The Never-ending Battle of Henry Johnson

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It was a clear day in New York City, February 1919.

The winter sun shone down warmly on masses of people lining both sides of Fifth Avenue.

The parade route was seven miles long, and they were cheering crowds along every inch of it.

People were jostling for a peek at thousands of soldiers who were marching uptown in perfect military formation.

These men were just back from the most apocalyptic conflict the world had ever seen.

World War I.

The Great War, as they called it back then.

The men were wearing dark wool uniforms and steel helmets.

The bayonets of their rifles gleamed in the sun.

Some of the men were shell-shocked.

Some were exhausted.

All of them were grateful to have made it back home.

And all the men were black.

They were known as the Harlem Hellfighters, the 369th Infantry Regiment of the United States Army.

This parade was their triumphant return to New York City, the city that had given them their unofficial name.

In 1919, troops were still segregated.

Discrimination wasn't confined to the Jim Crow South, it reached all the way to the trenches on the European front.

But the Harlem Hellfighters were some of the most highly decorated soldiers in the Great War.

They had seen 191 days of combat, the longest of any regiment, and they had never had a man taken prisoner or lost a foot of ground.

There were more than 2,000 Harlem Hellfighters in that parade, all of them heroes.

But there's one in particular that I want to tell you about.

His name was Henry Johnson, but as he rode past, the spectators called out to him by his nickname, Black Death.

Of all the Harlem Hellfighters, Henry Johnson had made the biggest impression back home.

In the trenches of France in the dark of night, he had single-handedly taken on an invading enemy force.

He had survived 21 near-fatal wounds, and he had rescued another wounded soldier who the Germans were trying to take prisoner.

Every person at that parade knew Henry Johnson's story.

It made it back to the U.S.

long before he did.

Henry was featured on Army recruitment posters and advertisements.

He was profiled in newspapers and magazines.

Out of a fighting force of millions, Henry Johnson had become one of the most famous soldiers in the entire war.

Henry rolled up Fifth Avenue in an open-topped Cadillac.

He couldn't march with the rest of the troops.

His foot had been destroyed in the battle.

It was being held together by a metal plate.

He waved and smiled as the crowds shouted his name.

At that moment, Henry was the most famous person in New York City.

But only 10 years later, Henry Johnson would die poor and broken, and soon enough, his story would be nearly forgotten.

The Battle of Henry Johnson might have started in France, but it kept going long after the war.

It went on, in fact, for 97 years, until finally, one of the most famous soldiers of World War I would be awarded our country's highest recognition for courage, the Medal of Honor.

I'm Malcolm Gladwell, and this is Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage.

The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States.

It's awarded for gallantry and bravery in combat at the risk of life above and beyond the call of duty.

Each candidate must be approved all the way up the chain of command, from the supervisory officer in the field to the White House.

This show is about those heroes: what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice.

Today, the never-ending battle of Henry Johnson.

Let's start with the Harlem Hellfighters.

I mean, it's there in the name, right?

Total badasses.

Other regiments have nicknames like the Rock of the Marne, the Liberators, the puzzlingly named Armorators, or my personal favorite, the nickname for the 101st Airborne Division, which at some point during World War II became known as the battered bastards of Bastogne.

But to understand Henry Johnson, you first have to understand the Harlem Hellfighters.

They started out as the 15th Infantry of the New York National Guard.

At the time, they were the only black regiment in New York State.

When the U.S.

went to war in April of 1917, men rushed to join the 15th.

They came from across New York, but the vast majority of them were from Harlem.

There wasn't a draft yet.

They didn't have to go to war.

They wanted to go.

All of them were volunteers, including Henry Johnson.

Henry was small, a slight man with a sweet disposition.

He had a massive smile and wore his Army issue cap at a rakish tilt to the side.

He almost hadn't met the physical requirements to enlist.

You had to be 5'4 ⁇ , and he was barely that.

but he was resourceful and he was tough.

