Master Sergeant Roderick “Roddie” Edmonds didn’t talk about his heroism in World War II, including his actions to save hundreds of his fellow soldiers, including several hundred Jews.
Edmonds served in the 106th Infantry Division, 422nd Infantry Regiment in the United States Army. He was captured and became the ranking U.S. non-commissioned officer at the Stalag IX-A POW camp in Germany, where – at risk to his life – he saved an estimated 200-300 Jews from being singled out from the camp for Nazi persecution and possible death.
Edmonds arrived in the combat zone in December 1944, only five days before Germany launched a massive counteroffensive, the Battle of the Bulge. During the battle, on December 19, 1944, Edmonds was captured and sent to a German POW camp: Stalag IX-B. Shortly after that, he was transferred, with other enlisted personnel, to another POW camp near Ziegenhain, Germany: Stalag IX-A.
As the senior noncommissioned officer at the new camp, Edmonds was responsible for the camp’s 1,275 American POWs.
On their first day in Stalag IX-A, on January 27, 1945—as Germany’s defeat was approaching—the commandant ordered Edmonds to tell only the Jewish-American soldiers to present themselves at the next morning’s assembly so they could be separated from the other prisoners.
Instead, Edmonds ordered all 1,275 POWs to assemble outside their barracks. The German commandant rushed up to Edmonds in a fury, placed his pistol against Edmonds’s head, and demanded that he identify the Jewish soldiers under his command. Instead, Edmonds responded, “We are all Jews here.”
He told the commandant that if he wanted to shoot the Jews, he would have to kill all of the prisoners.
The commandant backed down.
After 100 days of captivity, Edmonds returned home after the war but kept the events at the POW camp to himself.
After Roddie died in 1985, Edmonds’ wife gave his son Chris some of the diaries his father had kept. Chris, a Baptist minister, began researching his story and stumbled upon a mention of the event at the POW camp. He located several Jewish soldiers his father saved, who spoke about Roddie’s heroism.
For his defense of Jewish servicemen at the POW camp, Edmonds, a Christian, was awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations,” Israel’s highest award for non-Jews who risked their own lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.
As president of the United States we have a man in the White House who has moved well-beyond his autumn years. That man of course is Joe Biden, who even when he was at his best was simply a mediocrity.
Other men–no women that I can recall–who were just too old or sick to perform their duties have been heads of government. I’ll get to them in a bit. But the story usually ends bad for those countries. Sometimes, such as with the Soviet Union, that nation ceases to exist.
But back to Biden.
Much was said–but not on the Democratic protector networks CNN and MSNBC–about Joe Biden falsely claiming during a video conference last week with some Jewish leaders that he visited a Pittsburgh synagogue shortly after a deadly mass shooting in 2018.
He did not. Biden merely called that synagogue’s rabbi the following year.
But as is often the case with Sleepy Joe, the story gets worse. In an attempt to bond with the participants on the call, Biden spoke of his daughter, who is married to a Jewish man, while–gasp!–off of the teleprompter.
Imagine Superman after being buried in Kryponite–times 1000.
“There’s a psalm based – there’s a hymn – my favorite hymn in the Catholic Church based on a psalm, and it’s – it’s a psalm that talks about life. And – and so, I – I asked if that psalm – that hymn in the Catholic Church.
Biden then unsteadily recalled some lyrics but then he couldn’t remember the name of that song–or psalm–or hymn. Or whatever.
And then Great Grandpa rambled further into incoherence.
I’ve heard enough. Biden has to go, and yes, that means Kamala Harris will be president. But I’ll take my chances–even though I may eat these words–with a cackling leftist over a faded mind in a frail body. Conservatives, even non-religious ones, believe in conversion. Although converting Harris into a moderate is the best outcome I can imagine. And yes, that’s a big stretch in the hope department.
Back to the USSR:
In the last years of his life Leonid Brezhnev was clearly physically unwell. Since Soviet leaders didn’t do press conferences or give impromptu speeches, we don’t know about his mental health. His doctors, who probably are all dead now, didn’t talk. Brezhnev died in 1982, he was replaced by Yuri Andropov, who spent half of his 15 months as Soviet leader living in a hospital while he was being treated for kidney disease. Andropov’s successor, Konstantin Chernenko, a mediocrity like Biden, albeit without the jocularity or the gaffes, barely made it past a year in the Kremlin before dying of emphysema and heart disease.
C’mon man! Who chooses a man suffering from emphysema to lead a government?
In 1985, the healthy Mikhail Gorbachev, took over. But the rot had set in and the USSR collapsed six years later.
Here are some other sad examples of ill men in power. Paul von Hindenburg, a German World War I hero, wanted to retire after his term of office as president of Germany was winding down in the early 1930s. He was 84. But after Hindenburg ascertained that “the Bohemian corporal,” Adolf Hitler, would be elected as his successor, he ran again and defeated Hitler in a runoff race. A year later Hindenburg appointed Hitler as chancellor. You know the rest of the tragedy. Some historians believe Hindenburg, who died of lung cancer in 1934, was senile late in his life.
His titles varied but another World War I hero, Philippe Pétain, was the head of government of Vichy France. Pétain was 84–the same age as Hindenburg when he was reelected–when he took control of the Nazi puppet state. After the Nazi defeat Pétain was diagnosed as senile, which today is not considered a medical term. But was Pétain senile earlier?
There’s a tragic example in American history of a man who was too ill to serve. As he was running for his fourth term as president in 1944, those close to Franklin D. Roosevelt knew he was a sick man and strongly suspected he would die before his next term in office expired. That is why Democrat leaders pressured FDR into dumping his leftist vice president, Henry A. Wallace, for someone more centrist. Good for them! Harry S. Truman was chosen.
