What Truly Shocked German Officers About America’s Junior Leaders

You have also been the bravest of our enemies and in fact the only ones who have attacked us seriously in this year’s battles. The chief of staff to General Khan, commander of the German Third Army, said those words to an American officer in the autumn of 1918. American army intelligence recorded the statement and in 1919 it was published filed among dozens of similar confessions extracted from German prisoners, clergymen and postmasters in a report almost no one has read since.

Candid comment on the American soldier of 1917 1918. It sounds like a compliment. It was not. It was a diagnosis. Vaninam’s chief of staff was not describing an army. He was describing corporals, lieutenants, sergeants who had held a rifle for exactly 6 months before someone handed them 11 other men and told them to hold a hill.

Junior leaders, the term the US Army used for the officers and non-commissioned officers who commanded at the level of the squad, the platoon, the company, the men closest to the mud and farthest from the map table. This is not the story your textbook told you about World War I. It is not a story about generals or trenches or poison gas as spectacle.

It is the story of what happened when the oldest, most rigid officer cast in Europe collided with the newest, most improvised one in the world and blinked first. Here is the paradox at the center of it. In 1917, German intelligence assessed the arriving American army as a joke. Farmers and clarks led by 90-day wonders, an amateur mob that would collapse under the discipline of professional soldiering.

14 months later, a German general’s own chief of staff called that mob the only army brave enough to attack him seriously. What happened in those 14 months has almost nothing to do with weapons and everything to do with what an American corporal was allowed expected to do. knew the moment his sergeant went down.

We going to tell you what happened in one ravine on one morning in October 1918. The German officers spent the rest of their lives trying to explain away. To understand why the collision happened, you have to understand the gap it crossed. Its officer core was a peacetime club. West Point men, career professionals, a few thousand strong.

Within 18 months, the American Expeditionary Force would field more than 2 million men in France. Someone had to lead them. There was no time to build a junker cast, no decades to season a professional NCO core the way Germany had built one since the wars of unification. The United States did something the German general staff considered close to reckless.

It took farmers, postal clarks, and college boys, gave them 90 days of officer training at camps like Platsburg, New York, and Fort Sheridan, Illinois, and sent them to command platoon of men only slightly less green than themselves. In the German army, the gap between an officer and the men he led was not just rank, it was cast.

The attitude of the American officer towards enlisted men is very different, a German soldier named Walter from the village of Minditkan told an American interrogator after the armistice. In our army, officers have always treated their men as cattle. Another German veteran, Anton Leos, a postal agent from Derno, put it more bluntly.

American troops lacked, in his words, the snap and precision of the German soldier. But the closeness between their officers and their men, he said, more than made up for the lack of iron discipline. Discipline without distance. That was the innovation nobody in Berlin had accounted for. Three men carry this story.

None of them knew each other before the autumn of 1918. Only one of them would still be alive years later to explain what had happened. If a story like this, one the official record kept but popular memory forgot, is new to you, that gap is exactly what this channel exists to close. Loving this video and subscribing to the settlement helps us keep pulling files like this out of the archive.

And if you know someone who still pictures the American soldier of 1918 as an anonymous doughboy in a faded photograph, send them this one. Alvin York, 30 years old, a farmer from Palmau, Tennessee, a hollow so remote it had no railroad. He had grown up shooting squirrels for the family table and grown into a devout, hard-drinking young man who found God at a revival meeting and put down the bottle for good.

When his draft notice came, York filed as a conscientious objector on religious grounds. The county draft board denied it. He went to war still wrestling by his own account with whether killing another man could ever be reconciled with his faith. He carried that argument with him into the Argon Forest. Samuel Woodfell, 35, born in a log cabin on the Ohio River in Indiana, was York’s opposite in almost every way.

Where York was a reluctant civilian soldier, Woodfell was a career man. 17 years in the peaceime regular army service in the Philippines, duty on the Mexican border, a marksman so precise that fellow soldiers said he could call his shots before he fired them. Quiet, methodical, unbothered by conscience or fame, First Lieutenant Woodfell commanded a company in the 60th Infantry Regiment, Fifth Division.

