Where were you?
Shorty Goodwin, a member of First Baptist Church, Pell City, in St. Clair Baptist Association, was at the Alabama Theatre in Birmingham.
He doesn’t remember the actors or even the name of the movie. He doesn’t remember much of anything other than the lights coming up and the announcement over the speakers.
He had a not-so-sneaking suspicion, even as a teenager, that the Japanese had not only torpedoed some battleships in Hawaii but also the course of his young life.
“It was a sad reaction,” Goodwin said. “You know, like real sorry that it happened and what will this bring about. I knew it was going to bring on some problems and that I’d probably be involved, which was fine.”
The draft came for him at 18. It was 1943.
Soon he had a serial number — 34706919 — and a machine gun that went pum, pum, pum with 750 rounds a minute and a ticket to North Africa.
From there, it was the shores of Salerno, knee-deep in seawater pink with the blood of the 142nd Infantry.
It was the invasion of Italy.
Thirty men had been in his boat. Only seven made it to shore alive, including Goodwin, who was told that machine gunners like him had a three-and-a-half-minute life span in this kind of combat, defined as it was by German machine guns that went ratatatatatatata with 1,500 rounds a minute.
“We were fighting Germans and Italians,” he said. “But Italy had surrendered, or capitulated as they called it, and we were not allowed to fire at them until they fired at us first. That’s why there were so many casualties. As we were going in, they fired at us, and that’s when it started.”
Three-and-a-half days later, he was taken prisoner on the other side of the Italian peninsula.
“We were to detain the Germans for three hours until the regiment all got set up in a good position, but it lasted for three days and three nights,” Goodwin said. “We were asking for support, reinforcements, artillery, anything. We couldn’t get it. When we ran out of ammunition, there were only five of us left.”
He put his gun on the ground, his arms in the air and his life in the hands of God.
Of course, that’s when the artillery showed up. But then he was with the Germans. He was being marched at gunpoint through friendly fire. Trees were exploding and being knocked down all around him.
“We were just blessed not to be one of the trees,” Goodwin said and laughed.
They made it out of that and then the interrogation started — the cigarette lighters and the hot needles shoved under his thumbnail.
Who’s your major? Who’s your officer? Why were you late landing at the beach? Why this? Why that?
“I didn’t know any of that stuff,” Goodwin said. “I didn’t want to tell them anyway. I just gave them my name, rank and serial number and they didn’t like that.”
But they didn’t shoot him. They marched him. On and on and on and on through the mud he drank and the worms he ate. Finally, 70 shed pounds later, he was in Poland, near the Russian border, in a German prisoner-of-war camp.
His parents thought he was dead because that’s what they were told.
But despite everything — the dawn-to-dusk work, the oceans of snow, the mind-numbing hunger — 19-year-old Goodwin was still very much alive and hungry to get back to mom, apple pie and baseball.
On the fifth try, he escaped.
For three weeks, Goodwin wandered around the Polish countryside, sleeping in any haystack he could find and eating anything he could swallow. One day, he looked up and there was the Russian front. Soviets everywhere. He did his best to explain things. He spoke a little German by this point, and the Russian officer spoke a little English.
By the end of the conversation, he’d struck the deal that saved his life. Give me a gun, he said. Let me fight for you. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
And so it was that Shorty the American — Shorty Goodwin, from Pinson — hitched a ride inside a Russian tank, shooting Germans with a Russian rifle all the way to Berlin and the end of the war.
“We made it back to where the Americans were.”
Goodwin was heading home.
He got to New York and was given a train ticket to Birmingham, but he didn’t have any money to get to Pinson at 1:30 in the morning. There weren’t any cars on the roads for him to hitch with, not back then. Unbelievably Goodwin started walking. He had an aunt who had lived on 68th Street in East Lake. Maybe she still did.
“When she came to the door, she fainted,” Goodwin said, laughing. “Then she called my dad.”
Shorty Goodwin the corpse was alive again. He was back home. He moved on with his young life. He didn’t talk about the detour.
“He’d have his nightmares,” said Joyce, Goodwin’s wife. “But I knew they went through a lot of trauma in the war so I just accepted it. He still has nightmares. But other than that, I hear about it just like you do — when he’s speaking about it.”
She first heard about what happened to her husband — the full extent — 50 years after it happened. It was on their 45th wedding anniversary, the Fourth of July. He was speaking at Hilldale Baptist Church, Center Point, in Birmingham Baptist Association, which he used to attend.
He had never told his parents or his brother or his wife or his sons. What difference did it make? If that’s what the Lord had wanted him to go through, then so be it.
“But I got to praying about it,” said Goodwin, now 85. “And I said, ‘Lord, if there’s something you want me to do that I’m not already doing, just let me recognize it.’”
So now Shorty — Clarence Edward — Goodwin goes around to churches, and civic groups and anyone else who wants to hear a message of patriotism, salvation and total surrender to God.
“When I surrendered and gave it up, I had my hands up and it dawned on me then — ‘I’m standing in almost the same position as Jesus was in when He was nailed to the cross,’” he said. “No friends. No family. No country. No anything. That peace came over me, and that’s hard to explain but I still have it. I mean, I don’t worry. I don’t worry about hardly anything because that’s not for me to do. He’ll take care of it.”
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