The Harlem Hellfighters Spent 191 Days Under Fire and Came Home Heroes

In the winter of 1917 the United States Army had a regiment of trained, disciplined, well-led soldiers ready to fight the Germans, and it did not know what to do with them. The problem was not the men. The problem was the Army, which in that era was organised on racial lines, and these men were Black. So the Army did what bureaucracies do when they cannot solve a problem and cannot admit it. It gave the regiment away.

It lent them to France. The French took them gladly, put French helmets on their heads, handed them French rifles and sent them into the line. And the 369th Infantry, the men of Harlem, went on to spend more time in combat than almost any other American regiment in the war. That is the story of the Hellfighters, and it is a story about courage and about the gap between what America promised and what America practised. It is also, I will argue, a story about why the promise was worth keeping.

The 15th New York

The regiment began as a state militia unit. In 1916 New York organised a Black National Guard regiment, the 15th New York Infantry, after Governor Charles Whitman took office. This was the culmination of a campaign that Black New Yorkers and their white allies had pressed for years, since the state's existing Guard regiments did not admit Black volunteers.

Colonel William Hayward, a lawyer and Republican who had been a public figure in the city, took command, and he did what a good commander does: he recruited the best men he could find, set a high standard and insisted on it. Many of the officers were white, as the Army's practice demanded, but a few of the junior officers were Black, and the enlisted ranks drew from the pride of Harlem. The regiment's recruiters found no shortage of volunteers. Men signed up because they wanted to serve, and because they wanted to prove something to a country that had not made it easy for them to prove it.

After the United States entered the war in April 1917, the 15th New York was federalised that summer, and in 1918 it was renumbered the 369th Infantry. It sailed for France in December 1917.

The French connection

Here is the awkward fact. When the 369th arrived in France, the American Expeditionary Force had no place for it. General Pershing's army was segregated. Black soldiers were mostly assigned to labour and service units, loading ships and building roads. Some commanders, and some white soldiers, did not want to serve beside Black troops at all. The Black combat regiments that existed were to be organised into a separate division, and the 369th did not fit neatly into it.

The American command made the practical decision that the Black regiments would be loaned to the French army, which was starved for manpower after three years of slaughter. The French did not share the American prejudice. The 369th was assigned to the French 16th Division, issued French weapons and helmets, and fought alongside French soldiers. The regiment took its training from the French and its orders in French chains of command, and it reported that the French treated them as soldiers.

I want to be exact about what this does and does not show. It does not show that France was free of racial prejudice; the colonial empire was another matter. It does show that on the western front, in 1918, a country in mortal danger judged a man by whether he could fight. The American army's own policy was a failure of that standard, and a republic that holds that all men are created equal should say so plainly.

191 days

The number that sticks to the regiment is 191, the commonly cited count of days it spent in the front line, longer than any other American regiment in the war, by the usual account. I would not swear to the day, but the claim is consistent with the record that the regiment was in the line for the better part of six months, and that it was in action from the spring of 1918 through the autumn offensive. Whatever the precise figures, the picture is firm: the 369th was not kept back as a symbol. It was used up, as the good regiments were.

The casualties were heavy; the commonly cited figure runs to about 1,500, a large share of the roughly 2,000 or more men on the rolls at a time, though I would treat that as an approximation. In the Meuse-Argonne in the autumn of 1918, the regiment took part in the French attack and captured the ruins of the village of Séchault. The regiment received a unit citation of the French Croix de Guerre, and many of its soldiers received individual decorations from France. Later accounts say the Germans nicknamed them "Hellfighters." The nickname is cherished and its origin disputed, so I will not rest an argument on it. The men earned it by any account.

Henry Johnson and Needham Roberts

The individual story that has survived best is the one from the night of May 14 and 15, 1918. Two privates, Henry Johnson and Needham Roberts, were on sentry duty at a lonely outpost in the Argonne, when a German raiding party, a sizeable group of soldiers, cut through the wire and attacked them in the dark.

Roberts was wounded by a grenade early on. Johnson, a rail station porter in civilian life from Albany, New York, fought on. The accounts agree on the broad outline. He fired his rifle until it jammed and used it as a club. When the Germans tried to drag the wounded Roberts away, Johnson closed with them, and with a bolo knife he fought the raiders hand to hand. He was wounded repeatedly; the figure cited for his injuries is twenty-one wounds. The raiding party withdrew, leaving behind weapons and equipment. Johnson and Roberts had held the post. It was a small action, but in a war where raids were counted as victories, the two men's stand was widely reported and was among the first American stories of the war to capture the imagination of the home front.

France awarded both men the Croix de Guerre, and Johnson is generally described as the first American so honored. That fact tells you what the French thought. It also tells you something about the American army: its own decoration came late, very late.

The parade

The regiment came home in February 1919. On February 17, the 369th marched up Fifth Avenue in a victory parade, with the band at its head, and went on up through the neighbourhood of Harlem to a welcome from the crowds lining the route. The sidewalks were full. Newspapers reported the parade as a triumph. The men of the regiment had earned a hero's return. Many of them had also earned something that a parade could not give them, namely the unqualified respect of their own country.

And the band. The regiment's band was led by James Reese Europe, a Black musician and bandleader who had been a prominent figure in New York music before the war. He joined the 369th as a lieutenant, led a band that has been credited with introducing syncopated rhythms to the French public, and organised the regiment's musical life. He was the sort of man who made a case for his country without saying a word about it. His death in May 1919, killed in a dispute with one of his band members at a concert in Boston, was a shock to the city. The regiment had survived Germany, and its bandleader did not survive peace.

