Honoring the bravery of Roddie Edmonds

On a cold February night in 2009, Christopher Edmonds sat at a laptop googling his father’s name: Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds. Almost 24 years had passed since Roddie’s death from congestive heart failure. Christopher had grown up to become a pastor and have a family of his own. One of his daughters had just done a history project that focused on her “papaw” and how he had been a POW in World War II. The family kept a couple of fading diaries that she’d carefully scanned. But Christopher still felt like he hadn’t helped his daughter enough, because the truth was, his father never wanted to talk about those days. To make things more mysterious, some of the diary pages were missing. Others were taken up with a list of names and addresses—Roddie’s fellow POWs. How many of them were still alive? Christopher couldn’t shake the nagging drive to learn more. 

That night, he scanned the results of his search and clicked on a 2008 New York Times article that seemed at first like it should have nothing to do with his father. It was about how Richard Nixon had struggled to find a residence after his famous scandal, and how a Democrat man named Lester Tanner had generously stepped forward to sell the disgraced ex-president his own townhouse. In one passing sentence, Tanner said he felt moved to extend this offer because a man had saved his life in the war, in a POW camp—a man named Roddie Edmonds. 

Soon, Christopher would learn the full story: On the morning of Jan. 27, 1945, the haggard American prisoners of Stalag IX-A had been ordered to fall out in an unusual way. Instead of assembling in one group, they were to split into two groups: Jewish and non-Jewish. Of the 1,292 men captured at the Battle of the Bulge, about 200 were Jewish. To avoid discovery, many of them had destroyed their own dog tags, bearing a tell-tale “H.” As the highest-ranking American left in the camp, Master Sgt. Edmonds held their fate in his hands. He had been the youngest to make his rank at 22, and he was now only 25. But as he considered the order, he made his choice with an ironclad confidence beyond his years: He would defy it. All 1,292 men would fall out as one.

“Only the Jews!” the German major shouted that morning. “They cannot all be Jews.” That’s when Edmonds answered, “We are all Jews here.”

Infuriated, the major pressed a gun to Edmonds’ head and gave the order one more time. Edmonds calmly replied that the major would have to kill every last man standing, because the end of the war was coming soon, and judgment with it. At this, the major holstered his pistol, turned around and walked away.

One of the Jewish men who stood by Edmonds’ side as a witness would go on to change his name: from Tannenbaum to Tanner.

Over lunch at a club in New York, Tanner told Christopher that he believed Edmonds deserved the Medal of Honor. Yet despite his efforts to pull a campaign together, Tanner wouldn’t live to see it bear fruit. Initially, it was judged that Edmonds was ineligible because his actions hadn’t taken place in combat. But that judgment was reversed this year. Last Monday, Edmonds joined the fewer than 500 fellow soldiers who received the country’s highest award for valor in World War II. 

Although young Christopher grew up knowing none of this remarkable story, he saw his father as a hero for simpler, quieter reasons: his presence as a father and his steadfast Christian faith. In church, he became famous for belting out “How Great Thou Art” in a strong, booming voice. His favorite Bible verse was Romans 8:37: “Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.” He put this faith in action through faithful service to their Knoxville community. After the war, he worked as a sales manager and quickly earned a reputation for honesty and customer care. “Just go see Roddie,” people told their friends. “He’ll treat you right.”

In a documentary interview, Tanner laughs and jokes that Roddie Edmonds had “probably never met a Jew in Knoxville.” Yet when the moment of truth came, Edmonds met it unflinchingly. Christopher believes that if he could ask his father today why he was willing to die for these men, the answer would be “because he believed a Jewish man—Jesus Christ—had died to save him.”

Roddie Edmonds is the only American serviceman and one of only five Americans named in Yad Vashem’s “Righteous Among the Nations”—a campaign Tanner also spearheaded and thankfully did live to see succeed. The honor would no doubt have bemused Edmonds, who never saw himself as an extraordinarily righteous man and never believed his own story was worth telling. But through the memories of those he saved, and the children’s children who would never have been born if not for him, the story will endure for generations.