The regiment’s German opponents gave it a nickname that stuck: “Hellfighters.” The name was adopted and became the defining identity of the unit in American memory. The Harlem Hellfighters.
## The Return: February 1919
The 369th Infantry returned to the United States in February 1919 and marched up Fifth Avenue in a victory parade that drew an enormous crowd.
The parade was one of the largest public events in New York City immediately following the war, and the accounts describe the reception as enthusiastic. The regiment marched from downtown Manhattan to Harlem, and the specific segment through Harlem — through the neighborhood from which many of the regiment’s soldiers had come — was a celebration of a kind that the city had not seen before.
Henry Johnson was among those who marched. He was wounded, still managing the physical consequences of 21 injuries, but present for the parade that marked the regiment’s return. The images of the Fifth Avenue parade became part of the visual record of the regiment’s homecoming.
The parade was one of the last moments of broad public recognition that Johnson would experience. The transition from the Fifth Avenue parade to the specific circumstances of his later life is one of the starkest transitions in the documented record of a veteran’s experience in the period after the First World War.
## The Discharge Without Documentation
What happened to Henry Johnson’s military record after his discharge in February 1919 is one of the central facts of his story and one of the clearest illustrations of how the Army’s racial policies translated into specific harm to individual soldiers.