BETRAYED BY THE VA Thomas Alan Bowman Sr. asked his country for help. He got silence. Sign the demand →
Dear Doug Collins

William Shemin: The Sergeant Who Kept Going Back, and the 97 Years It Took to Say So

William Shemin did everything his country asked, and then he did the thing no order can produce: three times in three days, he left cover and crossed an open field under machine-gun fire to carry wounded men back, and when his officers were down he took command of the platoon himself. His Army decorated him for it — with its second-highest medal, and no explanation of why the highest one was not his. This page is the documented record of what he did at the Vesle River in 1918, what his institution did about it afterward, and who carried his case when no one else would: his daughter, for more than a decade, until she had changed the law itself.

The service, and the promise

William Shemin was born on October 14, 1896, in Bayonne, New Jersey, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. He played semi-pro baseball as a teenager, graduated from the New York State Ranger School in 1914, and worked as a forester in Bayonne. When the United States entered the First World War, he enlisted in the Army on October 2, 1917. By President Obama’s telling at the 2015 ceremony, he had lied about his age to get in.

After basic training at Camp Greene, North Carolina, Shemin was assigned as a rifleman to Company G, 2nd Battalion, 47th Infantry Regiment, 4th Division, American Expeditionary Forces. The division arrived in France in May 1918. Shemin fought in the Aisne-Marne Offensive, the great Allied counterstroke of that summer — and it is there, along a small river in northern France, that his record was made.

His daughter Elsie would later explain what America meant to the son of immigrants who had fled the pogroms, in words the president quoted back to her in the East Room: “His family lived through the pogroms. They saw towns destroyed and children killed. And then, they came to America. And here they found a haven, a home, success… That’s what America meant to him. And that’s why he’d do anything for this country.”

The promise made to men like William Shemin was the same one made to every soldier in the line: do the bravest thing, and your country will call it by its name. What follows is what that promise looked like when it was tested — in both directions.

What happened — August 7–9, 1918

In the first week of August 1918, Shemin’s regiment held ground near Bazoches, France, on the Vesle River. The trenches faced each other across roughly 150 yards of open space — in President Obama’s words, “a bloodbath. Soldier after soldier ventured out, and soldier after soldier was mowed down.”

What happened next is established by Shemin’s official Medal of Honor citation:

One of his officers, Capt. Rupert Purdon, put the first crossing in words that have followed Shemin ever since: “With the most utter disregard for his own safety, (Shemin) sprang from his position in his platoon trench, dashed out across the open in full sight of the Germans, who opened and maintained a furious burst of machine gun and rifle fire.”

The wound that ended it on August 9 was shrapnel, and a machine-gun bullet that pierced his helmet and lodged behind his left ear. It left him partially deaf. He was hospitalized for three months, then served on light duty with the Army of Occupation in Germany and Belgium. He received the Purple Heart for his wounds, and he was honorably discharged in August 1919.

What the institution did afterward

For the action itself, the Army awarded Shemin the Distinguished Service Cross, its second-highest decoration for valor, on December 29, 1919. At least one of his superiors had recommended him for the Medal of Honor — Capt. Purdon’s testimony supported the higher award, and a Distinguished Service Cross recommendation in the family’s possession stated that Shemin’s actions were worthy of the Medal of Honor. The higher award did not come. And — this is the documented core of the case — no explanation was ever given. Military Times’ account of the record states it flatly: “There was never an explanation of why he was denied the Medal of Honor.”

Shemin himself did not make a grievance of it. His daughter has said, on the record, that her father was fully satisfied with the Distinguished Service Cross: “He wanted only to serve his country.” His granddaughter Sara has said he never believed he had been discriminated against. He went home, earned a forestry degree at Syracuse University, started a greenhouse and landscaping business in the Bronx, married Bertha, and raised three children. When the Second World War came, he asked the Army to take him again — limp and all — and was told his service was his business and his family. He died in Syracuse on August 15, 1973, buried in Baron Hirsch Cemetery on Staten Island: a Distinguished Service Cross holder, and, as far as the official record went, finished.

His daughter saw the file differently. Elsie Shemin-Roth has recounted sitting on the front porch at twelve while her father’s Army buddy Jim Pritchard — who had been in the trenches beside him — told her: “Elsie, you’re old enough to know that your father never got the medal he deserved because he was a Jew.” She ran to her father, who told her antisemitism and discrimination were a way of life in the Army back then — and never dwelled on it. She dwelled on it for him.

This page states the next part plainly, because the record requires it: the claim that antisemitism caused the denial is an attribution — made by Shemin’s daughter, supported by his comrade’s account, and shared by the reviewers and legislators who took up the case. It is not a finding of fact by any Army board. No board ever investigated the 1919 decision or pronounced on its motive; no explanation for it exists in the record at all. What the record establishes is the outcome — a superior’s Medal of Honor recommendation that produced the second-highest medal instead — the silence that followed, and President Obama’s measured words in 2015: Shemin “served at a time when the contributions and heroism of Jewish Americans in uniform were too often overlooked.”

