Commander Richard J. G. Goodwin’s A View from the Minesweeper’s Bridge: A Royal Navy Officer’s World War II Memoir is a posthumous remembrance. It was originally intended as a family keepsake, but after Goodwin’s death, his children were compelled to share the manuscript and its engrossing account of their father’s life – a legacy of service and achievement that played out against pivotal events of the twentieth century that still inform the world we live in today.
As a World War II Royal Naval Officer, he participated in numerous missions, including the top-secret testing of cutting-edge minesweeping technology aboard the first coastal commercial vessel to be fitted with a four-hundred-ton magnet. This was to protect Britain’s coastline as Germany was laying magnetic mines in and around British waters – aiming systematically at starving the nation. He participated in missions including the invasions of Sicily and Normandy and the decisive victory at the Battle of Britain. Most compelling is his riveting account of dangerous assignments in support of the Eighth Army’s advance on North Africa as he participated in the longest recorded minesweeping mission across the Mediterranean.
Edmund Burke once noted that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. While Goodwin may have lived in a bygone era, his journey as an ordinary person doing the right thing for the greater good in extraordinary times of political uncertainty, social upheaval, and rapidly changing cultural mores is timeless – and never more relevant.
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