Coo-ee: From the frying pan into the fire

It is an inscription that remembers her son, Corporal George John Parker Goodman, a prisoner of war who was lost at sea on September 12, 1944.

Mr Goodman, born in 1918, was unmarried. Before his enlistment, he worked as a builder’s labourer and lived in Richmond.

He enlisted in Caulfield on June 6, 1940. Not surprisingly, given his work history, he was posted to 2/2nd Pioneer Battalion three days later.

These pioneer battalions were employed to perform engineering and construction tasks.

After a trip to hospital with a urinary tract infection and a short absence without leave that cost him a day’s pay, he embarked on April 7, 1941, with his unit in Sydney, bound for Syria and action against the Vichy French.

In the campaign in Syria and Lebanon, he was promoted to lance corporal and then evacuated with a slight, unspecified illness to a British hospital.

When Mr Goodman returned to his unit on October 2, 1941, he was moved to the Pioneer Training Battalion.

At the conclusion of his further training, he was returned to his old unit and promoted to acting corporal.

The battalion took to the sea on the same day on the SS Orcades, a converted ocean liner.

Mr Goodman and his unit were bound for Batavia (now Jakarta) in what is now Indonesia.

They were to confront the Japanese, who had already seized most of the archipelago.

Mr Goodman landed there on March 17, 1942.

By April 30, Mr Goodman and his battalion had been captured. They were shipped to work on the infamous Thai-Burma Railway.

There, they were starved and beaten, all the while digging railway cuttings with picks and shovels and manually laying railway tracks.

Some 12,000 POWs and 100,000 ‘romushas’, or native slave labourers, lost their lives working on that railway.

However, there was worse to come. As the war began to go against the Japanese in 1944, they put 2200 of these POWs on to two ships at Singapore.

The Japanese were transporting POWs to Japan to join other slave labourers working on the Japanese islands.

Some 1300 prisoners were put on the Rakuyo Maru. Another 900 were loaded aboard the Kachidoki Maru.

The POWs were loaded into the holds of both ships and then the holds were closed.

The prisoners were stacked as two layers of men lying shoulder to shoulder. Many were suffering from malaria, dysentery and beriberi.

All were severely malnourished. The ships also carried important supplies for the Japanese war effort, including oil, rubber and bauxite.

The two ships set sail on September 6, 1944, as part of convoy HI-72 bound for Japan.

Six days later, at 5am, the convoy encountered American submarines. The submarines’ orders were to prevent supplies for the war effort from getting to Japan.

The first torpedo from the USS Sealion hit the Rakuyo Maru.

Fires were already blazing on the sea from oil tankers hit earlier. The POWs who survived the torpedo hit took to the sea.

The Japanese had commandeered the lifeboats. POWs threw anything in the water that would float, including pieces of wood and rubber.

The crude oil on the water made the men vomit, and it burned when it made contact with ulcers on their skin.

It would be up to six days before US submarines still on patrol discovered the survivors.

They picked up 157 survivors. The others had been killed by the torpedo blast, drowned or attacked by sharks. Some went mad with thirst.

At 10.40pm on the same day, USS Pampanito torpedoed the Kachidoki Maru. She sank within minutes.

The survivors of the 900 POWs on board jumped into the sea in the dark.

Just over 400 of the 900 POWs aboard the Kachidoki Maru died.

The next morning, Japanese ships returned to pick up those who survived the sinking of the Kachidoki Maru.

The survivors were put to work building railways or working in coal mines until the Japanese surrender.

We do not know which of the two ships carried Corporal George John Parker Goodman.

However, he did not survive. Whether he died in the attack of September 12, 1944, or in its aftermath, is not known.

In total, 23 Japanese ships transporting POWs were sunk by Allied forces during the conflict.

Nearly 11,000 POWs and thousands of romushas lost their lives in these attacks.

– John Barry