Free Republic

“That was such a glaring error."The U.S. Army has given the official go-ahead for a National Guard unit to bear a name its forebears earned in the trenches of World War I: the Harlem Hellfighters. The Army Center of Military History approved the “Harlem Hellfighters” as the official designation for the 369th Sustainment Brigade of the New York Army National Guard on Sept. 21, 2020, according to a Guard press release. The quest to make the moniker official began in 2019 at the New York State Military Museum, when Courtney Burns, the museum director, was looking through the Army’s list...

Remembering Henry Johnson, the Soldier Called “Black Death” Henry Johnson suffered 21 wounds and rescued a soldier while repelling an enemy raid in the Argonne Forest in 1918 but died 11 years later a forgotten man Henry Johnson and the Harlem Hellfighters in a parade up Fifth Avenue upon their return to New York in February, 1919. (New York Division of Military and Naval Affairs) Like hundreds of thousands of young American men, Henry Johnson returned from World War I and tried to make a life for himself in spite of what he had experienced in a strange and distant...