Frederick Charles Goode was born in Birmingham, England on 22 July 1918, one of nine children of Gertrude and William Goode in the Lozells district of the city. He was educated locally until the age of 14, and worked as a labourer until the age of 17, when he joined the 1st Battalion, The Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, as a private with the army number 5108868. Fred’s first posting overseas was to Lahore, then still part of India. With the outbreak of war in 1939 his regiment was sent to Libya and based in Tobruk, where it saw action against German and Italian forces. When the British Army then called for volunteers for Commando units in late 1940 he joined No. 8 Commando, and after initial training in the UK arrived at the Bush Warfare School in Maymyo (now Pyin Oo Lwin), in the Shan Highlands of Burma, some forty miles east of Mandalay, in September 1941.
The school was set up in early 1941 following the success of a similar school established at Wilsons Promontory, Victoria, Australia, to train elements of the Australian Army Independent Companies (AAIC), by Mike Calvert, DSO (and Bar), also known as ‘Mad’ Mike Calvert, and Colonel F. Spencer Chapman, DSO. After training Commando detachments in demolition techniques there and in Hong Kong, Calvert commanded the school at Maymyo, while Chapman was posted to a similar school in Singapore. Elements of the AAIC were already in Maymyo when the British contingent – some 100 men, including Fred – arrived. The new arrivals were assigned to two newly formed units: Special Service Detachment I (Middle East), or SSDI, and Special Service Detachment II (Middle East), or SSDII. Fred was one of the fifty men assigned to the latter.
SSDI was initially led by Orde Wingate, then a captain, but subsequently was commanded by Major Milman. SSDII was commanded from the outset by Henry C. Brocklehurst, initially a captain, then a major, then finally a lieutenant colonel.
SSDI and SSDII were set up under the codename ‘Mission 204’, also known as Tulip Force, their mission being, alongside elements of the AAIC, to secretly go into China and train Chinese troops in demolition and guerilla tactics to use against the occupying Japanese. However, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, the two units’ orders were changed, and they were directed to assist in the defence of Burma, with SSDII assigned to the 1st Burma Division. In early February 1942 the C-in-C West Pacific – Earl Wavell – ordered that Orde Wingate co-ordinate irregular warfare in the theatre. SSDI and SSDII therefore came under the direct command of Wingate, now a Brigadier.
SSDI were deployed to Loimwe in Shan, and SSDII to the Taunggyi area of the state. The majority of SSDI eventually crossed the Irrawaddy River into India and safety. Milman was then assigned to Kunming. The same, sadly, was not true for the men of SSDII, who reached the Irrawaddy at Shwegu in February 1942 to find the far bank swarming with Japanese.
These men then split up. Two groups attempted to cross the Irrawaddy near Shwegu, while another two, one of which included Fred, attempted to go the long way round. Heading northeast, Fred and colleagues embarked on an arduous 2,000-mile trek on foot across jungle-clad mountains in a desperate attempt to reach India and safety. Many Burmese and Chinese villagers helped them on the way, at great risk to themselves, but Fred was finally betrayed to the Japanese in October 1942, just twenty miles short of his goal, and later incarcerated in Rangoon Central Jail. In April 1945, all the POWs held in the jail were force-marched away from the advancing 14th Army until after a week their Japanese guards abandoned them and they were liberated at last near the village of Waw. Those British POWs well enough to travel, including Fred, were airlifted out by Dakota and then transported by train, ship and air back to the UK
After discharge from the army, Fred returned to Birmingham where he gained employment as a plastic-moulder in a local factory. He married Dorothy Woodward in St Paul’s Parish Church, Lozells in 1947. They had one child: me.
My father began writing about his wartime experiences towards the end of the 1950s. He had read fellow SSDII survivor John Friend’s 1957 book The Long Trek, in which my father appears as ‘Sam Beddall’, and my gut feeling is that he wanted to set the record straight. (Friend and my father never did quite see eye to eye …) I well remember him coming home from work and sitting at the dining-table in the kitchen of our house in Great Barr, Birmingham and writing in longhand, with a pencil. It took him a long time, and he would ask me to take the resulting pages to my English teacher at school to review for him. Each time she handed them back for me to give to my father I would see sadness in her eyes. I, being so young, did not understand and was not allowed to read them.
My father died on 1 November 1993, never knowing that he, along with other surviving Far East POWs, had succeeded in obtaining compensation from the British Government for the ill-treatment they received at the hands of the Japanese. He was one of a group selected by ‘The Burma Star Association’ to be examined on an annual basis in a military hospital in London to determine the amount of disability that could be attributed to his incarceration. Payments to the survivors or next of kin began in January 1994.
It was not until 2012 that I got around to reading his reminiscences. I immediately wished I had read them while he was still alive. There were so many unanswered questions. It was then that I decided I should review them, put them in some order and undertake research into the men of SSDII.
It soon became obvious that there was indeed very little known about them. SSDI, by contrast, is well reported on, with copious photographs and documentation. My curiosity was piqued, and I determined to find out all I could about the men who split up on the banks of the Irrawaddy, only eight of whom, I eventually discovered, survived the war. It was the start of a roller-coaster ride of emotions that led to this book.
This, then, is my father’s story.