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

occasionally he saw German heads over the barrels.
    Lying prone, York treated the German heads popping over the parapets to old-fashioned target practice. Machine gun bullets whipped past him, the gunners apparently unable to depress the barrels far enough to nail him to the ground. York’s relentlessly accurate shooting suppressed the German fire to the point he could stand up and advance. As he did so, a German officer and five soldiers with fixed bayonets charged from about twenty-five yards. The magazine in York’s rifle was down to its final rounds, so he flipped out his pistol, a Colt .45 automatic, and shot his attackers as he would have shot wild turkeys—hitting the last one first and working his way up the line. It worked with turkeys because they didn’t see their fellows getting blasted, and it worked with Germans on the same principle. He intuited—he didn’t have time to think—that if he shot the lead man, the others would fall to the prone position and pick him off. But they didn’t. He shot them each in succession. Then he advanced again with his rifle, shouting at the machine gunners to surrender. He figured he had them now—between foiling the bayonet charge and knocking bullets into German heads, York had killed about twenty men.
    The German officer in command, Lieutenant Paul Jürgen Vollmer, emptied his pistol at the advancing Tennessean. Every shot missed; there was no getting at such an invulnerable foe.
    â€œEnglish?”
    â€œNo, not English.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œAmerican.”
    â€œGood Lord! If you won’t shoot any more I will make them give up.”
    York agreed; as he recounted later, “I didn’t want to kill any more ’n I had to.”
    He did have to kill one more. A surrendering German threw a grenade at him. Inevitably, it missed. York didn’t. York and his comrades suddenly found themselves the captors of about fifty German soldiers. When Vollmer asked York how many men he had, York said, “A plenty.” 3 York’s men weren’t so sure. York was: he kept his pistol on Vollmer.
    York’s march back became a sort of forcible conga line of captured Germans as he rolled up one unit after another with minimal fuss, shooting only one recalcitrant German machine gunner. By this time York had gathered so many prisoners—4 German officers and 128 other ranks—that he was turned away from both the battalion and regimental headquarters as having too many for them to handle. At his third stop, division headquarters, York’s brigade commander said, “Well, York, I hear you’ve captured the whole damn German army.”
    â€œNo,” replied York, saluting. “Only 132.” 4
    THE WAR THAT MADE THE MODERN WORLD
    Most Americans are probably equally humble when they think about their country’s contribution to victory in World War I. They figure we entered the conflict too late to claim much credit, or maybe they think our intervention was discreditable. Some say we had no compelling national interest to enter the Great War; worse, ourintervention allowed Britain and France to force on Germany an unjust, punitive peace that made the rise of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers Party inevitable. Had we stayed out of the war, the argument goes, the Europeans would have been compelled to make a reasonable, negotiated peace, and postwar animosity would have been lessened.
    Part of Americans’ disillusionment with World War I can be blamed on Woodrow Wilson. After preaching strict neutrality and campaigning on how his deft diplomacy “kept us out of war,” Wilson changed his tune in April 1917 and said the United States had to enter the war because the “world must be made safe for democracy” 5 —though that was never really the issue. He embraced the idea, even if he did not invent it, that this was a war to end all war—an expectation sure