American Rifle - Alexander Rose [152]
Newspapermen and propagandists portrayed York as an everyday man and reduced him to a “Mountain Man” stereotype, but he was by no means an ordinary person, and neither was his heroism anything but highly individualistic. Far from being a run-of-the-mill American Rifleman, York was in fact a freak, a statistical outlier, a unique fingerprint among U.S. servicemen. Once York had satisfied himself that America’s duty was to punish Germany for her transgressions, the energy and devotion he had once applied first to boozing and carousing and then to his religious beliefs were diverted into a single-minded, unswerving willingness to kill without pause and without fear. Though he was kindhearted and charitable in peacetime, York’s character under fire knew nothing of temperance but was quick to anger and quicker to avenge. The fanatical, fearless combination of faith and violence lurking deep in York allowed him to switch off the usual human emotions when punishing unbelievers.
Idealistic progressives at home invested far too much in York’s example. General Pershing, however, schooled harshly on the Western Front, had learned otherwise and began calling for more training in “rapid fire” as the war continued. Though he still wished to distinguish his dough-boys from their Allied comrades, Pershing was also becoming aware that relying exclusively on the accuracy of the rifle would be suicidal. The French and British (and Germans, for that matter) had, after all, three years’ worth of grim experience in trench fighting and knew what it meant to launch an infantry assault across no-man’s-land and through bales of barbed wire against embedded machine guns. While Crossman over at Scientific American gloated that German recruits were never tested at ranges greater than 435 yards whereas American marksman could hit a dime at a thousand, Pershing soon realized the plain truth that little fighting, let alone sharpshooting, occurred at such extreme ranges. Artillery (the German 77mm shell burst into 500 lethal splinters) or machine guns (the .303 Vickers spat out 250 rounds per minute) were used for killing, not rifles.
Americans, in other words, were overskilled at long-distance shooting. True, they had a wonderful reputation for hitting their marks; a German report on the Marines noted the “high percentage of Marksmen, Sharpshooters, and Expert Riflemen” among them.24 But the vast majority of hits took place at short range, often randomly during an attack or a skirmish, and weren’t owed to a beautifully centered single shot.
Even when fine shooting was involved (as in the case of York), it usually occurred at typical Indian-fighting distances—not, as progressives at home imagined, at up to a thousand yards. Indeed, much of the fine shooting even at home was done at relatively close ranges, thus rendering parts of the American Rifleman image somewhat mythical. Back in Tennessee, when the locals had been competing against each other, they shot at targets at 40 yards “ef ye shot from a chunk” (a chunk being a rest, like the fork of a tree limb), but when shooting offhand (that is, standing and not using a rest) the ranges were set at roughly 27 yards.25 (An honorable exception was Davy Crockett, who averred that when he shot offhand, his preferred range was 40 yards, at which distance he could hit a quarter-dollar.)26 York himself, honest to a fault, told General Omar Bradley during the Second World War that “most of his effective shooting [during World War