Veteran's Story: Sheridan hauled a key WWII cargo

Tim Clark, Correspondent

James ‘Jim’ Sheridan

United States Marine Corps

Service period: 1944 to 1946

The Pacific island of Tinian could have been called ‘Shelby West’ in the years 1944 and 1945. That’s because four Shelby men were there.

Cpl. Jim Sheridan was one of those men on the island, courtesy of the United States Marine Corps and the Empire of Japan. While there, the young Marine encountered three other "Shelbians" on the island at various times: John Stock, who was with a Navy construction battalion building the airfield; Joe Knapp, a Navy crewman on a cargo ship delivering supplies; and Paul Jones, with whom Sheridan had been friends back home, at the scene of an aircraft crash. Jones was an ambulance driver who’d shown up when the plane had gone down on the runway.

The war was well under way when Jim Sheridan reached the age of eligibility; when he initially tried to enlist, it was found during his physical that he had an abdominal hernia.

“They wouldn’t take me unless I got it fixed,” he said, “so I came back home and the doctor wanted me to try wearing a special belt before deciding on an operation. That belt lasted about a week.” Sheridan eventually had corrective surgery and, three months later, joined the Marines.

Undergoing basic training at Camp Pendleton, Calif., young Sheridan discovered he was something of a marksman. “I was the top shot in my platoon of 53 guys. Everyone thought I’d get sent to sniper school, but I didn’t. Things were moving along pretty good by then, (the Marines) going from island to island. We all got aboard a ship and ended up on Tinian, where we had a temporary runway set up.”

That runway allowed the Army Air Corps to begin aerial bombing of mainland Japan.

“When we got to Tinian, there was so much destruction. There were no buildings left anywhere, except what we built.” Sheridan said his outfit, the 18th Anti-Aircraft Battalion, worked 12-hour shifts. “I was assigned to a 50-cal antiaircraft crew. We had guns and artillery all around that airfield, and we always had at least one man in the hole at all times.”

One incident, while gun emplacements were still being built to guard against Japanese air attacks, still sticks out in Jim Sheridan’s mind.

“We were set up about a 120 yards from a 90-millimeter gun, on a rise that put us higher than that gun. During a Japanese air raid, we’re firing away at enemy planes, and we can hear those big 90s (shells) going right by us, very close. My buddy joked ‘the next one that comes by, we ought to write our initials on it.’ They were that close to us.”

Sheridan shook his head. “They would have wiped us out of we’d been hit by one of those shells. No sandbags had been put around that 90 yet, so their gun barrel would go low enough that they could’ve accidentally hit us.”

Later, after the attack was over, Jim Sheridan was called over to the 90mm gun pit by one of its crewmen. “‘Take a look down this barrel’, he told me, so I did. I could see our gun emplacement plain as day through the end of that gun.”

Sandbags were piled around the gun pit immediately, which wouldn’t allow the barrel to be depressed enough to endanger Sheridan’s 50-cal crew again.

Cpl. Sheridan had excitement of another sort shortly after being reassigned to drive a cargo truck from the docks to supply areas.

“We hauled high-octane fuel, ammo, bombs…whatever they unloaded from the ships. One day my truck was loaded with a huge crate, and I could tell from the packing that it was something important. I was told by the cargo master that the crate had to go to ammunition dump No. 1, so I drove it up there. They refused it because they didn’t know what it was, and told me to take it to dump No. 2," Sheridan recounted.

"I go over there and the same thing happens, they wouldn’t take it. So I drove back down to the beach and told the cargo master that nobody would accept the crate; let me tell you, he was madder than a hornet! He got in a jeep and told me to follow him, so back to dump  No. 1 we went," Sheridan said. "He goes flying into the headquarters tent and guys started running out like the tent was on fire. After that, they had me back my truck up to an underground bunker and they unloaded the huge crate into this bunker that didn’t have anything else in it.”

Mere days later, Sheridan learned that his mysterious cargo had been dropped over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. It had been the first atomic bomb, code named "Little Boy," to ever be used in war.

Tim Clark, a retired local law enforcement  officer,  is now a freelance writer and has a blog, Through an Old Cop's Eyes. Clark can be reached at oldcop135@gmail.com.