And on the other side of the wire, Paul Jurgen Wulmer, a German first lieutenant, recently given command of the first battalion, 120th Verteberg Laner Infantry Regiment, a battalion built from M and the towns around it. Veterans grinding through a fifth year of a war they no longer expected to win, but had not yet been ordered to stop fighting.

In 11 years, Wulmer would be summoned to a records office in Potam and asked formally on paper to explain what his battalion had allowed to happen on the morning of October 8th, 1918. He did not want to answer. We will return to what he said. The offensive that would put York, Woodfell, and Wulmer into the same square kilometer of forest began 3 weeks earlier.

September 26th, 1918, 5:30 a.m. The Mo Argon offensive opens along a 24- mile front between the Mo River and the Argon Forest. Over the next 47 days, more than 1.2 million American soldiers will pass through it. The largest single operation the United States Army has ever mounted, before or since.

By the time it ends, on the morning of the armistice, the American Expeditionary Force will have lost 26,277 men killed. Depending on which tally you trust, and the tall thies do not agree, another 95,000 to 120,000 will be wounded. Historians still argue over the exact total. What they do not argue over is this.

Nothing in American military history before or since has killed American soldiers faster. It is three trench systems layered one behind the other, machine guns cited to fire along the ravines instead of across open ground, artillery pre-registered on every crossroads and clearing. The Argon Forest itself is a maze of ridges and gullies barely mapped by anyone who has not already bled in it.

American units lose contact with each other within minutes of advancing. Runners die carrying messages between them. Radios do not exist at platoon level. What exists instead is a sergeant, a corporal, a lieutenant, and whatever decision he makes alone in the dark with no one left to ask. October 7th, 1918. The 82nd division pushes into the high ground north of the village of Shatel Shaheri.

By morning, the advance has stalled. German machine guns on a ridge the Americans call hill 2223. And on a rise beyond it, the Germans call Shona Ot, the beautiful view, are cutting the valley in half. A patrol of 17 men is ordered to work around the German flank and silence the guns. Command of the patrol falls to Sergeant Bernard Early.

Corporal Alvin York is one of 17. October 8, 6:00 a.m. The patrol moves out in fog and drizzle. By midm morning, it has slipped behind the German position undetected and stumbled almost by accident into a small headquarters group, a German major, a handful of staff, breakfast halfeaten on a table. The Americans capture them without firing a shot.

It is the last quiet moment of the morning. The gunfire starts almost immediately after. German machine guns on the slope above, guns the patrol did not know were there, open up on the 17 Americans and their prisoners from close range. In the first burst, six Americans are killed and three are wounded, early among them. The chain of command that began the morning with a sergeant now runs in the space of perhaps 90 seconds through every man standing until it reaches a corporal from Fentress County, Tennessee, who has never given an order to anyone in his

life. Eight Americans remain standing around them on the high ground more than 200 Germans. York does not order a retreat because there is nowhere to retreat to. He tells the other seven men to guard the prisoners. He takes the machine guns himself. What follows is described in the flat language of the afteraction report as engaging the enemy.

What it looked like from the German side was a single American rifleman working a hillside the way a man silences an alarm one bell at a time. York had spent his boyhood shooting squirrels out of trees at ranges the other boys in Fentress County could not manage. The method, take the farthest target first, work forward, never let the nearest man see you aim before he falls, was the same method now aimed at machine gun crews 30 yards away.

A German officer breaks from a trench and charges York’s position with a pistol, firing five rounds and missing everyone. York drops him with a single shot as the man closes to within a few feet the same discipline of aim under pressure that had minutes earlier dropped machine gunners a 100 yards out. Six German soldiers rise from a trench and charge with fixed bayonets, hoping simple numbers will do what marksmanship could not.

York, working left to right the way he had learned to drop a line of running squirrels before the front one hit the ground, kills the rearmost man first and works forward. So the men ahead do not see their comrades falling behind them and do not break stride until it is too late. It is at this point that Lieutenant Paul Wulmer, watching his battalion disintegrate from a position he cannot fully see, makes a decision that will define the rest of his life.

