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Site Of York's Heroics In 1918 found!
PATBUZZARD
Member Posts: 3,556 ✭
New York Times
October 27, 2006
Pg. 8
Officer Says He Found Site Of York's Heroics In 1918
By Craig S. Smith
PARIS, Oct. 23 - An American military officer based in Germany says that he has located with some certainty the spot on which the World War I hero Sgt. Alvin C. York carried out his famous exploit in the Argonne forest of northeastern France.
On Oct. 8, 1918, Sergeant York, then a corporal, crept behind enemy lines with 16 other soldiers to attack German machine gunners who were holding up an American advance. They came under fire, and Sergeant York was credited with overcoming the superior force by using sharpshooting skills he had honed during turkey shoots and squirrel hunts in the Tennessee woods.
Competing camps of scholars and military historians have long debated the exact site of this legendary stand, which ended with the capture of 132 German soldiers and was immortalized in a 1941 film starring Gary Cooper. Until now, no one had found what seemed to be such striking material proof that the exploit might have taken place as described.
"We nailed it," said Lt. Col. Douglas Mastriano, an American military intelligence officer working for NATO, who has spent six years researching the Sergeant York story using American and German military archives.
The general area where the fight took place, near the village of Ch?tel-Ch?h?ry, is well known, but vague and conflicting battlefield accounts made it impossible to say exactly where it occurred.
Most people involved in the hunt have agreed, however, that Sergeant York was the only one who emptied a sidearm in the narrow valley that day, and students of the issue have said that finding a concentration of empty Colt .45 cartridges would be the best proof of where he stood.
Over the past year, Colonel Mastriano, his wife, Rebecca, his son Josiah and his friends Kory O'Keefe, Lt. Col. Jeff Parmer and Gary Martin spent nearly 1,000 hours walking the battlefield with metal detectors. On Oct. 14, Colonel Mastriano and Mr. O'Keefe found two .45 caliber rounds, one live and one that had been fired.
They returned the next weekend and found more evidence: 19 empty .45 cartridges scattered over a 10-foot-wide area at the base of a hill, along with German and American rifle rounds. Many of the German rounds had not been fired. They found more .45 slugs 20 yards away near the remains of a German trench together with hundreds of German rifle and machine gun cartridges, many of them live rounds, and bits of gun belts and debris consistent with soldiers surrendering.
The material fits closely with Sergeant York's account, in which he described firing his rifle toward machine gunners on a hill before pulling out his Colt .45 to pick off seven German soldiers who charged him with fixed bayonets. Colonel Mastriano had the casings examined by a ballistics expert, who confirmed that they all had come from the same gun.
"I honestly never thought that we would recover the .45s and was stunned when we dug them up," Colonel Mastriano said this week from his home in Heidelberg, Germany. "The find means that the search for the York spot is over."
October 27, 2006
Pg. 8
Officer Says He Found Site Of York's Heroics In 1918
By Craig S. Smith
PARIS, Oct. 23 - An American military officer based in Germany says that he has located with some certainty the spot on which the World War I hero Sgt. Alvin C. York carried out his famous exploit in the Argonne forest of northeastern France.
On Oct. 8, 1918, Sergeant York, then a corporal, crept behind enemy lines with 16 other soldiers to attack German machine gunners who were holding up an American advance. They came under fire, and Sergeant York was credited with overcoming the superior force by using sharpshooting skills he had honed during turkey shoots and squirrel hunts in the Tennessee woods.
Competing camps of scholars and military historians have long debated the exact site of this legendary stand, which ended with the capture of 132 German soldiers and was immortalized in a 1941 film starring Gary Cooper. Until now, no one had found what seemed to be such striking material proof that the exploit might have taken place as described.
"We nailed it," said Lt. Col. Douglas Mastriano, an American military intelligence officer working for NATO, who has spent six years researching the Sergeant York story using American and German military archives.
The general area where the fight took place, near the village of Ch?tel-Ch?h?ry, is well known, but vague and conflicting battlefield accounts made it impossible to say exactly where it occurred.
Most people involved in the hunt have agreed, however, that Sergeant York was the only one who emptied a sidearm in the narrow valley that day, and students of the issue have said that finding a concentration of empty Colt .45 cartridges would be the best proof of where he stood.
Over the past year, Colonel Mastriano, his wife, Rebecca, his son Josiah and his friends Kory O'Keefe, Lt. Col. Jeff Parmer and Gary Martin spent nearly 1,000 hours walking the battlefield with metal detectors. On Oct. 14, Colonel Mastriano and Mr. O'Keefe found two .45 caliber rounds, one live and one that had been fired.
