A boy from Tennessee left his footprints on the beach at Pearl Harbor — an 18-year-old farm boy in the Navy in World War II, serving aboard a hospital ship in the Pacific Ocean.
Although his only stop at Pearl Harbor was short, long enough to drop off wounded soldiers, he knew the ravages of the United States’ war started on that “date which will live in infamy,” according to then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Glen Sharp eventually found his way out of the war and to Chillicothe, where he has lived with his wife, Willie May, in the same house on Benedict Street, since 1948.
The story of his life and the war years still dot his memory as a son, husband, father, grandfather and great-grandfather.
Down South
In the little town of Bluff City, Tenn., Sharp was born in 1925, the third of seven children (two brothers and four sisters) to Glen and Carrie Lee Sharp.
A four-mile walk carried him to and from Mountain View School each day. His family farmed 120 acres, raising cattle, chickens, wheat, corn, oats and hay.
“We had milk cows and lots of chickens,” said Sharp. “We sold eggs, milk and chickens and put up lots of hay by hand.”
His official schooling ended with eighth grade, but he continued to work hard on the farm.
“One time, lightning struck our big barn that was full of wheat, and it burned for three days,” said Sharp. “We got the horses out, though.”
Once he reached the age of 18, he enlisted in the United States Navy, which would change his life dramatically from a rural hill-country farm boy to a world traveler and sailor.
He had yet to meet his wife, who lived just a short ways from Bluff City. Those years would come after he served his country for the next three years.
Out to sea
Sharp’s first stop ended at Great Lakes Training Center in Chicago, and then to San Pedro, Calif., to await his orders.
“I was shipped out after my ship, the USS Comfort, was finished in May 1944,” remembered Sharp. “We waited in San Pedro while the ship was being built.”
Once aboard, he headed for Brisbane, Australia, where the troops picked up wounded soldiers and transported them back to Guam.
“I never got sea sick, just a day or two when we first went to sea,” said Sharp. “My first night at sea, they put me in the crow’s nest. We had a telephone, and if we saw anything at all, we reported its position.”
The first and second times the Japanese attacked the USS Comfort, the bombs dropped from the overhead planes fell just short of the hospital ship, which was clearly marked with the Red Cross symbol, as required by the Geneva Conventions.
The third time, however, the Japanese used a different, and more deadly, tactic — a kamikaze pilot.
“We were in the Pacific Ocean bringing patients back when this kamikaze came in and hit us and killed 27 people,” said Sharp.
Sharp had just finished his helmsman watch from 2-4 a.m. April 28, 1945, as the ship sailed just east of Okinawa carrying 526 wounded, and was not ready to turn in yet.
He decided to spend a little time talking to some of the patients and finding out where they lived.
As he leaned across one of the patient’s bunks to adjust a record player, tragedy struck.
“I heard a kapow, and black smoke started coming in,” said Sharp. “The body of the Japanese pilot followed the plane’s engine through the side of the ship and down to the engine room about three decks below. We got the fire out and managed to get back to Guam and get rid of the patients and then go back to the states to get it repaired.”
Sharp sat about 15 feet from where the plane struck. As luck would have it, the plane stopped its destruction about an inch from the main seam line of the 10,000-ton USS Comfort.
According to one report, the plane struck full amidships, striking just above the illuminated Red Cross.
“That would have been the end of us,” said Sharp. “That’s luck, isn’t it? There was no time to get scared. It was time for action.”
Sharp headed for the No. 1 lifeboat, but ended up handling a fire hose. He started on the fantail, dragging a hose. He stopped, broke out a porthole and stuck the hose inside until the fire was gone. Then it was on to the next porthole, and the next, and the next.
The ship listed 20 degrees, but two destroyers came to aid in righting the ship and pumping water from it.
Then the injured ship, under its own power, escorted by the two destroyers, met up with two Japanese submarines, and the entire crew put on life jackets.
The subs did not harm the USS Comfort on its return to the U.S. port.
About every six months, the ship returned to the states for supplies needed for all the troops and patients occupying its decks.
