Alvin C. York
Old Paths Bible Ministries © 2007 Richard St.James
God In American History
Sergeant Alvin C. York
The Testimony
After the WAR to end all WARS, Alvin C. York, America’s all time war hero ascribed to GOD his exploit in France’s Argonne Forest in World War I. The supernatural explanation Alvin gives is as follows:
“Some of them officers have been saying that I being a mountain boy and
accustomed to woods and nature done all these things the right way jes
by instinct, like an animal when it is cornered. There may be something
in that. I hain’t never got much larnin’ from books, except the Bible.
Maybe my instincts is more natural than of men who ain’t brunged up like
I was in the woods and in the mountains. But that ain’t enough to
account for the way I come out alive, with all those German soldiers and
machine guns raining death on me.
I am willing to admit that maybe I had I had all the breaks, and them
right. Jes the same, there was something else. There had to be something
more than man power in that fight to save me. There can’t no man in the
world make me believe there weren’t. And I’m a-telling you the hand of
God must have been in that fight. It surely must have, been the divine
power that brought me out. No other power under heaven could save a man
in a place like that. Men were killed on both sides of me and all around
me and I was the biggest and the most exposed of all. Jes think of them
thirty machine guns raining fire on me p’int-blank from a range of only
twenty-five yards and all them-there rifles and pistols besides, those
bombs, and then those men that charged with fixed bayonets, and I never
receiving a scratch, and bringing in one hundred and thirty-two
prisioners.
I have got only one explanation to offer, and only one: without the help of God I jes couldn’t have done it. There can be no arguments about that.” Alvin sums it this way. “So I am a witness to the fact that God did help me out of that hard battle; for the bushes were shot off all around me and I never got a scratch. So you can see that God will be with you if you will only trust him and I say that He did save me --------. Now He will save you if you will only trust Him.” 1
Quotation 1. Sergeant York and the Great War, His Own Life Story and War Diary. (Originally edited by Tom Skeyhill 1930.) Edited by Richard “Little Bear” Wheeler, Mantle Ministries and The Vision Forum, Inc., 2004. Page 181-182. Return to Alvin C. York Menu
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