The long delay of justice

The next part of the story is the one that should trouble every American, and that I will not soften. Henry Johnson came home to Albany with grave injuries and a reputation. He was celebrated and then, in the way of public attention, forgotten. He had difficulty finding work, and his health was poor. He died in 1929, in his thirties.

The American government had not given him the Medal of Honor. It had given him no major American decoration at all for decades. In 2002 he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, and on June 2, 2015, President Obama presented the Medal of Honor posthumously to Johnson, nearly a century after the action. I have no objection to saying so plainly and giving the president his due; conservatives should applaud correcting a historical injustice when the record supports it, and here it plainly did. The delay was an indictment not of the soldier but of the system that overlooked him. Five Medal of Honor Citations Read Closely and What Each One Asks of Us and What the Medal of Honor Is, Who Awards It and How a Citation Is Written explain how the process works and why the record matters.

What the Founding promised

Now let me do what the Founders would have wanted and measure the story against the text.

The Declaration of Independence says "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights." Not all white men. Not all men of a particular church or region. All men. The Declaration's Founders did not live up to the principle, and slavery was the great wound in the Republic until the Civil War. But the principle was in the document, and it gave later generations the standard by which they could measure the country's failures. That was Abraham Lincoln's argument at Gettysburg, and it was Frederick Douglass's argument in his great speech on the Fourth of July, which is the subject of What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July and Why Douglass Kept the Constitution.

After the war, the Fourteenth Amendment of 1868 guaranteed every person born in the United States citizenship and the equal protection of the laws. The Hellfighters were citizens under that text. A segregated army that treated them as a problem to be reassigned was a violation of the spirit of the amendment, if not at that moment a violation of the law as courts then read it. It took until July 26, 1948, for President Truman's Executive Order 9981 to establish equality of treatment and opportunity in the armed forces, and a decade longer for the services to carry it out. The same soldiers who served in 1918 were the ones whose service made the case.

That is the constitutional point: the Founding's principle did the work. The men of the 369th did not need a new theory. They needed the old one to be honoured.

The rebuttal: a country that segregated them does not deserve the story

The strongest objection comes from the left, and I would put it this way. The Hellfighters' story is not a story of American success. It is a story of American failure. The country made them fight in a segregated army, loaned them out like equipment, withheld their honours for a century and then celebrated them when it was convenient. To make it into a conservative lesson about the Founding's promise is to whitewash the record.

I would answer in four points.

One, the facts the objection states are true, and I have stated them above. No honest account omits them.

Two, the objection assumes that celebrating the soldiers means defending the segregation. It does not. These are separate things. A conservative loves the principle and judges the practice against it. If the principle were false, if the Declaration's claim were just a pose, the soldiers would have had no standard to appeal to, and the failure would not be a failure but simply the way things are. The very ability to call segregation a betrayal depends on the principle the Founders wrote down.

Three, who did the correcting? The record shows citizens did it, by petition, by service, by voting, by litigation and by persistence. The Hellfighters' descendants and the historians who kept their memory alive won the Medal of Honor for Johnson by arguing that the record warranted it. That is how a republic repairs itself: by pointing to its own text. The remedy for the country's failure was the country's own creed.

Four, the objection tends to suggest that the right response is to be ashamed of the country. The Hellfighters did not feel that. They marched up Fifth Avenue proud to be Americans. They served a country that had not yet kept its word, because they believed that it would. It is a poor tribute to men who believed in America to teach their grandchildren to disbelieve in it.

What this asks of us now

The regiment's story is a reproach and an inspiration at once. It reproaches those who would have kept the Army's doors shut. It inspires because the men went through the door anyway, and because they proved the principle by living it. They fought for an America that was not yet fully the America of its creed, and by fighting they helped make it so.

I would add one more observation, and it is a conservative one. The soldiers' effectiveness did not come from a policy of diversity or from official sympathy. It came from the same sources that make any unit effective: a demanding colonel, discipline, training, pride, a sense of mission and the knowledge that the whole country was watching. Hayward held them to a high standard and the men met it. That is the formula, and it works for anyone. For a related story of Black soldiers who proved the doubters wrong in an earlier war, read The 54th Massachusetts at Fort Wagner and the Soldiers Who Proved Doubters Wrong, and for another group of soldiers who used their own gifts to help win a war, The Navajo Code Talkers Built an Unbreakable Code From Their Own Language.

The case in brief

1. The 369th Infantry began as the 15th New York National Guard in 1916, was federalised in 1917 and sailed for France in December 1917.
2. Because the segregated American army had no place for it, the regiment served under French command and spent about 191 days in the line, one of the longest combat tours of any American regiment.
3. Henry Johnson and Needham Roberts held an outpost against a German raid in May 1918 and received the French Croix de Guerre, while Johnson did not receive the Medal of Honor until June 2, 2015.
4. The regiment's story is measured against the Declaration's claim that all men are created equal and the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of equal protection, and the failure was the country's, not the principle's.
5. A republic repairs its failures by appealing to its own creed, and the Hellfighters did that with their service.

What you can do: read the Fourteenth Amendment's first section aloud with a child, and then visit a local veterans' memorial and look for the names of men who served in a segregated unit.