As his wife Edna Jackson would say, Henry wasn't big, but oh boy, he can go some.

Like a lot of the 3,600 men of the 15th Infantry, Henry saw the military as a chance to serve his country and have steady work.

It was risky, but if he survived, it could mean a better life.

So he joined up.

Back in the 1970s, a documentary crew tracked down one of the last surviving Harlem hellfighters, a guy named Melville Morris.

He talked about the pride they all had in the 15th.

Every man thought he was in the best squad in the best regiment of the whole damn United States Army.

They set sail for France in the fall of 1917, but when they got there, instead of grenades and tanks, they were handed shovels and wheelbarrows.

The American Expeditionary Forces, under the command of General John Pershing, had no intention of sending the 15th into battle.

Instead, they would work as stevedores, manual laborers.

They were assigned to lay railroad tracks.

Turns out, Jim Crow had followed the Hellfighters all the way to Europe.

And General Persian

said there are no fighting blacks in this war.

We'll train them in the stevedors

or send you back home.

We'll sat down down on old ships and do all kinds of details, but not fight.

Because Persian wanted, he didn't want no potters

in his division.

They all want Lily White.

The 15th were trained to fight, and they knew they could make a difference.

They also knew what fighting would mean, not just during the war, but afterwards.

When they went back to the United States, a lieutenant from the 15th wrote home from France to say, if we can't fight and die in this war as bravely as white men, then we don't deserve equality.

But if we can do things at the front, if we can make ourselves felt, if we can make America really proud, then it will be the biggest possible step towards our equalization as citizens.

Henry had worked as a baggage handler in Albany before the war.

He was strong.

He had grown up in hard-scrabble North Carolina.

He knew adversity, and he was deeply proud to be an American soldier.

Being kept out of the fighting wasn't just frustrating.

It was infuriating.

And then, in March of 1918, the 15th Infantry got their chance.

The French Army was at its breaking point.

They had been on the front lines for three years and lost more than a million men.

They looked at the soldiers of the 15th and figured, the white Americans don't want to fight with them, so maybe we can.

So they requested their service.

The 15th was quickly renamed the 369th Infantry Regiment of the United States Army, and they went off.

to join the French.

This, by the way, was pretty much unheard of.

The U.S.

military did not lend out soldiers.

But loaning the Hellfighters solved a problem.

General Pershing wouldn't have to worry about keeping his black and white soldiers apart.

Plus, it was a nice thing for an ally to do.

And as an extra neighborly act, his staff sent their French liaison a document titled, Secret Information Concerning Black American Troops.

It warned about the dangers of relying on, quote-unquote, inferior black soldiers.

It noted that their, quote, vices were a quote constant menace.

And it asked the French not to treat the black soldiers as equal, warning against eating with them or even shaking their hands.

Otherwise, the document explained the men might expect the same treatment when they got back to America.

But the French welcomed the newly christened 369th Infantry into their army as fast as they possibly could.

In that 1970s documentary I mentioned, you can hear hear how excited Melville was about all things French.

We got French helmets, French canteens, French rifles, and instead of water and canteen, we should French wine.

And we joined the 4th French Army.

They were sent to the Argonne Forest in the northeastern corner of France to join the beleaguered French troops in the trenches.

And when they got there, turns out the 369th weren't just ready to fight.

They were great at it.

And soon enough, thanks to their tenacity and their skill, they had earned their new name, the Harlem Hellfighters.

Back home though, the truth of what they faced as black soldiers, that white American soldiers did not want to serve alongside them, was being very carefully hidden.

We'll be back in a minute.

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In the early hours of May 15th, 1918, Henry Johnson and his friend and fellow hellfighter Needham Roberts were sent to a listening post in no man's land, the area between the French trenches and the German position.

Picture a wide swath of desolate terrain pocked with craters and burnt trees.

The French were holding the western side in deep trenches rimmed with barbed wire.

The Germans were holding the east.

Henry and Needham's job was to stay up through the night and be the eyes and ears of their platoon.

