Alvin York was born in 1887 in Fentress County, Tennessee, one of 11 children in a two-room log cabin, with less than a year of schooling and a rifle he used to hunt for the family table. After his father died in 1911 he drank and brawled across the county until his best friend was killed in a bar fight. In late 1914 he joined the Church of Christ in Christian Union, which forbade all violence, and when the draft reached him at 29 in 1917 he wrote on his card that he did not want to fight. At Camp Gordon, Georgia, Captain Danforth and Major Buxton debated him verse by verse, and a 10-day leave to pray in the mountains sent him back convinced the war was his duty.
On October 8, 1918, in the Meuse-Argonne, his 17-man patrol captured a German command post before machine guns on a ridge killed six Americans and wounded three. Caught in the open, York shot from the back of the German line forward until the commander, Vollmer, emptied his pistol at him and then surrendered; York marched 132 prisoners back. A 1919 Saturday Evening Post article made him famous, yet he refused vaudeville tours and endorsements. A civic club’s gift of a 400-acre farm came with a mortgage he could not pay until Rotary Clubs bailed him out. He fought for the York Agricultural Institute, turned interventionist against Hitler, tried to enlist at 54, and served as a Signal Corps major on bond drives. He died in 1964 at 76.
- York’s commanders countered Thou shalt not kill with Christ’s instruction to sell a cloak and buy a sword.
- During the Great Depression he mortgaged the same farm to keep school buses fueled and teachers paid.
- He proposed leading a battalion of illiterate marksmen from his home county in World War II.
- He finally allowed the 1941 film starring Gary Cooper to fund an interdenominational Bible school.
- Earnings from that blockbuster tied him up in a decade-long battle with the IRS.
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