Brooks captions White's images with the words of a bigoted white Southern reporter whose double-edged tribute to Johnson says much about the prevailing racial attitudes faced by the Hellfighters: 'As a result of what our black soldiers are going through in the war, a word that has been uttered billions of times. Armed with no more than a bolo knife he killed four of the enemy and wounded 20 more single handedly. On guard duty in the trenches, Johnson fought off a German raid on the regiment despite running out of ammunition. One especially powerful sequence depicts the fight against improbable odds that won Henry Johnson the Croix de Guerre. There are also reminders of the kind of story telling it's only possible to do in graphic form. There are featured roles for real figures such as WEB Du Bois, the great philosopher of race, and James Reese Europe, the regiment's band leader, an acclaimed ragtime composer and conductor who played a major role in popularising jazz on both sides of the Atlantic and was latterly dubbed 'the Martin Luther King of jazz'. In rendering the unit's story in comic book format, Brooks has found a way to bring their journey to life with an intensity that merges historical events with the momentum of tightly plotted fiction. From a window on 73rd Street, Mrs Vincent Astor and a group of society ladies could be seen waving. Spectators included New York governor Alfred E Smith, press baron William Randolph Hearst and the plutocrat Henry Clay Frick. Honoured with a victory parade along Fifth Avenue, the Hellfighters were cheered on by a crowd of 250,000. The valour of the Harlem Hellfighters, as the Germans called them, was uncontestable.Īmong their ranks was Henry Johnson, the first American of any colour to win the French Croix de Guerre.

And they had done so without conceding a foot of ground to the Germans or losing a man to capture. The most decorated black soldiers of the First World War, they had served for 191 unbroken days in the trenches, a longer time than any other US troops. On a clear, cold morning in February 1919, the 369th Infantry regiment – a segregated African-American combat unit – returned to New York from France.

The harlem hellfighters by max brooks