On Oct. 8, 1918, while serving on the Western Front, Army Cpl. Alvin C. York led a charge against a German machine-gun position during World War I, which resulted in 20 enemy casualties attributed to York alone, and the capture of 132 German soldiers.
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He did it with just seven men.
York grew up near the Tennessee–Kentucky border, the third of 11 children in a family that subsisted on hunting and farming, making York a skilled marksman. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, York was drafted into the Army after being denied conscientious-objector status, which allows an individual to defer military service based on freedom of thought, conscience, or religion — he became a Christian fundamentalist two years earlier.
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