American Samurai Vol:2
Sgt. York and the heroes journey
Alvin York was just a simple farmer and blacksmith from the hills of Tennessee. From this simple beginning, Alvin would be thrust into the pantheon of American mythological heroes by WWI. His journey would take him from the backwoods of Tennessee to the fields of France and back. Alvin’s story is not a myth, yet the journey was mythological so mythological in fact we might call it the archetypal hero adventure. Before we go making grandiose claims we should refamiliarize ourselves with the quintessential expert on the heroic and comparative mythology Mr. Joseph Campbell.
Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces was published in 1949 it is a work of comparative mythology in which Campbell compares the mythological journeys of archetypal heroes across cultures. Campbell’s book summarized these stories into a monomyth that he dubs the “hero’s adventure”. For Campbell, the hero’s adventure has seventeen steps.
The Call to Adventure
Refusal of the Call
Supernatural Aid
The Crossing of the First Threshold
Belly of the Whale
The Road of Trials
The Meeting with the Goddess
Woman as the Temptress
Atonement with the Father
Apotheosis
The Ultimate Boon
Refusal of the Return
The Magic Flight
Rescue from Without
The Crossing of the Return Threshold
Master of the Two Worlds
Freedom to Live
I know that’s a lot of criteria to meet for Alvin York but luckily Campbell gives our hero an out. The hero does not have to meet all seventeen steps or even complete them in order. In Alvin’s case, we are going to look at nine steps following three acts (I. Departure, II. Initiation, III. Return).
The Call to Adventure
Refusal of the Call
Supernatural Aid
The Crossing of the First Threshold
Belly of the Whale
The Road of Trials
The Ultimate Boon
The Crossing of the Return Threshold
Freedom to Live
Act I: Supernatural aid/ Call to adventure/ Refusal of the call.
Our hero comes from humble beginnings. Alvin was born in a small cabin in Tennessee. The third of eleven children, he grew poor with a farmer and part-time blacksmith for a father. His father died when he was young and Alvin took up the mantle of provider, and by all accounts, he was good at keeping his family fed and clothed. Alvin had another side. He was a violent drunk. His drunken brawls even left his best friend dead and he spent time in and out of jail. But where would our story be without a little redemption?
Super Natural Aid:
Alvin was struck by lighting his road to Damascus moment had come. Alvin ran straight to the church repented of his sins and was a changed man. Well, that’s how it happened in the film Sergeant York. In real life, Alvin’s mother and wife spend years witnessing to him until he eventually saw the light and dedicated his life to Christ. He repudiated his life of violence and choose pacifism and a life of quiet farming.
God has a funny habit of having different plans for us than we have for ourselves. While Alvin wanted to lay low and farm, life sent him a draft notice, he was going to France.
Call to adventure/Refusal of the call:
Alvin’s call to adventure was world war one, this poor farm boy from Tennessee was being sent to France to fight and kill Germans. That was a problem because Alvin had just promised he was going to stop doing both of those things. Uncle Sam had different plans so Alvin sought conscientious objector status on religious grounds which he was granted. See back in WWI if you were a conscientious objector you still had to serve in the Army and Alvin was a man of his word and refused to seek discharge from the Army.
So Alvin unwilling to fight but willing to serve Alvin was sent to France.
Act II: Crossing the first threshold/Belly of the Whale/Road of trials
Alvin entered the belly of the whale or as it is commonly called Company G, 328th Infantry, 82nd Division of the U.S. Army. In France, Alvin began to speak with his company commander, Captain Edward Courtney Bullock Danforth Jr., and his battalion commander, Major G. Edward Buxton. The result of these conversations was a change of heart. Alvin came to the conclusion that he could in fact fight and so was sent to the front lines of the Argonne.
We pause here to take a moment to remind those of just how bad The Meuse-Argonne offensive was. It was the largest frontline commitment of troops by the U.S. Army in World War I, and also its deadliest. Between September 26 – November 11, 1918, some 1.2 million French and American troops did battle with 450,00 Germans. The result was an allied victory but at the cost of 122,063 dead or wounded Americans, 70,000 French casualties, and 126,000 German casualties. This is the belly of the whale where Alvin would face his road of trials.
Belly of the Whale / Road of Trials.
October 8, 1918, Alvin and his unit were tasked with taking a German machine gun nest near hill 223. The German machine guns had stopped the Americans dead in their tracks. Alvin would later recall.
