Their last victories
Medals of Honor for 2 WWI heroes who also faced bias
TWO NEW YORK heroes got their due Tuesday when they were posthumously awarded Medals of Honor — almost a century after they risked their lives on the bloody battlefields of France.
“It’s never too late to say thank you,” President Obama said before awarding the nation’s highest military honor to the dogged supporters of Pvt. Henry Johnson and the proud daughters of Sgt. William Shemin.
Obama acknowledged that for too long the contributions of brave black soldiers like Johnson and heroic Jewish soldiers like Shemin went unacknowledged.
“We have to work as a nation to make sure that all of our heroes’ stories are told,” Obama said at the White House ceremony.
Shemin dodged German gunfire to pull wounded soldiers to safety during three days of bloody fighting in World War I. Johnson rescued a wounded soldier from his all-black Harlem Hellfighters regiment while simultaneously fighting off
a surprise German attack with just a knife.
But neither could completely escape bigotry back home .
“The great thing about America is that we undo our injustices more than any other country,” said Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who along with the Daily News Editorial Board and others took up the cause of honoring Johnson.
Johnson and other members of the 369th Infantry Regiment were honored with a parade down Fifth Ave. when they returned home from the war.
But even though Johnson, of Albany, suffered two dozen wounds, he got no medical benefits and it wasn’t until 1996 that he was posthumously awarded the Purple Heart. He died at age 32 in a veterans hospital in 1929.
For years, the Army resisted awarding Johnson because he fought for America under French command. Also, the Army insisted there was no documentation of Johnson’s heroism — a claim proved false when a Schumer staffer found his military records online.
New York National Guard Command Sgt. Maj. Louis Wilson accepted the medal on Johnson’s behalf.
In Shemin’s case, it was his daughter Elsie Shemin-Roth who spent years compiling the records to buttress her case that her dad deserved the top medal. Shemin, a father of three and grandfather of 14 who ran a nursery business in the Bronx, died in 1973 at 76.