But the Japanese threat held less concern for the USS Comfort crew than did the typhoons, said Sharp.
“Even scarier than the kamikaze was the typhoons you ran into,” said Sharp. “The ship was popping and cracking like guns going off.”
Finally, in 1946, Sharp was released from the Navy, having traveled to Okinawa, the Admiral Islands, the Caroline Islands, Palau, Woendi Island, Yokohama, Brisbane, Biak, Goodenough Island, the Marshall Islands, Pearl Harbor and Ryukyu Islands.
On April 19, 1946, the USS Comfort was decommissioned and transferred to the United States Army that same day.
It was time to head back to eastern Tennessee and pick up on life again.
Making changes
After working at a Ford garage in Elizabethton, Tenn, for a couple of months, Sharp made a “big mistake.”
The garage owner got a Ford car in that I wanted to buy, so he told me the car was mine,” said Sharp.
“The next day, a guy I worked with said, ‘There goes your car. They just sold your car.’ So what did I do? I made the biggest mistake I ever made. I told the owner that he lied to me.
“He jumped out of his chair and said, ‘Nobody talks to me like that.’ That ended my job. He said, ‘You’re fired.’”
By this time, Sharp had married Willie May in 1946 after a chance meeting at the bus station in Bristol.
“She was drinking coffee with another girl and I started talking to her,” said Sharp. “She’s from Bristol, Va. One side of the street is Tennessee and one side is Virginia,” he said of the two Bristols, with the state line running down the middle of the main street.
He next worked in Wallace, Va., until a building under construction was finished.
While talking to a neighboring farm boy, Bud Massengill, whose parents owned a country store, and some of his other schoolmates, they decided to head north to get jobs.
“I said, ‘Let’s take off and go to Illinois and see if we can find a job,’” said Sharp.
One of his older brothers, who had been in the service for six years, worked for the Santa Fe Railroad and lived in Chillicothe.
So, Sharp, Massengill and Buck Cagle, along with Willie May and the Sharp’s first son, Dave, came to Chillicothe in 1947 in Sharp’s 1936 Chrysler Coupe.
The Sharps bought their current home the next year and soon added another son, Gary, to the family.
Massengill, meanwhile, met and married Mary Bierworth, a girl from the area.
The three men went to work at Caterpillar’s East Peoria plant, and Sharp worked there, first as a repairman, then at an overhead crane job. His ‘big yellow” employment lasted six years.
He quit to go to work for Irions concrete, first as a truck driver, but later as a truck mechanic. That job also lasted six years.
Then it was on the Chipper Cartage in Peoria for 12 years as a mechanic, also driving trucks at times.
His final job was at Greenview Nursery as a truck mechanic for about 12 years until his retirement.
Life today
Now, at age 84, Sharp tends to do as he pleases, when he pleases.
He has been a member of Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 4999 for many years and voluntarily tended bar there for about 12 years.
He also helped build the first post home, which used to be the site of Margarite’s Restaurant on Santa Fe Avenue.
“It used to have a basement and we’d hold dances down there,” said Sharp. “We eventually tore it down, filled in the basement and built the new building.”
Once he stopped tending bar, he found his time to be his own.
“Now, I do whatever I want to do,” said Sharp. “I manage to stay busy just piddling around.”
With good health to his credit, Sharp and his wife enjoy their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
“I’ve been hurt a few times doing other things, but that just goes along with life,” said Sharp.
He was honorably discharged from the U.S. Naval Reserve Nov. 8, 1951, after serving as a fireman for 20 months at sea aboard the USS Comfort (AH-6) as part of the original commissioning crew.
“It’s a rough row to hoe,” Sharp said of serving in the military. “Some of the places I was at, at least I had a nice, warm place to sleep each night.”
Sharp said his secret to a long, healthy life is to “stay busy, keep going.
“I’ve been lucky, one of the luckiest guys that’s still alive,” he added. “I’ve had so many close calls with death, and I survived them all."
Chillicothe, Ill. —
