1916
Raised in Harlem
The 15th New York National Guard is organized from Harlem's Black community. Its officers are told to expect a labor unit. Its men expect a regiment.
The record
The Story
A regiment from Harlem, a trench in France, and a name that came from the other side of the wire. Here is what actually happened — and where this series begins to invent.
What happened
The 15th New York National Guard was raised in Harlem in 1916 — a Black regiment in a segregated army, drilled in dance halls and basements because it had no armory of its own. When the United States entered the war it was federalized and eventually redesignated the 369th Infantry Regiment.
Before it ever saw Europe it was sent to Camp Wadsworth in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where the town made its feelings plain. The Army's answer to the trouble was not to protect the regiment. It was to ship it out early.
In France the men were first handed shovels instead of rifles — unloading ships, laying rail, digging. American command had no intention of putting a Black regiment into the line beside white American troops.
So the 369th was loaned to the French, who had no such reservations and a desperate need for infantry. The men were issued French helmets, French rifles, French rations, and sent forward under the French 16th Division.
Timeline
Images on this page are frames from the series, not archival photographs.
1917
Spartanburg
Training at Camp Wadsworth in South Carolina meets open hostility from the town. Rather than face it down, the Army moves the regiment's departure forward and sends it overseas.
1918
Given to the French
After months of labor duty, the regiment is attached to the French 16th Division and finally issued combat arms. It goes into the line in the Argonne sector.
May 1918
Henry Johnson's night
On sentry duty with Needham Roberts, Private Henry Johnson holds off a German raiding party — wounded, out of ammunition, finally fighting with a bolo knife. Roberts is not taken. Johnson and Roberts become the first Americans awarded the French Croix de Guerre.
1918–19
191 days in the line
The regiment spends 191 consecutive days in front-line trenches — longer than any other American unit of comparable size in the war. It takes more than 1,400 casualties, the heaviest of any American regiment.
1919
Fifth Avenue
On 17 February roughly 3,000 men march up Fifth Avenue and into Harlem behind James Reese Europe's band — the same regiment that had been left out of the farewell parade on the way to war.
2015
Ninety-seven years late
Henry Johnson receives the Medal of Honor, posthumously, at the White House. He had died broke in 1929.
The name
They were called the Black Rattlers by their own army, Men of Bronze by the French, and Hellfighters — so the story goes — by the Germans who could not move them. Three names, one regiment
Only one of those names survived, and it survived because it was the one the enemy used. That is the detail this series could not let go of: a country that would not give these men a parade on the way out, and an opposing army that gave them a title.
Historians are careful about the nickname's origin — the paper trail is thin, and it may owe as much to the press as to any German trench. We tell it the way it has been told, and we say plainly that it is a story about a story.
Where we invent
The Hellfighter is not a real man. He is a character, built on top of the record above and standing in for men who were real. The regiment, the 191 days, the Croix de Guerre, Henry Johnson's night in the Argonne, the parade up Fifth Avenue — all of that happened.
What the series adds is a question: what does it cost one soldier to keep holding a line after the war has ended, after the orders have stopped coming, and after the country he fought for has gone back to pretending he was not there?
We invent forward from history. We do not invent over it.
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