Roosevelt died three months after his fourth inauguration at the relatively youthful age of 63. But not before getting swindled into condemning most of eastern Europe to communist totalitarianism for over four decades at the Yalta conference by a healthy Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin. While no Americans were left behind millions of Poles were. Remember, Britain and France declared war on Germany to save Poland from tyranny.
It was an ailing Brezhnev who made the disastrous decision to invade Afghanistan.
Joe Biden never should have run for president in 2020. And those close to him, such as his wife, should have said convinced him to ride out the rest of his life as a has-been.
Biden needs to resign. Or the 25th Amendment must be utilized to remove him from office.
Lost among the fallout after the presidential election was the debut of a compelling four-episode on Netflix, The Liberator. It tells of exploits of the leadership of Felix Sparks (Bradley James), who eventually reached the rank of lieutenant colonel, of the 3rd Battalion of the 157th Infantry Regiment in the European theater of World War II. Yes, for the most part, this is a true story.
The series which began streaming on Veterans Day, is animated and it uses the new technique of Trioscope, which combines live action and computer and manually created images. The series is based on Alex Kershaw’s book The Liberator: One World War II Soldier’s 500-Day Odyssey from the Beaches of Sicily to the Gates of Dachau. It’s a huge improvement over rotoscoping, most famously, or notoriously used in the first feature film version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord Of The Rings, which was directed by Ralph Bakshi. The animation is grainy with a touch of sepia, the latter hue of course is common in films set in first half of the 20th century.
For the most part, The Liberator avoids hackneyed plotlines and characters of many World War II projects, other then sepia. There is no “Guy From Brooklyn” in it. But here is a soldier from Chicago, who of course is a Cubs fan. Fact: real and fictional characters from in television and movies are never White Sox fans, unless, as in Field Of Dreams, the South Siders are central to the plot. Oh well, to be fair it was the Cubs, not the White Sox, who played in the World Series in 1945.
When Lieutenant Sparks arrives at Fort Sill in Oklahoma shortly before America’s entry into World War II, he’s given command of “Company J,” which consists of soldiers locked up in the stockade. These ragtag men are a mix of Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and cowboys.
It’s a tough command, “The Indians and the Mexicans don’t like each other very much,” a jail guard tells Sparks. “And they hate us more.”
But Sparks is looking for fighters, not divisiveness. He and molds them–even though the Native Americans and Mexicans can’t enter a bar off base in Oklahoma. In Italy a captured member of the Thunderbirds is confronted with this irony by a German officer.
During its two years in Europe, in addition to the invasion of Sicily and the liberation of Dachau, but also the invasion of southern France, as well as the Battle of the Vosges near the German border, and finally fighting in Bavaria, the 157th Infantry Regiment encountered over 500 days of combat. Sure there are arguments and spats among the soldiers. People never always get along. But the soldiers form an effective fighting unit.
The German troops are treated relatively sympathetically in The Liberator, but only up to a point as the Thunderbirds later of course liberate Dachau.
The supporting cast is superb, particulary the performance of Martin Sensmeier as Sergeant Samuel Coldfoot and Jose Miguel Vasquez as Corporal Able Gomez, two composite characters.
Originally The Liberator was intended as a live action miniseries for A&E Studios for the History Channel but filming such a project in so many disparate locales, the plains of Oklahoma, Italy, the Mediterranean coast, the Vosges, and Bavaria, proved financially impossible. Not so much with animation. Which is why The Liberator is probably on the cusp of what we’ll see soon on the big and small screens. And the use of animation in war dramas will spare us motion picture embarrasments such as the desert combat scenes in the 1965 box office flop The Battle Of The Bulge.
The Liberator is currently streaming on Netflix. It is rated TV-MA, although despite depictions of battlefield wounds and the frequent use of profanity–in English and Spanish no less–I’m unsure why. Oh, some people smoke cigarettes in it too. I’m mean c’mon. This is the 1940s!
Tune in and start watching. You’ll be glad for it.
There seem to be a lot of folks on the left taking delight in the economic crash brought by the Corona / Wuhan virus and who seem to live for the number of infected and dead to rise in the hopes that it will lead to the defeat of Donald Trump (See my post CNN’s Letter to Sean Davis)
So for the sake of those reading that drivel and those who making who are saying it from ignorance rather than with purpose let me explain something.
Given the normal freedom to travel and the interaction of people you aren’t going to stop this virus from spreading across the nation, people are going to be exposed, 1st and at once in bigger cities where travel is more common but eventually elsewhere. That’s the nature of a virus.
The real idea is to slow down the spread for two reasons.
To keep the level of infection low enough for hospitals to cope on a national level
To give time to the best and brightest to come up with ways of treating this virus so when it does spread we can arrest it.
Both of these goals are frankly within reach and the measures already taken are contributing highly to that goal. Think of it like World War 2 when the plan was to hold in the pacific and push supplies to England in the Atlantic until we were ready to land in North Africa.
When there is a treatment that can prevent death available then we are half way there
But there are also long term goals that are also targets
Give enough time to retool manufacturers to produce the items necessary in this situation
Give enough time to move pharmaceutical production to the states
Develop a Vaccine
Create a strategic reserve of these various products for when and if this type of thing happens again.
Once these things are done then we can move aggressively knowing that no matter how much of a punch this has we can parry it and counter. This is the Invasion of Europe and the push in the pacific.
Oh and one more thing. Some metropolitan centers such as NYC New Orleans, Chicago , New Jersey and LA might have a tougher time . They will likely be under quarantine and restriction longer than others, this is Akin to the Island hoping strategy of the US forces in the Pacific Once the other easier area are secure full attention can be given to these problem sites.
This is what the president and his team are doing and those who are trying to make it something other than it is are just looking for advantage and should be treated accordingly
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