He offers to surrender the position to one man whom he still believes must be backed by a company he simply cannot see through the trees. York accepts. He does not know yet how many men are about to file past him. The march back to American lines becomes its own kind of proof. Lieutenant Joseph Woods watching the column pass counts the prisoners as they go by.

Two a breast disarmed guarded by eight riflemen and a corporal who has just fired by his own later estimate roughly 35 aimed shots without a wasted round. The count reaches 32 German soldiers, more prisoners than there were Americans left standing to guard them several times over. 4 days later, 12 mi east, the same offensive produces its second impossible morning.

October 12th, near the village of Kunel, First Lieutenant Samuel Woodfield’s company is pinned in open ground by three separate German machine gun positions, each one covering the others, the classic defense in depth the German army had spent four years perfecting. German gas shells have already put mustard agent into the low ground his men are crossing.

Woodfill himself is showing the first burn of it in his lungs and eyes. He does not wait for it to get worse. Alone ahead of his own company, Woodfell crosses open ground under direct fire and takes the first machine gun nest with his rifle, killing the crew. He moves to the second, killing that crew too. At the third position, his rifle runs dry and his pistol jams.

A soldier’s two worst possible failures arriving at the same moment in front of the same gun. Woodfill picks up an entrenching tool lying in the mud, a pickaxe, the plain iron tool his men had been issued to dig their own graves in the ground if it came to that, and finishes the third crew with it, handto hand in a trench 3 ft wide.

He leads his company through the gap he has just cut. Not one of his men dies doing it. We promise to return to Wulma. In 1929, 11 years and a lost war later, a German government records office in Potam formally requested that he provide a written account of what had happened at Chhatel Shahari for the historical record.

Vulmer did not want to give it. He delayed, ignored the first request and was pressed again before he finally sat for the statement. What he insisted on repeatedly was that a larger American force must have been involved, that eight riflemen and a corporal could not have taken a battalion, and that somewhere in the confusion of that morning, there had to have been more of them than the record showed. There were not.

The German army’s own casualty and prisoner roles cross-checked decades later against American unit records, confirm the number Lieutenant Woods counted walking past him on the road. Wulma was not simply lying. He was doing what any officer trained inside a rigid hierarchy does when the hierarchy fails to explain what he watched happen.

He looked for the missing battalion because the alternative that eight men led by a corporal exercising a level of independent judgment no German enlisted soldier of 1918 was trained or permitted to exercise had simply outfought and outthought him. Did not fit inside anything the creeks academia had taught him about how wars were won.

Two mornings, two ravines, two men who had never met. No orders from above, no time to ask. A corporal who had almost refused to carry a rifle at all. A lieutenant with a pick instead of a gun. Roughly 35 shots. 132 Germans marched out for every eight Americans left standing. Three machine gun nests, one pickaxe.

Not one American casualty behind Woodfill. This is not a legend. It is a headcount. Neither man celebrated. There is no photograph of York smiling on the walk back from Hill 223. only the flat rungout look of a man doing arithmetic he does not want to do again. York would tell interviewers for the rest of his life that he had prayed while he fired, that he had aimed to disable where disabling would stop a man, and that killing an estimated 25 of the enemy that morning, a number separate from and additional two the 32 captured, was not a thing he was proud

It was, he said, a thing the war had required of him. Woodfill said, even less. He filed his report, went back to his company, and by his own account, thought no more of it until his commanding officer told him he was being put in for the Medal of Honor. General John J. Persing, commanding the entire American Expeditionary Force, wrote the citation into his own official report of the war.

Outstanding was the heroism of Lieutenant Samuel Woodfell, fifth division, in attacking single-handed a series of German machine gun nests near Kunel and killing the crews of each in turn until reduced to the necessity of assaulting the last detachment with a pick, dispatching them all. Persing would later call Woodfill privately the outstanding soldier of the American Expeditionary Force, a designation he did not hand out twice.

Both men received the Medal of Honor. Neither man asked for a parade. The numbers around them stayed grim regardless of what either man did. The Muse Argon offensive ground on for another month after Chhatel Shaheri and Kunel through rain, through mud that swallowed wagons to the axle, through German counterattacks that gave back ground exactly as slowly as it had been taken. Of the roughly 1.