If they heard or saw anything suspicious, They were to alert the rest of the troops.

The Hellfighters had seen two months of action.

The Germans had seen three years.

They'd become experts at raiding trenches, coming by surprise, killing, taking soldiers prisoner, and pumping them for intelligence.

That night, everyone was on edge.

They were sure a raiding party was going to come.

So sure, a French lieutenant ordered Henry and Needham back to safety.

Henry, as he told reporters later, wasn't having it.

Lieutenant, he said, I'm an American and I never retreat.

Henry and Needham stood watch all through the pitch-black night.

Their ears were attuned to everything around them.

The wind whistling through no man's land, a rustle in the leaves.

Then, at two or three in the morning, they heard an ominous, gnawing noise.

Crunch, crunch, crunch.

It was the sound of wire cutters.

Suddenly, an enemy flare lit up the dark.

The Germans had arrived.

Grenades exploded and bullets cut through the night air.

Shrapnel tore through Henry and Needham's uniforms, their skin.

Henry threw grenades of his own, his heart racing.

He shouldered his rifle and started shooting.

Needham, meanwhile, had been wounded in the arm and hip and he lost consciousness.

Henry was fighting alone.

In an instant, the Germans were on top of them.

Henry couldn't see how many, 10?

20?

He realized with horror that they were going to drag Needham away.

The Hellfighters hadn't yet let a man be captured as a prisoner.

They prided themselves on that.

He had to keep them from taking Needham.

Henry had fired all the rounds in his rifle, and when he went to reload it, it jammed.

Unusable.

So he turned his rifle around and swung it wildly.

Alone and mobbed by the enemy, he beat back the Germans until the butt of his rifle broke.

Then he remembered his bolo knife.

If you don't know what a bolo knife is, let me put it this way.

You don't cut butter with it.

9 to 14 inches long, with a razor-sharp blade along one side, Henry swung the knife and took down one enemy soldier, then another.

Shots rang out.

Henry was hit in the right forearm, right hip, and left leg, but he kept stabbing.

He swung his knife until the Germans turned and ran into the night.

He slashed and thrust until he was sure his friend was safe.

Henry, as his wife Edna knew, could go some.

He'd lost a lot of blood.

He struggled to stay conscious.

He just couldn't.

And as he sank to the ground, Henry hurled one last grenade, hitting and killing an enemy soldier as he fled.

Reinforcements reached the listening post a few minutes later.

Melville remembers it.

Henry had been wounded 21 times.

But he refused to die.

I took Johnson and Roberts.

We finally got out there in the morning and dragged their bodies back.

They weren't dead and both lived through it.

The next morning, as the two recovered in the hospital, their commanding officers surveyed the path of the Germans' retreat.

His captain, Arthur Little, wrote, quote, we trailed the course with the greatest of ease by pools of blood, blood-soaked bandages, and blood-smeared logs where the routed party had rested.

They also discovered that the raiding party had left behind a small but very valuable collection of weapons and intelligence.

They deduced that as many as 24 24 Germans had been on the scene, yet Henry had held them off in hand-to-hand combat without a working firearm in the dark.

He kept them from crossing the French line.

In just a few minutes of fighting, he had defeated an entire raiding party.

That's why, when Henry came back home, everyone in America knew his name.

The day after the battle, three American reporters arrived at the scene.

While General Pershing had restricted news about American military operations overseas, the French had no such rules.

And the 369th was, after all, embedded with the French.

The journalists raced to speak to Needham and Henry at the hospital.

They sent their reports back to the States, where people were desperate for some news, any news, of progress in the war.

Henry was happy to talk to the reporters about that night and that bolo knife.

Each slash meant meant something, believe me, he told them.

I just fought for my life.

A rabbit would have done that.

His actions, wrote the Saturday Evening Post, were proof that the color of a man's skin has nothing to do with the color of his soul.

Two days after the attack, the French 16th Division, which commanded the Hellfighters, officially recognized the actions of Needham and Henry.

