Scott Swanson
Darrell Goddard was looking at a Time-Life book on World War II some years ago when he saw a scene that looked very familiar.
In a U.S. Army photo from a battle on Bougainville Island, near New Guinea, was a tank with the name “Lucky Legs II” emblazoned on it. A tall, athletically built soldier stood upright, firing a rifle at the right of the tank, while other American GIs crouched or crawled on the ground as they fought a battle.
The reason the photo was familiar was because Goddard realized he was the soldier firing the gun.
“He recognized the situation,” Goddard’s wife Bobbie said. “He knew it was him, but the tank confirmed it.”
“There was one tank on the island and we used it,” said Darrell Goddard, now 89, who’s lived in Sweet Home since 2006.
Growing up in an impoverished, single-parent family, Goddard said times were tough before he was drafted into the Army for World War II.
Darrell Goddard holds a copy of a Life book about World War II that features a cover photograph that he believes pictures himself and his fellow soldiers during a battle in Bougainville.
He was born June 13, 1923 in Bellingham, Wash., where his father owned two grocery stores – and was “so successful that he ran Safeway out of business there,” he said. His father had fought in World War I and the family had a photo of him during a celebration in downtown New York City at the end of that war.
His parents divorced and Goddard’s mother moved with her three children – two boys and a girl – to Pasadena, Calif., where Goddard grew up.
“We lived very frugally,” he said. “We lived on $135 a month for four people for many years.”
While in high school at what is now Pasadena City College, Goddard started working at a coffee bar, and was earning money, he said. World War II had broken out in Europe and Asia, but it seemed somewhat distant.
“I was just a wild kid; we didn’t have much money and we had a broken family.
“I bought a car from the son of the owner of the Studebaker company, who lived in the Arroyo Seco in Pasadena. I put $1,000 in the bank. I was beginning to have some ideas. We didn’t really know what the war was about.”
But then he was drafted after the U.S. entered the war in 1941.
His brother Richard, two years his senior, who had been working in a bank, also was drafted – into the Navy.
“He was a genius,” Goddard said. “He could sit there and listen to people rattle off numbers and then tally them up in his head. The Navy found out he could do that and they nabbed him and made a navigator out of him because he could always get them there at the right time. I ran into him a couple of times during the war.”
After basic training at Camp Roberts, north of San Luis Obispo, Calif., he was sent to infantry school, also at Camp Roberts.
“We would take 26-mile walks carrying all this stuff,” he recalled. “I got caught once because I took a stovepipe and wrapped it in a helmet liner or something of that nature and carried it like a knapsack because it was lighter.”
The “fun” ended soon, he said. He found himself on a fast ship heading for the South Pacific.
After some months in French Polynesia, Goddard was assigned to the 37th Infantry, which had formerly been an Ohio National Guard unit, and sent to New Guinea, where he spent a year and a half.
“Bougainville is a big island, and if you like coconut they had a huge plantation there,” Goddard said.
New Zealand and Australia had provided “a lot of coast watchers” who helped prevent a Japanese attack on those countries.
But it took the Allies a year and half to drive the Japanese to surrender on Bougainville, which happened a few weeks before the final surrender in Tokyo. The photo that has appeared in at least two Life publications that the Goddards have found, and a portion of which is also on Wickipedia under “Bougainville,” though Goddard is cropped out of that one, was taken during those months of combat.
“I did not see the photographer,” he said. “He was dressed like everyone else so you couldn’t tell. But I can tell you that this guy is dead – I don’t remember his name,” he said, pointing to one soldier in the photo, “and this one doesn’t know how to crawl,” he added, pointing to another who is on his hands and knees.
Goddard was in the Philippines when the war ended and, returning to the U.S., finished high school in Pasadena. He got a job running a restaurant in Pasadena and helped the owner turn it into a smorgasbord – a new idea at the time.
St. George’s Smorgasbord eventually expanded into a chain throughout Southern California, with restaurants in San Diego, Hemet and other locations, supervised by Goddard.
After 10 years, he said, he was ready for something else. He’d met Bobbie and they were married in 1962. Also, he said, that was the year he became a born-again Christian.
They moved to San Luis Obispo, where he met Bob Davis, owner of the first motel in America, the Apple Farm.
Goddard already had a daughter when they were married and a second was born, and a son. Bobbie got a job as finance director for San Luis Obispo County and Darrell helped Davis develop the Apple Farm into a thriving business with a store and a restaurant.
Over the years they’ve moved around.
“We’ve lived in 14 dwelling places,” Darrell said. In 1982 they left Lodi, in the San Joaquin Valley in California, and moved to Coquille, then to Sweet Home in 2006.
A thoughtful man, Goddard reflects back on his war experience with emotion.
He said he had known Japanese, particularly while working at the coffee bar Pasadena, and had mixed feelings about finding himself fighting them.
“On both sides of us were Japanese people,” he said of his pre-war days. “I was close to those guys. All of a sudden, they were gone. I really liked them.
“I always loved the Japanese. Then I got to be a warrior and killed a lot of people. When I found out what they did, those people who almost took over China, that didn’t change the affection I had for them.”
He said he did feel hostility toward the Japanese government leaders who “sent an army to kill everybody in the world.
“We spent about 18 months or so on Bougainville knowing we had to prepare because the Japanese Army had perpetrated the Rape of Nanking. I realized this was a horrible offense to God. At that point it was ‘go get them.’”