By BILL McKINNEY
Morning News staff reporter
Ever since he can remember, Fr. Robert Goodill mixed his love for sailing with a desire to be a missionary.
The U.S. Navy saw to it he got the opportunity to do both.
The Roman Catholic priest volunteered for
Naval duty in 1943. He wanted to enlist earlier, the moment he heard that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, but he promised a dying pastor he'd stay close until the end.
""Don't make me out to be a
hero,'' Goodill told a reporter. ""I was just a chaplain on a ferry boat.''
That ""ferry boat'' was the USS Hyde, an attack transport with a naval crew of 350 men and a capacity to carry 900
armed troops into battle.
Everything considered, the Hyde was a pretty lucky ferry boat.
After Lt.j.g. Goodill joined the crew at Eniwetok Atoll in 1944, the vessel continued its island hopping, jumping from Saipan
to Guam to Iwo Jima to Okinawa to the Philippines and then to Japan.
Between Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the Hyde was loaded with wounded Americans and made a trip back to the United States.
As the war ended, the USS Hyde
was part of a huge armada being massed for an expected assault on the Japanese mainland, an invasion that wasn't needed after U.S. bombers dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
""I remember
concelebrating a Mass with Francis Cardinal Spellman on the Battleship Missouri just after the war ended,'' Goodill said.
""It was a blistering hot day at the end of August and the cardinal was overcome with
heat. We breakfasted that morning with the cardinal in his underwear.''
Goodill can remember good times, comical times in the Navy, but, like all war veterans, those memories are mixed with memories of sadness
and fear and prayer.
The Erie priest today is a young looking 82 years old and retired, or, as a secretary at St. Luke Rectory put it, ""as retired as Fr. Goodill can be.''
He said his only real combat
experiences came at Iwo Jima and at Okinawa, especially at Iwo Jima when the U.S. fleet was attacked by Japanese suicide pilots called kamikazes.
""We weren't hit. We had "P' boats (landing craft)
circle the ship spreading an oily smoke around us so the enemy couldn't see us.
""We picked up some of the survivors from the Calaghan, a destroyer that didn't have that kind of protection.''
It was also
at Iwo Jima that he saw his first Japanese prisoners of war, four wounded soldiers taken aboard ship for questioning.
""They were brave men but they were scared. They'd been told we would butcher them
if they were captured. They were astounded when we fed them, cared for their wounds and gave them chocolate and cigarettes.
""A couple were quite artistic. They drew pictures of Mt. Fujiyama on
linen handkerchiefs for some of the boys. I wanted one but couldn't ask because I felt so sorry for them.''
At night, Goodill said, he would stand on deck and watch the battle raging on the island.
""You could see at night the flashes of gunfire, fire from flame-throwing tanks, flares. From that distance, it was like watching a movie.
""We listened to the radio messages between the
troops. I heard one soldier say, "Sarge, there are five Japs coming down the path with their hands up. What do I do?'
""The sergeant, using a lot of unprintable language, yelled, "Shoot 'em!'''
After Iwo Jima the Hyde returned to the United States with more than 200 wounded, some in very bad shape.
""I
remember one lad in pitiful condition. On the way to the States we took aboard a young man, Bob Mitchell, who had organized the boys choir that sang with Bing Crosby in the movie, "Going My Way.'
""He organized another choir and this young man who'd been wounded in the spine and was immobilized and fading fast was asked if there was something he wanted played. He asked for "The Old Rugged
Cross.'
""They did it and I stepped aside and cried.''
The boy died that night, just as the Hyde entered San Francisco Bay.
Goodill wasn't permitted to go ashore at Iwo Jima. He was permitted on
Okinawa, after most of the fighting had ended and the island was secure.
He wandered around the battlefields but his most enduring memory was the smell of the place.
""The stench of death from the rotting
bodies filled the air,'' he said. ""It was a sickly, sweet smell.''
Asked what was hardest, preaching to men going into combat or ministering to the wounded coming back from the field, Goodill found
the question hard to answer.
""I'd offer Mass for the Catholic boys and a special divine service for the Protestant boys. I gave the Jewish boys two bottles of altar wine for their Seder service.
They asked me to hold a service for them and I did.
""All I could do was encourage them. I said their sole purpose was to defend themselves and their posterity against enslavement by the fascism of the
Nazis and the kind of cruelties the Japanese perpetrated on the Chinese.
""I told them they had come not to kill but only to defend and I asked them to pray for their enemy.''
Goodill noted the extent of
Adolf Hitler's inhuman nature, using one of Hitler's own quotes: ""To the Christian doctrine of the infinite value of the human being I oppose the Nazi doctrine of the complete nothingness of the human
being.''
It was that kind of terrible philosophy, Goodill said, that forced the people of his generation to lay down their lives to destroy.
To the wounded and dying, Goodill visited them, sat with them, talked to
them and prayed with them. He tried to answer their questions, tried to offer understanding and order in the midst of chaos.
Finally, on Good Friday of 1946, Lt. Goodill was discharged from the Navy and
returned, temporarily, to civilian life.
Temporarily because, with the onset of the Korean War, he again offered his services, entering the Navy at the rank of lieutenant commander and, when that war ended, leaving
with the rank of commander.
Goodill wasn't a hero. Not in the conventional sense.
He was, and still is, a man who acts on his own strong sense of duty to his God, his fellow man and his country.
He is the
kind of man who, in life's long run, touches so many other lives with so much love and humor that he allows the very essence of civilization to continue to exist.