They both received the French Quad de Guerre, the country's highest military honor.

They were some of the first U.S.

soldiers ever to earn this distinction.

Henry's medal also included the bronze palm for extraordinary valor, and that's when he got his nickname, Black Death.

It took two days for the French to award Henry's courage.

It would take decades for the United States to do the same.

Henry spent the rest of the war in a French hospital, recovering from his injuries.

His foot had been destroyed, and the army awarded him the wounded chevron, an acknowledgment of his disabilities.

They also upgraded his rank from private to sergeant.

But while the French were willing to honor his courage and valor with a medal, the American military would not.

Even though, by the end of the war in the winter of 1918, the Harlem Hellfighters had served longer in the trenches than any other American regiment, and they had suffered the most losses with 1,500 casualties.

A reporter from a local paper found Henry at the pier as he got off the steamer coming home to New York and described him this way.

His lip is scarred by a knife slash.

His head holds a dent made by a rifle butt.

In his hand is the welt of a bayonet slash and a silver plate keeps his left foot in place.

He got his hero's welcome.

Henry rode in a place of honor in the parade up Fifth Avenue carrying a bouquet of lilies.

Melville remembered it well.

Everybody wanted to see Henry Johnson.

Everybody wanted to shake his hand.

That's one day that wasn't the slightest bit of prejudice in New York City.

Henry was featured on an ad for war stamps.

It read, Henry Johnson licked a dozen Germans.

How many stamps have you licked?

But Henry was exhausted, physically broken.

When he got off the train in Albany, finally home, he was greeted by New York Governor Al Smith and a group of cheering fans.

He was grateful, of course, but pay attention to what he said to the reporters.

Quote, I am very proud of all of you, but I'm sick and tired.

I just want to say that I'm glad to get back home.

He didn't want to be celebrated.

But the welcoming party wouldn't take no for an answer, and Henry was paraded around the city and hustled to get another fancy dinner.

Governor Smith promised to name a street after him.

And then the Attorney General's office started raising funds to build a new house for Henry, too.

But those things came at a price.

He was asked to speak before the New York State Senate Judiciary Committee, and he had terrible stage fright, sweating and stammering.

Afterwards, the papers announced Hero Flunks in speech effort.

And maybe because the real Henry wasn't so keen on public appearances, fake Henry Johnsons started popping up to take his place and make money off it.

Two fake Henrys were arrested in Albany, selling photographs.

Henry asked the judge to go easy on them and offered to lend the impersonators money if they needed it.

The newspapers noted that, quote, he doesn't care for the honors himself, but he hates to have the public imposed upon.

Then, another fake Henry appeared in St.

Louis before thousands of fans and the city's mayor.

That one was hauled off to jail.

So now the pressure was on the real Henry to get out there and speak for himself.

The organizers of the St.

Louis event pleaded with him to come and speak.

And maybe because he felt badly that they'd been deceived, or maybe because he needed the money, he went to be the star attraction in an evening celebrating black contributions to the war effort.

It was held in the Coliseum, the largest and most luxurious venue in all of St.

Louis.

5,000 people gathered to hear him tell his story.

He was walking into an atmosphere bubbling with racial tension.

In St.

Louis and across the country, lynchings were in the news constantly.

The Ku Klux Klan was on the rise, not just in the South, but stretching the whole width of the United States, from New Jersey to Oregon.

So the evening of Friday, March 28th, 1919, was meant to be a joyful one, but also to to walk a very thin line on the question of race, dramatic oratory, heroic stories, a tribute to the sacrifice of a community, and a small request for rights.

It started out the usual way.

First, there was a welcome from the mayor of St.

Louis that was followed by speeches from a Missouri senator, the president of the city's board of aldermen, a congressman and more.

Then, a series of black preachers spoke, and one, a a minister from Mississippi, called for the enfranchisement of black voters in his home state.

