginning of April, York seemed like a new man—at least on the outside. Inside, though, his soul remained divided with feelings of guilt and betrayal. Several months in the future, in the Argonne Forest in October 1918, York would reap the reward—and pay the consequences—of his decision to fight.