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Dear Doug Collins

Henry Johnson: The Sentry Who Held the Post, and the 97 Years It Took to Honor Him

Henry Johnson did everything his country asked, in a war his country would not let him fight under its own command. On a single night in 1918 he held a forward outpost against a German raiding party, saved the man beside him, and took 21 wounds doing it. France decorated him almost immediately. The United States gave him nothing — no medal, no Purple Heart, no disability allowance — and then took ninety-seven years to say his name at the White House. This page is the documented record of what he did, what his own institution did about it afterward, and who carried his case when no one else would.

The service, and the promise

He was born William Henry Johnson in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and moved to New York as a teenager. He worked as a chauffeur, a soda mixer, a coal-yard laborer, and a redcap porter at Albany’s Union Station. On June 5, 1917, he enlisted and was assigned to Company C of the 15th New York (Colored) Infantry Regiment — an all-Black New York National Guard unit that would be redesignated the 369th Infantry Regiment, the “Harlem Hellfighters.”

The Army that took him was segregated to its core. Reflecting the discrimination of the society around it, American Expeditionary Forces leadership avoided placing African-American units alongside white Army units, in the Army’s own words — so General John J. Pershing assigned the 369th to fight under the French Army. The regiment spent its first months on supply and service labor, then entered the front-line trenches in the Champagne region on April 15, 1918, under the French Fourth Army. It would spend 191 days in the front line, longer than any other American regiment, earn a regimental French Croix de Guerre, and collect more than 170 individual Croix de Guerre medals.

The promise made to men like Henry Johnson was the same one made to every soldier who stands a night post: stand your ground, and your country will stand by you. What follows is what that promise looked like when it was tested — in both directions.

What happened — May 15, 1918

In the early morning hours of May 15, 1918, Privates Henry Johnson, 26, of Albany, and Needham Roberts, 17, of Trenton, stood sentry at a forward outpost near a bridge over the Aisne River at Bois d’Hauzy, northwest of Sainte-Menehould, at the western edge of the Argonne Forest. Around two in the morning they heard wire cutters on the perimeter fence. A German raiding party — at least 12 soldiers by the official Medal of Honor citation; Army and National Guard histories estimate 20 to 24 — had come to kill the outpost and drag prisoners back for intelligence on the all-Black American regiment.

Johnson opened a box of grenades and told Roberts to run back and alert the main line. Before Roberts could move, the first German grenades landed in their position. What happened next is established by Johnson’s official citation and the Army’s and New York National Guard’s histories of the fight:

By daylight Johnson had been wounded 21 times. His own account of the night, quoted by the New York National Guard, was plainer than any citation: “Each slash meant something, believe me. There wasn’t anything so fine about it. Just fought for my life. A rabbit would have done that.”

France’s answer came the next day. The French 16th Division’s orders, dated May 16, 1918, said Johnson “gave a magnificent example of courage and energy.” Johnson and Roberts were among the first American soldiers to receive the French Croix de Guerre, and Johnson’s carried the coveted Gold Palm for extraordinary valor. He was promoted to sergeant, and on February 17, 1919, he rode in an open car at the head of the 369th’s homecoming parade up Fifth Avenue, waving to the crowds. Theodore Roosevelt Jr. would call him one of the five bravest American soldiers of the war.

What the institution did afterward

Then his own country processed him out — and lost him in the paperwork. Johnson’s discharge records made no mention of his wounds or of the fight, and on the strength of that omission he was denied both a Purple Heart and a disability allowance, as the National Archives’ and Smithsonian’s accounts of his file both record. The only wound recognition of his lifetime, Army officials later acknowledged, was a wound chevron worn on his sleeve. The Army’s own biography concedes the result in one sentence: he “was unable to return to his pre-war porter position due to the severity of his 21 combat injuries.” His shattered left foot had been rebuilt around a metal plate. The standard accounts — Smithsonian Magazine’s history and the New York National Guard’s own — record that he could not hold steady work, that his family broke up, and that he died in July 1929, of myocarditis after tuberculosis, in a veterans hospital. For decades his family believed he had been buried in a pauper’s field outside Albany. He had in fact been buried at Arlington National Cemetery — Section 25, Site 64, under his birth name — and New York military historians did not locate the grave until 2001. In 2002 the man who had campaigned for him for years, Herman Johnson, stood at it and said: “Learning my father was buried in this place of national honor can be described in just one word — joyful.”