Our boys just went down like the long grass before the mowing machine at home. Our attack just faded out … And there we were, lying down, about halfway across [the valley] and those German machine guns and big shells getting us hard
Corporal York, four NCO’s and thirteen Privates were ordered to infiltrate the German lines to take out the machine guns. York and his men managed to infiltrate behind enemy lines and overran a group of Germans preparing to attack U.S. troops. While handling the prisoner, a German Machine gun opened up on them. In an instant six Americans were dead and three wounded. York described the events later.
And those machine guns were spitting fire and cutting down the undergrowth all around me something awful. And the Germans were yelling orders. You never heard such a racket in all of your life. I didn't have time to dodge behind a tree or dive into the brush … As soon as the machine guns opened fire on me, I began to exchange shots with them. There were over thirty of them in continuous action, and all I could do was touch the Germans off just as fast as I could. I was sharp shooting … All the time I kept yelling at them to come down. I didn't want to kill any more than I had to. But it was they or I. And I was giving them the best I had.
York fought his way to the machine gun at times relying on his side arm to do the job. York managed to reach the machine gun and began to pick the Germans off one by one. Eventually, Imperial German Army First Lieutenant Paul Jürgen Vollmer, emptied his pistol trying to put an end to York. Failing to so much as wound York, and realizing his mounting losses, he offered in English to surrender to York
York and seven men then marched 132 Germans back to American lines. Upon his return Brigadier General Julian Robert Lindsey, remarked: "Well York, I hear you have captured the whole German army. " Famously York replied: "No sir. I got only 132."
Act III: Crossing the Return Threshold/ Freedom to Live/ Ultimate Boon
Alvin returned home in the spring of 1919 and soon after found himself in the national spotlight. His story was circulated around the country as the marketability of a soft-spoken simple man from the country was realized. Alvin refused offers to profit from his new fame and instead retired to a simple life of farming.
Freedom to Live.
Alvin formed the Alvin C. York Foundation which was geared toward increasing educational opportunities for children in rural Tennessee. Alvin did speaking tours to raise money for his foundation. Audiences were left wanting as York chose not to speak about his time in the Argonne. York when asked to speak out about the war said
"I occupied one space in a fifty-mile front. I saw so little it hardly seems worthwhile discussing it. I'm trying to forget the war in the interest of the mountain boys and girls that I grew up among."
The York Foundation would not survive the Great Depression and he would spend the rest of his life working in various government jobs. He would campaign for U.S. involvement in WWII and try to enlist when the war came through at fifty-four he was too old. Alvin and his wife Gracie had ten children over the course of their marriage. Alvin would go on to live a relatively quiet life until his death on September 2, 1964.
Ultimate Boon.
Indestructible life or limitless bounty is what Campbell calls Ultimate Boon. For Alvin York, this comes in the form of the myth that surrounds him. He would be the subject of the highest-grossing film of 1941 starring Gary Cooper as York (a role that would win Cooper the Oscar). For York, his heroic feats in the Argonne Forrest live on, they live long past his life on earth. Earning him a place in the pantheon of the U.S. Armies stored history.
Alvin’s Monomyth
Joseph Campbell’s monomyth that condensed the epic tales from across time and culture was lived by Alvin York. While his life followed a universal heroic path complete with redemption and divine intervention. His story is uniquely American. Alvin York was shaped by the distinctive conditions of the Appalachian hills. The grit and determination cultivate from a life of subsistence farming kept Alvin going. The spiritual confidence fashioned from the evangelical tradition rendered the fear of death as nothing more than a whisper. The masterful use of M1903 to dilute German resistance to the equivalent of a turkey shoot. These are all traits crafted by the American experience making Alvin’s hero’s journey extraordinarily American.
As Campbell and others have shown the hero’s journey has a formulaic nature. The long and arduous path from a self-effacing mortal man to a heroic demigod is marked by a set of challenges where the would-be hero faces adversity and loss, is cast into the belly of a whale, baptized by the fires of combat, touches the divine and returns home born again.
Alvin York lived the hero’s journey. His life was as real as yours and mine. Yet he walked the path of the mythological heroes of old. Alvin heeded the call to adventure that drew him from the hills of Tennessee. Crossing the threshold into a war-torn France. Enduring the road of trials where he faced death in the Argonne Forest. Finally returning home and discovering the freedom to live a normal life and raise a family. In the end, the ultimate boon, his memory lives on forever in the halls of the heroic, worthy in its own way of standing next to the likes of Odysseus or Beowulf. For every young boy whose imagination turns sticks to rifles, there the mythological spirit of Sargent York lives.
-TJ Slaughter
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