The grenade was his first weapon of the night. It was not his last.
## The Fight at Outpost 20
The grenade alerted both his own position and the German raiding party that the approach had been detected. The Germans attacked.
The accounts vary in their specific numbers. The official citation says “at least 12” German soldiers. Other accounts give 20, 25, or more. The prompt guardrails for this article flag the variation in enemy counts and the lack of an independently verified modern count; the official citation’s figure of “at least 12” is the most defensible specific number.
Roberts was wounded early in the engagement — shot and unable to stand. His role in the fight, as the accounts describe it, was to pass ammunition and grenades to Johnson while he could and to call out warnings. Roberts’s contribution was real and documented; the official account does not describe a solo action by Johnson alone but a two-man stand in which Roberts continued to function despite his wounds.
Johnson fired his rifle at the advancing Germans. The rifle jammed. He used it as a club. The rifle broke.
He drew his bolo knife.
The bolo was a heavy knife, the standard-issue sidearm of infantry soldiers of the period — a tool more than a weapon under normal circumstances, used for cutting wire, clearing brush, and general field utility. In Johnson’s hands, on the night of May 15, it became the weapon with which he held off a German raiding party.
The specific details of the hand-to-hand fighting are part of the accounts in ways that the prompt guardrails flag: they cannot be independently verified in every particular, they come from Johnson’s own account and from the accounts of French officers who arrived after the action, and they should be understood as reported and attributed rather than as a contemporaneous official record. What is documented through the citation and the French military honors is that the action happened, that it was extraordinary, and that it involved individual combat in which Johnson functioned while badly wounded.