The recognition, when it finally moved, moved in a ladder — each rung decades apart, each one pushed from outside:

The case had been carried for decades by Albany advocates — the late John Howe foremost among them — by the New York National Guard, by Schumer’s office, and above all by Herman Johnson, a Tuskegee Airman in World War II who had grown up believing Henry Johnson was his father and spent his own later life fighting for the man’s honors. Herman died in 2005, ten years too early. Then, in 2015, the Army’s genealogical vetting of the award delivered a blow no one expected: researchers found that Herman’s birth certificate named a different man as his father. Henry Johnson had no direct descendants to receive the medal. The family that had carried his name for three generations attended the ceremony as the government’s guests, and the medal itself was placed in the hands of the institution that had finally, finally come around: Command Sgt. Maj. Louis Wilson of the New York National Guard — the senior enlisted leader of Johnson’s own Guard — accepted it from President Obama in the East Room. Wilson, a 39-year Guardsman, had said beforehand that his whole career “doesn’t come close” to what Johnson did in a day.

Obama named the reason for the delay out loud: Johnson and Sgt. William Shemin, honored beside him that day, had been judged — in the president’s words — “by the color of their skin and not the content of their character.” And he stated the arithmetic this section exists to record: “It has taken a long time for Henry Johnson and William Shemin to receive the recognition they deserve… The least we can do is to say: We know who you are. We know what you did for us. We are forever grateful.”

One correction belongs on this page, because this section is built from the record and the record, once researchers finally dug into it, corrected part of the legend. Some accounts long held that Johnson received no government support at all. The Army’s hired genealogist, Megan Smolenyak, found that was not quite true: Veterans Affairs records show a permanent and total disability rating granted on September 16, 1927 — for tuberculosis, in the last two years of his life — with compensation and VA medical visits after it. “He was struggling when he died,” Smolenyak concluded, “but not necessarily in poverty.” The correction does not acquit anyone. A man wounded 21 times in his country’s service was denied at discharge on a paperwork omission, and what the system eventually gave him arrived in 1927, not 1919 — close enough to his death to be a footnote, not a life.

Where it stands now

The account, as far as medals go, is closed. Johnson’s Medal of Honor is held at the War Room of the New York State Capitol in Albany, in the city he left as a porter. His grave at Arlington is marked and findable. Albany renamed a boulevard for him, raised his statue in Washington Park, and marks Henry Johnson Day each June with a community-service award in his name. The 369th’s story — and his — is now told by the Army, the Medal of Honor Society, and the National Guard that once misplaced his grave.

But notice what it took, because that is the pattern this site exists to document. The fight lasted one night. The medal took ninety-seven years, an act-of-Congress waiver, a 1,300-page resubmission, a senator’s staff finding a general’s memo on the internet, and a family that carried the case for decades — a family that turned out, at the very end, to have carried it for a man who was not their blood at all, and carried it anyway. France needed a day to see what Henry Johnson had done. His own institution needed a century, and other people’s stubbornness, to say so.

The ledger

Johnson is this section’s “finally accounted” exhibit — the one they finally got right, 97 years late. His fight is finished; his place on this list is the proof that an accounting can arrive even a century late.

What has been done

What has not been done

What is being sought

The record, on video

No camera was rolling at the Bois d’Hauzy outpost in 1918 — Johnson’s fight survives in citations, reports, and one lithograph, not film. What the record has instead is the day his country finally said it, and the tellings that followed. Six films: the ceremony, the Society’s portrait, two histories, a documentary on his regiment, and the ground where he lies.

The ceremony. The U.S. Army's film of the June 2, 2015 East Room ceremony: President Obama presents Johnson's Medal of Honor to Command Sgt. Maj. Louis Wilson, 97 years after the fight. (U.S. Army video.)

The Society's film. The Congressional Medal of Honor Society's own portrait of Johnson and the medal that took a century.

The telling. HISTORY's account of Johnson's fight and legacy — the battle, the wounds, and the long wait for his own country.

The regiment. Lucasfilm's documentary on the 369th — the segregated regiment Pershing handed to France, and the war it fought for 191 days.

The battle, examined. The Great War channel's centennial-era study of Johnson and the Hellfighters, from the wartime record.

Where he lies. Arlington National Cemetery's film on its own resident: Johnson, buried in Section 25, Site 64, under the name he was born with. (Arlington National Cemetery video.)

Sources

Further record

Part of Betrayed, Not Forgotten — this site's accounting for the service members and veterans their own institutions failed. Videos are embedded from their publishers; nothing here is re-hosted.