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Henry Johnson · Anonymous America

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  Speaker 1: I'm Jerry Broadway, and this is Anonymous America where we
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  celebrate the forgotten heroes of American history. Today, I want
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  to tell you about a man who fought off twenty
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  four enemy soldiers single handedly in the dark, in the
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  middle of a French forest with a broken rifle and
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  a bolo knife. His name was Henry Johnson, and even
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  though you should have, you've probably never heard of him
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  from Hey Dad Productions. This is Anonymous America. Henry Johnson
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  was born in eighteen ninety two in Winston Salem, North Carolina.
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  He grew up poor, moved north as a young man,
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  and eventually settled in all New York, where he worked
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  as a railroad porter. And when the United States entered
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  World War One in nineteen seventeen, Henry Johnson wanted to
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  fight for his country, so he enlisted into the army.
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  Now here's the thing you need to understand about what
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  that meant. The US Army in nineteen seventeen was completely segregated.
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  Black soldiers were kept in separate units. They were given
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  inferior equipment, and largely treated as nothing more than support labor.
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  The assumption at the time was that black men either
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  couldn't or wouldn't fight. Henry was assigned to the three
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  hundred and sixty ninth Infantry Regiment. You may know them
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  by the name. The French gave them the Harlem hell Fighters.
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  Because the US military didn't want to use black combat troops.
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  The hell Fighters were essentially loaned to the French army.
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  The French had no reservations. They handed these men weapons,
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  they put them on the front line, and they fought
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  right alongside them. Now, for Henry Johnson, the front line
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  meant the Argonne Forest, which, if you've never read much
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  about World War One, is about as close to a
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  waking nightmarre as a human being can get. It's mud,
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  it's trenches, it's barbed wire, it's artillery, and you live
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  there under the constant threat of a German raid. On
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  May fifteenth, nineteen eighteen, Henry Johnson and a fellow soldier
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  named Needham Roberts were standing duty in a trench in
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  the forest around two in the morning. They heard something,
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  and then they realized that what they heard was wirecutters
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  snapping the barbed wire around the area. And that's when
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  they saw the raiding party. Not one or two, not
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  three or four twenty four German foot soldiers. Henry and
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  Needam immediately opened fire, but the Germans kept coming. There
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  was just too many of them. Needum was wounded almost immediately.
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  He went down with multiple grenade wounds. He was badly hurt,
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  but he kept fighting from the ground. He was passing
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  grenades to Henry as fast as he could pull the pins.
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  And Henry threw the grenades until they ran out, and
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  he fired rounds until his rifle jammed, and it jammed early,
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  and now the German raiders were in the trench and
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  they were going after need them. So Henry flipped his
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  rifle around and began to use it as a club.
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  He did that until the rifle broke, and then he
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  pulled out his bolo knife and he went to work.
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  By the time the night was over, Henry Johnson had
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  fought off the entire raiding party. Four German soldiers were dead,
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  several others were wounded. The rest retreated back into the forest,
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  and Henry had been hit twenty one times with bullets
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  and grenade fragments, but he was still standing. The French
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  were stunned, awarded Henry Johnson the Croix de Guerre with
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  a gold palm. It's their highest military honor. He was
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  only one of a handful of Americans that ever received
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  that award at that level. French General Pershing called Henry
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  Johnson one of the finest soldiers he'd ever seen. Back
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  home in America, newspapers had picked up the story. They
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  called Henry Black Death. People lined the streets of New
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  York to cheer the Harlem Hell fighters when they came home,
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  and for about five minutes, Henry Johnson was famous, and
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  then nothing. The US Army never gave Henry a medal,
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  He received no pension. His wounds were so severe that
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  he couldn't hold a steady job. He struggled with what
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  we now know SPTSD. He lost everything he had. Henry
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  Johnson died in nineteen twenty nine. He was broke, he
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  was in pain, and he was completely forgotten, and he
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  was only thirty two years old. He didn't even get
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  a proper grave marker for decades, and it took the
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  United States government ninety seven years to make this right.
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  In twenty fifteen, President Barack Obama awarded Henry Johnson the
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  Medal of Honor posthumously. Now here's the thing. About Henry Johnson.
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  He was fighting for a country that wasn't fighting for him.
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  The army that trained him didn't trust him enough to
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  let him serve in an American unit. The government he
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  bled for denied him a pension. As his body fell apart.
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  The system had essentially failed Henry before he ever set
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  foot on that boat to France. But when the wires
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  started rattling in the dark and twenty four enemy soldiers
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  came at him, he charged anyway. Because Henry Johnson understood
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  something that many people have forgotten today, and that is,
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  as bad as America has treated some of her children
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  through the years, she tries every day to get better.
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  Henry Johnson held on to the hope that if he
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  could just help, when this war, America would learn and
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  America would grow in America would evolve, And that hope
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  gave him more ammunition than a jammed up rifle ever could.
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  History may have forgotten Henry Johnson, but he holds a
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  place of honor in anonymous America.