Mainsail
Member
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 Châtel-Chéhéry, 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 Châtel-Chéhéry, 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.”