The man who is good enough to carry a musket in no man's land is good enough to carry a ballot in the state of Mississippi, he said.

Another preacher made the case that black people should be included in the new wave of post-war industry, each one of them asking politely for those things that were supposed to be their inalienable rights, not being too controversial.

And then it was Henry's turn.

He was supposed to get up on stage and smile and wave, just like he did during that parade.

We don't have Henry's personal letters or his diaries.

We can't know exactly what he was thinking.

But here's a clue.

He kept the dignitaries and the politicians waiting on the stage to begin the event for an hour.

The mayor, the senator, 5,000 people, all of of them waiting.

What was he doing?

Pacing in the hall, back and forth, back and forth, thinking about

something.

Maybe he still had terrible stage fright.

Maybe he was worn out from being carted around like a curiosity.

Or maybe what he was exhausted by was all this politeness and forbearance.

Maybe he was sick of pleading for equality from the country the Harlem hellfighters had been willing to fight and die for.

We can't know.

But what happened next changed the trajectory of Henry Johnson's life.

He made his triumphant entrance, hobbling on his shattered foot.

The crowd went absolutely nuts.

He stepped to the mic, alone like he'd been that night in no man's land.

And whatever upbeat, happy thing he was meant to say, he didn't say it.

His tone was bitter.

Equal treatment in the war was a lie, he said.

There was no racial friendship in the trenches.

Black troops suffered prejudicial treatment from white American soldiers, and those white soldiers weren't just bigots.

They were cowards.

Henry told the Coliseum that a white major had said, and I'm quoting here, send the Negro troops to the front.

There are too darn many Negroes in New York anyway.

And then Henry added, If I were a white man in Albany, I would have so much metal that I would be the next governor of New York State.

The audience was stunned.

Some uniformed black officers left the stage in protest.

Others in the audience cheered.

It was complete chaos.

What they all felt was shock.

This guy was famous, which in America means you're supposed to be happy, right?

That it'd say this and say it in front of white dignitaries?

It simply wasn't done.

But Henry was used to fighting alone.

The St.

Louis Argus, the preeminent black paper in the city, reported on the evening with horror.

Remember, times were precarious for black people.

Being outspoken like Henry was a risk to the community's safety.

The front page blared.

Henry Johnson's speech insults Coliseum crowd.

Mrs.

Victoria Clay Haley, who had brought Henry to St.

Louis for the event, swore, quote, of course we didn't know what the man was going to say.

We wouldn't have had him come here to insult the white people of our city for anything.

He did us more harm than good.

And no one was more at risk of harm than Henry himself.

A group of angry Marines visited him at his hotel, demanding that he take back what he had said about cowardice among white troops.

And the threats kept coming.

Henry escaped the city that evening, in disguise.

The military wanted nothing more to do with him.

A federal warrant was issued for his arrest, based on the the complaint of white soldiers who had said that Henry had, quote, disparaged their valor, unquote.

The technical charge on the warrant?

Wearing the uniform after a prescribed time, whatever that means.

The promised house in Albany never materialized.

No street was named after him.

The most famous soldier in the world, I'm going to bet you've never heard of him.

But I want you to think about that night.

We tell stories about war because the battlefield intensifies bravery.

But that's not the only place we're brave.

It turns out, sometimes speaking the truth is the bravest and most dangerous act of all.

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The years that followed pushed Henry into obscurity.

His marriage to Edna ended.

He was permanently disabled by his battle wounds, unable to find steady work.

He was in and out of hospitals, and his tiny Army disability payment wasn't enough to live off of.

His health declined.

He moved from Albany to Washington, D.C.

Then, in 1929, just 10 years after that grand parade up Fifth Avenue, he passed away.

He was only in his 30s.

The cause of death was myocarditis, a weakening of the heart muscle.

The papers covered his death in a minor way.

He was buried at Arlington Cemetery.

Once again, he was surrounded by black soldiers.

The burial ground, like the military, was still segregated back then.

The practice wouldn't end until 1948.

