The document acknowledged, in its own language, that this was different from French custom: France did not apply the same racial hierarchy, and French officers would need to adapt to American expectations when American soldiers were present.
The document was not, in the end, entirely effective. French officers continued to interact with soldiers of the 369th on roughly equal terms. The French Army continued to award its honors — including the Croix de Guerre — to Black American soldiers without the racial qualification that the AEF memo contemplated. The French recognition of Johnson and Roberts was given in defiance of, or at least without regard to, the AEF’s preferred approach.
The document is part of the documented record of the specific institutional environment in which Johnson served. It is not a secret of recent discovery; it was reproduced in the NAACP’s publications during the war and was part of the documented record that W.E.B. Du Bois and others cited in their writings about the treatment of Black soldiers.
## The Veterans Bureau and the Post-War Support Structure
The specific institutional framework for veteran support in the period after the First World War was different from and less comprehensive than the system that developed after the Second World War.
The Veterans Bureau — established in 1921 to consolidate the government’s services to veterans — was designed to provide medical care, disability compensation, and other support to veterans of the First World War. Its predecessor organizations had been inadequate to the task, and the Bureau itself struggled in its early years with corruption and administrative failure before being reformed under a new director in the mid-1920s.