Free The Yanks Are Coming! by III H. W. Crocker Page A

of the United States in World War I / H. W. Crocker III.
    pages cm
    1. World War, 1914-1918--United States. 2. United States. Army. American Expeditionary Forces. 3. World War, 1914-1918--Biography. I. Title.
    D570.C68 2014
    940.4’0973--dc23
    2014011621
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For the VMI Keydets, class of ’17
    and
    Scott E. Belliveau, class of ’83

PROLOGUE
    â€œWELL, YORK, I HEAR YOU’VE CAPTURED THE WHOLE DAMN GERMAN ARMY”
    I t was cold, wet, and dreary—8 October 1918—the Meuse-Argonne Campaign. A miasmic mist drifted through the early morning sky from exploded artillery shells and gas canisters; men clung to clumps of damp earth as bullets spat toward them from sporadic machine gun and rifle fire. On the far left of the American line was squad leader Sergeant Alvin York. In the course of his thirty years, York had grown from a sharpshooting, hard-drinking mountain brawler into a Christian pacifist, and then, once he was drafted, into a Christian soldier. He wasn’t an educated man or a cosmopolitan one—he’d had a hard time taking his eyes off the French-speaking Vietnamese truck drivers (“Chinamen,” he called them)who had rocketed him to the front, driving like drunken fiends—but he had superb instincts in the field.
    The Germans had a well-earned reputation for being tenacious, superb infantrymen, but it was one of the virtues of the Americans that they weren’t much impressed by reputations. The Germans were entrenched on forested high ground around a valley, about five hundred yards long, that the Americans were trying to cross, having taken Hill 223 at the opening of the arc the night before. If the Germans were battle weary—intelligence reports promised that the units in front of the Americans were of low caliber, their morale used up—they were still in an excellent position to hit the Americans on three sides; in fact, the advanced American platoons were already pinned down, fenced in by German mortar and machine gun fire.
    York’s company on the far left of the American line was moving in support of the trapped units. Sergeant Harry M. Parsons sent three squads, including York’s, a total of about seventeen men, on what he feared was a suicide mission: flank the German machine guns enfilading the American platoons.
    Sergeant Bernard Early led the doughboys 1 into the forest. Their first contact with the enemy was two Germans who wore Red Cross armbands and were shocked to see the Americans. One surrendered; the other plunged into the forest like a high-tailing deer, York and his comrades in pursuit.
    The Americans weaved through the forest, finally stumbling on a detachment of tired German soldiers who had dropped their packs and were sitting down eating breakfast. Stunned at being flanked, the Germans surrendered. Except for one, who fired at York: the German missed; York didn’t.
    The Americans, having surprised the enemy, were now surprised in turn. German machine gunners, hidden on a covering hill, suddenlyopened fire, raking the Americans, hitting one poor corporal with, York estimated, a hundred bullets, practically shredding the uniform from his body. Nine of York’s colleagues—more than half the unit’s strength—fell dead or wounded. York was on the ground too—unhurt, though bullets had sliced the dirt in front of him and left a stray helmet “all sorter sieved, jes like the top of a pepper box.” 2 He guessed there were more than twenty machine guns ahead of him;