That might have been the end of Henry Johnson's story, his bravery in the trenches forever overshadowed by his bravery on that stage in St.

Louis.

At least you could say he went down swinging.

He insisted on being seen for who he was.

Not a mythical soldier who licked a dozen Germans, but a man who was frustrated by the limitations of his country, and then that country turned away from him.

But some people remembered.

Years after Henry's actions in France, Teddy Roosevelt Jr., the son of the former president and the future Medal of Honor recipient himself, described Henry as one of the five bravest soldiers in the war.

In the 1950s, Langston Hughes, the great black poet and playwright, considered writing a book about him.

Then, in the early 1970s, a group of veterans of the 369th Regiment decided to push for more.

Henry had been one of them, after all.

We wanted to right a wrong, they said.

So they started a movement for Henry to get the recognition he deserved.

Led by two Vietnam vets, the group started lobbying Congress.

They brought local, state, and federal officials into the fight.

Slowly, slowly, they made progress.

In 1991, a memorial to Henry was erected in Albany, and a section of the city's northern boulevard was renamed Henry Johnson Boulevard.

Finally, he had a street named after him in his hometown, one long-forgotten promise kept.

In 1996, President Bill Clinton posthumously awarded Henry Johnson the Purple Heart.

In 2002, the Army gave him their second highest military honor, the Distinguished Service Cross.

Then, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York threw his weight behind the ultimate goal, recognizing Henry with a Medal of Honor.

In 2011, a Schumer staffer discovered a long-lost memo from General John Pershing dated May 1918, just after Henry's heroic stand.

Even Pershing was impressed by Henry's actions, and he described them as, quote, a notable instance of bravery and devotion.

A Medal of Honor recipient has to be approved all the way up the chain of command, remember?

With this letter from Pershing, they had the evidence they needed to make their case.

Senator Schumer's office submitted a nearly 1,300-page request to the military in support of Henry's Medal of Honor and launched a petition to build support.

After decades of calls and advocacy, something broke through.

Henry would have his Medal of Honor.

His battle was finally coming to a close.

Soldiers don't go into combat with the hopes of being celebrated.

Soldiers sacrifice because it's what they do.

They act on principle.

Maybe to stand for a country they love as it is, or fight for a country they hope it can become.

For Henry Johnson, that hope became a little closer to reality.

almost a century after his bravery in France and his battles on the home front.

On June 2nd, 2015, President Barack Obama awarded Henry his Medal of Honor.

America can't change what happened to Henry Johnson.

We can't change what happened to too many soldiers like him, who went uncelebrated because our nation judged them by the color of their skin and not the content of their character.

But we can do our best to make it right.

And today, 97 years after his extraordinary acts of courage and selflessness, I'm proud proud to award him the Medal of Honor.

That night in the trenches back in 1918, Henry fought hand to hand so that his brother in arms wasn't taken prisoner.

When he got home, he fought to make sure that none of his comrades would be prisoners of a society that sought to keep them down.

They called him Black Death, but I don't think Black or Death should be the first words we think of when we think of Henry Johnson.

I prefer Hellfighter.

Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage, is written by Meredith Rollins and produced by Meredith Rollins, Constanza Galardo, and Izzy Carter.

The show is edited by Ben Nadaf Hafrey, sound design and additional music by Jake Jake Gorski.

Recording engineering by Nina Lawrence.

Fact-checking by Arthur Gompertz.

Original music by Eric Phillips.

Special thanks to Washington University in St.

Louis, Missouri for sharing archival material from the documentary Men of Bronze by William Miles.

And if you want to learn more about our Medal of Honor recipients, follow us on Instagram and Twitter.

We'll be sharing photos and videos of the heroes featured on this show.

We'd also love to hear from you.

DM us with a story about a courageous veteran in your life.

If you don't know a veteran, we would love to hear a story of how courage was contagious in your own life.

You can find us at Pushkin Bods.

I'm your host, Malcolm Glauvo.

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