The official citation for Johnson’s Medal of Honor acknowledges Roberts’s role and the two-man context of the action. The story of May 15, 1918, is Henry Johnson’s story in its dominant narrative form, but it is also Needham Roberts’s story, and the accurate account includes him.
## The Specific Failure of the Discharge Papers
The specific failure that produced the greatest harm to Henry Johnson was the absence of documentation in his discharge papers. This was not a minor bureaucratic error; it was the mechanism through which the Army’s racial policies translated into concrete deprivation.
The Army’s record-keeping for the discharge process in 1919 was not perfect under any circumstances — the rapid demobilization of a large wartime force created administrative pressures that produced errors across many soldiers’ records. But the pattern of specifically deficient records for Black soldiers — missing wounds, missing valor, missing the documentation that would have connected them to the benefits and recognition available to veterans — was not randomly distributed. It was concentrated in the records of Black veterans in ways that parallel the larger pattern of under-decoration that the later studies documented.
For Johnson specifically: without a record of his 21 wounds, he could not access disability compensation. Without a record of his valor, there was no basis for an American decoration. Without the American decoration, the story of his service was official only in French military records — records that were accessible to researchers but not to the bureaucratic machinery that determined his daily life in Albany after his discharge.