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Lions of the Argonne
Lions of the Argonne tells the intertwined stories of these two real men as they move from radically different worlds toward the day that will bind their lives together. York, a gifted marksman and deeply religious Tennessee farmer, enters the Great War struggling to reconcile his Christian faith with the terrible necessity of killing. Across the Atlantic, Vollmer and his Württemberg comrades march to war in 1914 expecting a short and glorious campaign, only to endure four years of artillery, machine guns, hunger, friendship, love, loss, and disillusionment.
Author Bio
Douglas V. Mastriano, Ph.D., is an award-winning military historian, author, combat veteran, retired U.S. Army colonel, former professor at the U.S. Army War College, and Pennsylvania state senator. He is the author of Alvin York: A New Biography of the Hero of the Argonne (University Press of Kentucky, 2014) and Thunder in the Argonne: A New History of America’s Greatest Battle (University Press of Kentucky, 2018), and co-editor of Pershing’s Lieutenants: American Military Leadership in World War I (Bloomsbury/Osprey, 2020).
Mastriano’s research into Alvin York and the October 8, 1918 action in the Argonne Forest has spanned nearly twenty years and included extensive American and German archival research, battlefield investigation, and archaeology in France. His work contributed to the establishment of the Sergeant York Historic Trail in the Argonne Forest. Fluent in German after living in Germany for approximately ten years, he has worked extensively with German sources and the history of the Württemberg soldiers who confronted York.
Mastriano holds a Ph.D. in history and served as a professor at the U.S. Army War College. During his military career, he served as a U.S. Army officer and combat veteran and retired at the rank of colonel. His military, academic, and historical work has included extensive battlefield study and more than one hundred battlefield staff rides. His historical scholarship and writing have received the William E. Colby Award, Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Award, Carder Family Book Prize, U.S. Army War College Madigan Award, and Army War College Foundation Writing Award. Mastriano has presented his historical research on C-SPAN and at the National WWI Museum and Memorial, Association of the United States Army, Army Navy Club in Washington, D.C., U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center, and venues throughout the United States and Europe. He has extensive experience with television, radio, podcasts, public lectures, historical presentations, and battlefield interpretation