2 million Americans who passed through the offensive, more than 26,000 did not survive it. The German line York and Woodfield’s regiments were fighting to open did not fully collapse for another 5 weeks. And it collapsed in the end, not because one German unit failed, but because dozens of German battalion and company commanders across a front of dozens of miles kept discovering the same thing.

WMA discovered in his ravine that the men across from them would not stop coming, would not wait for permission, and would not retreat simply because the manual said they should be losing. York went home to Pal Mall in 1919, refused a string of commercial endorsements that would have made him wealthy, and spent the next seven years raising money, one small donation at a time, to build a school.

In 1926, he broke ground on the Alvin C. York Agricultural Institute meant to give children in his own isolated hollow, the high school education he himself had never received. Classes began in 1929, the same year Wulma sat for his statement in Potam, though neither man ever knew of the others year. York handed the school to the state of Tennessee in 1937 once its finances outgrew what he could raise alone.

He suffered a stroke in 1948, further strokes through the 1950s, and spent his final decade largely confined to bed. He died on September 2nd, 1964 at a Veterans Hospital in Nashville. Woodfill’s postwar years were harder and quieter. The peaceime army had little use for a 40-year-old company grade officer with no interest in publicity, and he drifted between assignments toward obscurity and financial hardship.

When the United States entered a second world war in 1941, the army, short on genuine legends to put in front of new recruits, briefly recommissioned Woodfill, by then approaching 60, as a symbolic training officer. He died on August 10th, 1951 in Vet, Indiana, and was buried in a local cemetery. It took a sympathetic congressman four more years to get him moved to Arlington where he belonged.

He had already been there once in a manner of speaking. On November 11th, 1921, General Persing personally selected a small group of the most decorated soldiers of the war to escort the casket of the unknown soldier to its tomb at Arlington. Samuel Woodfell was one of them. So was Alvin York. So was Charles Whittley, who had commanded the lost battalion in that same Argon forest and would take his own life 18 days later, unable to carry what he had seen.

Three junior officers from three different mornings of the same offensive, standing together over a grave built specifically to hold a name no one would ever know because the war had produced too many stories like theirs to fit them all into the history books, and someone had to represent the ones who went unrecorded. Of Wulmer, the American record simply goes quiet.

He gave his reluctant statement in 1929, and the trail, so far as the surviving archives tell it, ends there. Ask most people today what they know about the American soldier of the First World War, and you will get a shrug or a half-remembered image from a black and white news reel, or if they know anything at all, a garbled version of the York story lifted from a 1941 Hollywood film that trimmed the reluctant, conscientious objector and the plain arithmetic of 35 shots down into something closer to a folktale.

Hollywood needed a hero with no doubts. The historical record inconveniently gives us a man who spent the whole war arguing with his own conscience and answered the argument with a rifle he never stopped being uneasy about using so well. Woodfill fell out of memory faster still. No film, no legend, just a pick left in a trench and a citation filed under a general’s name instead of his own.

Even the German side of the story sat mostly untouched for the better part of a century. filed in a records office in Potam that few American historians ever had reason to open until researchers began cross-referencing German unit diaries against American afteraction reports and found that the two sides independently arrived at the same impossible number.

What survived in the end was not the myth. It was the paperwork. A chief of staff’s grudging tribute recorded for American Army intelligence in 1919. A Medal of Honor citation written in a commanding general’s own hand. a reluctant German lieutenant statement extracted 11 years after the fact that could not quite bring itself to say plainly what it was describing.

Historians did the rest, piecing together from three separate and unglamorous archives a story that neither government particularly wanted remembered. Ordinary men outperforming a system built by professionals. The only ones who have attacked us seriously in this year’s battles. Voninam’s chief of staff meant it in 1918 as a tribute to an army.

He had no way of knowing he was actually describing a corporal from a hollow with no railroad and a lieutenant with a pickaxe and the eight men and one battalion between them who had simply refused to wait for someone with more rank to tell them what to do next. Armies do not attack seriously. Men do one machine gun at a time when no one is left above them to ask permission.

That was the discovery the German army made in the autumn of 1918. It is the discovery this channel exists to keep making one forgotten name at a time.