<v Speaker 1>I'm Jerry Broadway, and this is Anonymous America where we

<v Speaker 1>celebrate the forgotten heroes of American history. Today, I want

<v Speaker 1>to tell you about a man who fought off twenty

<v Speaker 1>four enemy soldiers single handedly in the dark, in the

<v Speaker 1>middle of a French forest with a broken rifle and

<v Speaker 1>a bolo knife. His name was Henry Johnson, and even

<v Speaker 1>though you should have, you've probably never heard of him

<v Speaker 1>from Hey Dad Productions. This is Anonymous America. Henry Johnson

<v Speaker 1>was born in eighteen ninety two in Winston Salem, North Carolina.

<v Speaker 1>He grew up poor, moved north as a young man,

<v Speaker 1>and eventually settled in all New York, where he worked

<v Speaker 1>as a railroad porter. And when the United States entered

<v Speaker 1>World War One in nineteen seventeen, Henry Johnson wanted to

<v Speaker 1>fight for his country, so he enlisted into the army.

<v Speaker 1>Now here's the thing you need to understand about what

<v Speaker 1>that meant. The US Army in nineteen seventeen was completely segregated.

<v Speaker 1>Black soldiers were kept in separate units. They were given

<v Speaker 1>inferior equipment, and largely treated as nothing more than support labor.

<v Speaker 1>The assumption at the time was that black men either

<v Speaker 1>couldn't or wouldn't fight. Henry was assigned to the three

<v Speaker 1>hundred and sixty ninth Infantry Regiment. You may know them

<v Speaker 1>by the name. The French gave them the Harlem hell Fighters.

<v Speaker 1>Because the US military didn't want to use black combat troops.

<v Speaker 1>The hell Fighters were essentially loaned to the French army.

<v Speaker 1>The French had no reservations. They handed these men weapons,

<v Speaker 1>they put them on the front line, and they fought

<v Speaker 1>right alongside them. Now, for Henry Johnson, the front line

<v Speaker 1>meant the Argonne Forest, which, if you've never read much

<v Speaker 1>about World War One, is about as close to a

<v Speaker 1>waking nightmarre as a human being can get. It's mud,

<v Speaker 1>it's trenches, it's barbed wire, it's artillery, and you live

<v Speaker 1>there under the constant threat of a German raid. On

<v Speaker 1>May fifteenth, nineteen eighteen, Henry Johnson and a fellow soldier

<v Speaker 1>named Needham Roberts were standing duty in a trench in

<v Speaker 1>the forest around two in the morning. They heard something,

<v Speaker 1>and then they realized that what they heard was wirecutters

<v Speaker 1>snapping the barbed wire around the area. And that's when

<v Speaker 1>they saw the raiding party. Not one or two, not

<v Speaker 1>three or four twenty four German foot soldiers. Henry and

<v Speaker 1>Needam immediately opened fire, but the Germans kept coming. There

<v Speaker 1>was just too many of them. Needum was wounded almost immediately.

<v Speaker 1>He went down with multiple grenade wounds. He was badly hurt,

<v Speaker 1>but he kept fighting from the ground. He was passing

<v Speaker 1>grenades to Henry as fast as he could pull the pins.

<v Speaker 1>And Henry threw the grenades until they ran out, and

<v Speaker 1>he fired rounds until his rifle jammed, and it jammed early,

<v Speaker 1>and now the German raiders were in the trench and

<v Speaker 1>they were going after need them. So Henry flipped his

<v Speaker 1>rifle around and began to use it as a club.

<v Speaker 1>He did that until the rifle broke, and then he

<v Speaker 1>pulled out his bolo knife and he went to work.

<v Speaker 1>By the time the night was over, Henry Johnson had

<v Speaker 1>fought off the entire raiding party. Four German soldiers were dead,

<v Speaker 1>several others were wounded. The rest retreated back into the forest,

<v Speaker 1>and Henry had been hit twenty one times with bullets

<v Speaker 1>and grenade fragments, but he was still standing. The French

<v Speaker 1>were stunned, awarded Henry Johnson the Croix de Guerre with

<v Speaker 1>a gold palm. It's their highest military honor. He was

<v Speaker 1>only one of a handful of Americans that ever received

<v Speaker 1>that award at that level. French General Pershing called Henry

<v Speaker 1>Johnson one of the finest soldiers he'd ever seen. Back

<v Speaker 1>home in America, newspapers had picked up the story. They

<v Speaker 1>called Henry Black Death. People lined the streets of New

<v Speaker 1>York to cheer the Harlem Hell fighters when they came home,

<v Speaker 1>and for about five minutes, Henry Johnson was famous, and

<v Speaker 1>then nothing. The US Army never gave Henry a medal,

<v Speaker 1>He received no pension. His wounds were so severe that

<v Speaker 1>he couldn't hold a steady job. He struggled with what

<v Speaker 1>we now know SPTSD. He lost everything he had. Henry

<v Speaker 1>Johnson died in nineteen twenty nine. He was broke, he

<v Speaker 1>was in pain, and he was completely forgotten, and he

<v Speaker 1>was only thirty two years old. He didn't even get

<v Speaker 1>a proper grave marker for decades, and it took the

<v Speaker 1>United States government ninety seven years to make this right.

<v Speaker 1>In twenty fifteen, President Barack Obama awarded Henry Johnson the

<v Speaker 1>Medal of Honor posthumously. Now here's the thing. About Henry Johnson.

<v Speaker 1>He was fighting for a country that wasn't fighting for him.

<v Speaker 1>The army that trained him didn't trust him enough to

<v Speaker 1>let him serve in an American unit. The government he

<v Speaker 1>bled for denied him a pension. As his body fell apart.

<v Speaker 1>The system had essentially failed Henry before he ever set

<v Speaker 1>foot on that boat to France. But when the wires

<v Speaker 1>started rattling in the dark and twenty four enemy soldiers

<v Speaker 1>came at him, he charged anyway. Because Henry Johnson understood

<v Speaker 1>something that many people have forgotten today, and that is,

<v Speaker 1>as bad as America has treated some of her children

<v Speaker 1>through the years, she tries every day to get better.

<v Speaker 1>Henry Johnson held on to the hope that if he

<v Speaker 1>could just help, when this war, America would learn and

<v Speaker 1>America would grow in America would evolve, And that hope

<v Speaker 1>gave him more ammunition than a jammed up rifle ever could.

<v Speaker 1>History may have forgotten Henry Johnson, but he holds a

<v Speaker 1>place of honor in anonymous America.