They returned the next weekend and found more evidence: 19 empty .45 cartridges scattered over a 10-foot-wide area at the base of a hill, along with German and American rifle rounds. Many of the German rounds had not been fired. They found more .45 slugs 20 yards away near the remains of a German trench together with hundreds of German rifle and machine gun cartridges, many of them live rounds, and bits of gun belts and debris consistent with soldiers surrendering.
The material fits closely with Sergeant York's account, in which he described firing his rifle toward machine gunners on a hill before pulling out his Colt .45 to pick off seven German soldiers who charged him with fixed bayonets. Colonel Mastriano had the casings examined by a ballistics expert, who confirmed that they all had come from the same gun.
"I honestly never thought that we would recover the .45s and was stunned when we dug them up," Colonel Mastriano said this week from his home in Heidelberg, Germany. "The find means that the search for the York spot is over."
Comments
Ben
I think that they are reading quite a bit into the find, especially when everything they are using to guide them was never known to be absolutely accurate in the first place. If the exact spot was hard to locate back during WWI, you can bet it is much harder to locate today and probably impossible to say with certainty.
York also carried and shot a rifle that day. There is still a controversey over the type of rifle. Records indicate Yorks unit were carrying 1917 enfields yet the York family insisted for years that the rifle was a 1903 springfield.
They could examine the headstamps on the .45 casings to make sure they were from the same ammo arsenals suppling US troops at the time, As noted in the article they could determine that all cartridges came from the same gun. I wonder why there were so many empty cartridges if in fact York shot 7 men once(back to front like turkeys the way the story goes) should only be 7 empties.
Looks like it proves that York did not fire them.
According to the movie, he fired only those seven shots from the .45, the rest were from his rifle.
here's another way of looking at it.. If seven men were charging you with bayonets, what's the chance you could not only hit but stop them all with one round apiece?
Makes more sense that if it did happen and York did shoot seven men with the .45 that he had to reload and perhaps shoot more than one man once, maybe even miss every other shot, after all the men were running towards him, supposedly not side to side but one after another.
I think even the "known" facts of the actual incident are murky at best. People dont always remember things the way they happened, especially if they dont write it down. After the guys with York got through exagggerating, then the newspapers and eventually Hollyweird got hold of the story, who knows what happened except that York probably did kill a bunch of guys with rifle and pistol and sufficiently impressed both the Germans into surrender and his comrades into amazement.
I have read German accounts of the incident where York was portrayed as a war criminal for threatening the life of a captured German officer(I think its against the rules of war) and forcing the man at gunpoint to call for surrender of the machinegun battery.
Maybe to scare the German officer into calling for surrender, York fired a few rounds into the ground at his feet, thus helping to account for the extra empty .45 casings.
But when a guy busts his butt spending so many hours trying to discover the facts about a long ago event, he will sometimes bend over backwards to prove that he has discovered something important.
The show Unsolved History had a group of professors who swept the Custer Battlefield with metal detectors. These guys claimed to have "disproven over a century of myth" regarding this fight. They claimed to have proven that there was no heroic last stand, because they found few empty shell casings on Last Stand Hill.
We proved these guys wrong right here on this forum. I hypothesized that souvenier hunters would have been picking up brass from Last Stand Hill, starting a few weeks after the battle.
Then, one forum member, I think Plains Scout, told of a guy he knew who had five gallon buckets full of brass and bullets that he had picked up from the Custer Battlefield.
There was one attempt at discovering historical truth that I knew about, which was successful.
The most successful sniper of WW2 was a Finn named Simo Haya. He killed around 530 Russians in the Winter War.
About five years ago, some American collectors, who hang around over on the gunboards forum, made a trip to Finland. They met with Simo Haya, and they went with him to some of the battlefields he had fought on. Haya would dig a foxhole about 500 yards from a Russian position, and he would fire 20 or 30 rounds. Then he would move on.
Sure enough, Haya located some of his Winter War foxholes. The Americans got the metal detector out, and they dug up quite a bit of Simo Haya's WW2 brass.
I got a confidential email from one of these guys, telling me to look out, because soon some of this brass would be available for purchase.
I would have love to have had one of those shells.
But, the Finnish govt. got wind of it, and started raising hell about "looting historical sites". The whole deal vaporized, and no one would talk about it.
See, these Americans take trips to Finland every few years to see the military museums, and the battle sites. They did not want to anger the Finnish government.