Department of Veterans' Affairs
Transcript
Joining the Army
I was 19 then, most people felt that if Australia was at war that it was just natural to join and become a member. That was a universal feeling. All the young people of my class, my age, they were quite unusual if they didn't feel that way. I, at the age of 18, I'd already joined the militia.
When the AIF was formed, I automatically ... I was six months underage, but no one questioned it. That was that. It was a general belief, and I don't feel that my thoughts have ever changed. I do think that under similar circumstances, our country is such that it has a warm feeling of protection. No question arose. It was just a normal thing to do and a natural thing to do, and we wanted to do it…I couldn't imagine being on a ship, and I couldn't imagine being up in the air. My father had been a soldier in the Boer War, and I suppose it was just a natural feeling to join the army, which I did.
Artillery survey officer
I joined the Army. I was younger than I should have been, but no one seemed to worry very much about that, least of all me. I was fairly good at mathematics, and I joined an artillery unit. I became the artillery sergeant. I must have impressed them sufficiently because they sent me to an officers' school in Sydney.
That was rather an intense sort of thing but I did well at it, and I think I topped the course. I was the first in the 10 that came down from Queensland to this officers' school. One of them failed and I think I came top of the school. Obviously, I was cut out to do it, and I did it. I was one of the first in Queensland, of course, to be ... go to the ... my original unit as a reinforcement lieutenant. Being good at mathematics, I was in charge of their artillery survey as a survey officer. That was the capacity in which I served.
Japanese attitude to death
The result of the meeting of the Japanese and the Australian and British armies, we're not leaning on the fact that there were huge numbers against us, but it was about a 20 to 1 adjustment between the numbers of the Japanese and ourselves. We lost an enormous number in action in a unit of 500, 600, we lost something like 350 in battle, in battlefront. I don't know that we did all that much damage.
The Japanese are a race that seems to almost encourage abrasion and death. Anyone does anything they don't like, they take their head off. That's pretty constant pattern that they've followed over centuries. They've followed that sort of century behaviour over a period of a thousand years, it's not just the last hundred years or so. That's their attitude towards it, towards death, and certainly towards coming up against something. Oh, take their head off, we won't have any more trouble. It was an unpleasant war for me from that point of view.
Artillery ambush
As far as we were concerned, we had done very well coming down the peninsula. We had been there for a month or so before the Japanese landed. We had planned an attack on the Japanese by disguising our weapons. We'd arranged for that and of course, my work, survey, was very important.
We managed to manipulate the Japanese, that was, a group of Japanese that were attacking us. We managed to have them ... Malaya is, of course, a country that a lot of people are growing rubber and other materials there. The Japanese came through this cultivated country. We managed to disguise our troops as being peasants. We had several infantry units with us.
They avoided contacting the Japanese as they came through. We set up a trap for them. They came into the trap. As artillery, we were focused on where we wanted them to be. Terrible to look back on, thinking how we killed people. We probably killed a whole unit, whole battalion. Three or four thousand people came into our trap, and we had our artillery focused on that area. When they'd come through into it, we blasted them. We lost some two to three thousand men ourselves. The Japanese would have lost five to six thousand. In wartime, we considered that a success.
Burying the dead
After our capture, the Japanese allowed us to send troops back to this battlefront, and we were able to bury all our men who were killed. The men also made, the men who were doing this work, they made with local material, they made a large wand. They made a special wand out of the local material, and they planted this where we buried all our men.
The 18th Battalion Infantry was all Queenslanders. This was the infantry that was working with us. They were preceded in World War One if we can spread the tale to that. There a similar wand that was made on the battlefields of France in 1918. That wand is in a church in New South Wales. They took the wand that we had made for this particular battery. It has been brought back to Australia. It lies in this church in a town in New South Wales. It is there as a memorial to all the men who died.
20 Mile walk to Changi
The Japanese general, they were all nasty creatures by our standards. When our senior medical officers said we have a lot of wounded, we can't get out to Changi without a lot of support. The Japanese general virtually said, "Every man will go out to Changi. All the wounded will walk the distance if need be. Get cracking. This is an order of the Japanese Navy ... oh, Japanese Army. It must be obeyed." That was their reaction. So everybody walked the 20 miles out to Changi. That was that.
Burma-Thailand Railway
When we left Changi to go up onto the railway, there was a great deal of talk. Everyone was saying you're a lieutenant. The officers aren't likely to work there. Probably only being taken up so that they can supervise the work of the workers. Ha ha ha. When we did get up there, the train from Changi took us up to the border of Burma, or Thailand. From there, we had another ... some of them had 200 miles to walk.
