2 WWI troops honored, 97 years after heroism

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama awarded two World War I soldiers the Medal of Honor on Tuesday, recognizing men whose bravery on the battlefields of France had not been recognized with the nation’s highest valor award for 97 years because of racial and religious bias.

Sgt. Henry Johnson, a legend in the Army’s allblack “Harlem Hellfighters,” and Sgt. William Shemin, the Jewish son of Russian immigrants, were acclaimed before a packed East Room of the White House. Obama said that there are surely others like them who have gone “unacknowledged and uncelebrated” and that the United States has more work to do to honor them.

“America is the country we are today because of people like Henry and William — Americans who signed up to serve, and rose to meet their responsibilities, and then went beyond,” the president said. “The least we can do is to say: ‘We know who you are. We know what you did for us. We are forever grateful.’ ”

Johnson, then a private, is credited with fighting off a large group of German raiders in France’s Argonne Forest while serving as a sentry. Blacks were not allowed at the time to serve in American combat units, but the 369th Infantry Regiment had been sent by Gen. John J. Pershing to fight alongside undermanned French units.

Accounts of Johnson’s bravery by his fellow soldiers — including Pershing — were found in the past few years by staff members of Sen. Charles Schumer, D.-N.Y. The Army posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, second only to the Medal of Honor, to Johnson in 2003, but the higher award had been out of reach.

Johnson’s Medal of Honor was accepted Tuesday by Command Sgt. Maj. Louis Wilson, the senior enlisted soldier in the New York National Guard.

Johnson died in 1929, without receiving even a Purple Heart.

Shemin, the other recipient, joined the Army as a teenager by lying about his age, and is credited with braving enemy fire three times in a bloody engagement with German soldiers in France on Aug. 7, 1918. “That young kid who lied about his age grew up fast in war,” Obama said Tuesday

A large contingent from the Shemin family was present at the ceremony, and the award was accepted by two of his daughters, Elsie Shemin-Roth and Ina Bass “86 and 83, and gorgeous,” the president said.

Shemin-Roth is credited with pushing her father’s case forward and enlisted the help of Missouri’s congressional delegation. Shemin, who had three children, died in 1973.

Obama said it takes the United States too long sometimes to recognize heroism and noted that Shemin “served at a time when the contributions and heroism of Jewish Americans in uniform were too often overlooked.”