What blocked correction for most of a century was not an argument. It was a missing door. In the 2002 defense authorization, Congress had ordered reviews of valor awards to Jewish and other minority veterans of the Second World War, Korea, and Vietnam, to find men denied the Medal of Honor through prejudice. No review mechanism existed for the First World War. In the early 2000s, Elsie Shemin-Roth learned of those reviews and found her father’s war was not in them. She gathered his records, photographs, commendations, and firsthand accounts; enlisted her congressman, U.S. Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer of Missouri, and the state’s senators; and, guided through the Pentagon by retired Army Col. Erwin Burtnick of the Jewish War Veterans of the U.S.A., she pushed for the door itself: a law.

The law came in two steps. The standalone bill — the William Shemin Jewish World War I Veterans Act (H.R. 5371, 111th Congress) — was enacted as Section 595 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012: the Army and Navy secretaries were directed to review the records of Jewish-American World War I veterans who had received the Distinguished Service Cross or Navy Cross, and to recommend an upgrade where the record warranted it. In December 2012, Rep. Luetkemeyer submitted the request to upgrade Shemin’s cross under that review.

The ladder, rung by rung:

On June 2, 2015, in the East Room, President Barack Obama presented the medal posthumously, accepted by his daughters Elsie Shemin-Roth and Ina Bass, 86 and 83 that day. He shared the ceremony with the other man on this site’s accounting whose wait matched his almost to the year: Pvt. Henry Johnson of the Harlem Hellfighters, his medal accepted by Command Sgt. Maj. Louis Wilson of the New York National Guard because Johnson had no living descendants. Shemin became the 4th Infantry Division’s first Medal of Honor recipient for actions in the First World War.

Obama addressed Elsie directly: “Well, Elsie, as much as America meant to your father, he means even more to America… But William Shemin saved American lives. He represented our Nation with honor. And so it is my privilege, on behalf of the American people, to make this right and finally award the Medal of Honor to Sergeant William Shemin.” Elsie’s own verdict, in the eleven words she chose: “Discrimination hurts. A wrong has been made right. All is forgiven.”

Where it stands now

The account, as far as medals go, is closed — and it closed the way this section’s accounts close when they close at all: because a family member refused to accept that the paperwork was the verdict. The fight lasted three days in 1918. The correction took a daughter’s campaign of more than a decade, a statute named for her father, a formal review, and ninety-seven years.

The two families honored that day have not let the pairing lapse. In August 2018 the Shemin family traveled to the French battlefields where Shemin and Johnson fought — and, holding that Johnson had no family of his own to stand for him, Elsie arranged for soldiers of Johnson’s regiment, the 369th, to be represented on the trip. His story is now carried by the Army, by the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, by Syracuse University, which counts him its first and only Medal of Honor graduate, and by a family biography, The Ivy Hero (2022), whose authors made a rule of their project: whenever they tell William Shemin’s story, they tell Henry Johnson’s too.

But notice what it took, because that is the pattern this site exists to document. No foreign army decorated William Shemin within days, the way France decorated Henry Johnson. His own Army saw what he did, wrote it down, recommended its highest honor — and then, for reasons it never recorded, gave him its second-highest and moved on. The mechanism that finally corrected it did not exist until his daughter demanded Congress build one for a war nearly a century past. The correction was not the institution auditing itself. It was an 86-year-old woman who had carried a sentence spoken on a porch when she was twelve, all the way into the East Room.

The ledger

Shemin is this section’s second “finally accounted” exhibit — the one they finally got right, 97 years late. His fight is finished, as Henry Johnson’s is; the two medals were presented in the same ceremony, on the same morning. His place here is proof that an accounting can arrive even a century late — and a record of what it costs when the only review mechanism is a daughter.

What has been done

What has not been done

What is being sought

The record, on video

No camera was rolling at the Vesle River in 1918 — Shemin’s fight survives in a citation, an officer’s testimony, and his family’s keeping, 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, the National Guard’s feature, Elsie’s press conference, the Pentagon induction, and the evening news of the day.

The ceremony. The Army's film of the June 2, 2015 East Room ceremony: President Obama presents the medal to Shemin's daughters, 97 years after the Vesle River. (U.S. Army video.)

The Society's film. The Congressional Medal of Honor Society's portrait of Shemin, his life and his medal recounted by his daughter Elsie Shemin-Roth.

The telling. The 131st Bomb Wing's feature on Shemin's story — the rescues, the lesser medal, and the daughter who learned why at twelve. (131st Bomb Wing video.)

The carrier, in her own words. Elsie Shemin-Roth's St. Louis press conference ahead of the ceremony, on the father who said his war was never about medals. (U.S. Army video.)

Into the Hall of Heroes. The Army's film of the June 3, 2015 Pentagon induction of Shemin and Johnson, the day after the White House ceremony. (U.S. Army video.)

The news, the day it happened. CBS Evening News, June 2, 2015: both World War I heroes awarded the Medal of Honor, nearly a century on. (CBS Evening News.)

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.