They'd been prisoners for two years at this stage, and there were a lot of very ill people at that stage. Particularly, our medical officers did their utmost to try and persuade the Japanese to provide transport. The Japanese simply held their hands up and said, "Every man will walk." Many men just died. Those that made it were the workforce that went on. They had huge numbers, thousands, and thousands of prisoners. During most of the time in Burma, we were all pretty sick. My doctor, he would swear that he was being paid richly for his work, but the way he talked to you, you'd feel that he was being paid very richly just to do a simple job like amputate a couple of toes.
Disease
When we were taken prisoners, of course, they didn't improve. I had told you ... an earlier story ... they decided that they would, the Japanese, would increase their chances of success by building a railway. Burma and Thailand, generally, are very much underdeveloped from that point of view, and they decided the quickest thing to do is put up a railway.
We've got lots of labour, all these thousands of prisoners. They took us up in large numbers. They had a separate ... not only did they not avoid using officers for work. In general in wartime officers are captured but they, traditionally, they don't work. We're talking about our attitude between the British and the Germans in previous wars that happened. But not so for the Japanese. They took us up as an officer, of course, a whole 500, 400 of us. We went up and we were one of their principal workforces, cutting through country that seemed to almost enjoy death in that there was such a high incidence of disease, of cholera.
Malaria, of course, everyone had malaria every day without any form of suppression. But the greatest ... although dysentery was pretty terrible, the greatest killer was acute diarrhea and multiple causes. We just lost men in hundreds at a time. There were huge numbers of both British and Australian troops. I think, with the British troops, there were something around 150,000 prisoners, and they died like flies.
Tropical ulcers
My worst trouble was that we had no, over a period of three years, four years, we had the shoes that we were walking in. They were never replaced. The hard work we were doing, they just wore out. Very common diseases were to get what's called a tropical ulcer. We never see them in Australia. People think that they've heard of them, but they've never seen it.
I got a tropical ulcer just walking to work. We had to walk up a hill like that, that was about a mile, mile and half, every day. With poor shoes, poor socks, if any, they rubbed on the shoes, rubbed on the feet. Tropical ulcers were so common. Practically, they used to hurt like hell. I thought I'd never felt greater pain than I had with my tropical ulcer, but actually, I did.
Bitten by a centipede
I was in a tent. The weather had broken, and the monsoons were just pouring out of the sky. We had about 14 men under a tent fly, if you can imagine that, trying to sleep after a heavy day's work. I got this blasted ulcer on the middle ... of my left foot. It just ached and ached and ached. I thought it couldn't possibly get worse, when all of a sudden, I got a dreadful pain in my right toe, in the middle of the right foot.
I realised I'd probably been bitten by something. I scrumpled the bit of bed clothing that I had over my foot and sort of tied up whatever was there. I rolled 'round for the rest of the night with pain in my right toe. I can laugh about it in the past ... in the present, but it wasn't funny then. I lost all the pain that, it was just aching, aching, aching, aching in the left foot, and suddenly this dreadful pain in this right foot. I was in, if you can imagine 14 men under a tent fly, under pouring rain, not comfortable.
The rest of the morning, I got this pain in this right foot. Dawn came, and I cautiously took the things off the foot that I'd thumped on. As I did, an enormous centipede ran off. I'd been bitten by a bloody centipede, and it was worse than the pain I had on the left foot. But by then, my pain had come back. We had this huge walk every day up almost a 45 degree for well over a mile.
Anyway, in due course, the Australian doctors, we had two Australian doctors in the camp, one wonderful fellow from Sydney. He was the sort of fellow that made you feel as though he ... he made you feel good just by talking to you. He made you feel as though he was being paid thousands of dollars for any operation he might do on you. He said, "I'm sorry, Mr. Goodwin, but I think the only way to treat that foot is to take the toe off." He immediately set to. I don't know what sort of anesthetic he gave me if any, and he took the toe off. It healed, got better. I got back to work, and that was that. That's my war wound, an absent toe.
End of the war
It was all pretty sudden. Much more sudden than the beginning. It was pretty hard to believe that we were suddenly free. The ... it was in many cases the Japanese were pretty upset about the whole thing. I know that our one thought was to get home for most of us. I don't think anybody felt like tearing down amongst the Japanese and belting people around. We had quite suddenly realised that it was over. Almost impossible to believe.
But anyway, they thought that I had tuberculosis. I had a bad cough, and I was seven stone. They put me on an aeroplane and I was taken over to an island somewhere or other in the middle, I can't remember now the name of the island. There was one other, an officer from my unit, a captain. They thought he had tuberculosis. They flew him home, and he died within a week or so of getting home. I was put on the ship. I ate luscious food. By the time I got home, I must have looked pretty normal.
