By Leslie Kelly
The year was 1944. He was just 17 and joining the U.S. Navy. And a very short time later, Ray Tee was aboard the USS Ammen heading for the South Pacific.
“I just kept thinking what’s a skinny farm boy like me doing here?” said Tee, now 86 and a resident of Silverdale.
Tee was born Feb. 4, 1927, at New Port, Washington. He lost his mother early on and he was sent to live with an aunt and uncle on a farm in Latah, south of Spokane. Farm life was difficult and sometimes he wasn’t able to attend school. So at 17, he decided to leave school and join the Navy. He found his father, who signed the papers that allowed him to enlist at 17.
His first stop was boot camp in Idaho, and then he was assigned to the Ammen, a World War II destroyer that had a mission to fight in the South Pacific.
“There were five of us from boot camp who were put on a bus and sent to California,” he said. “We were sent to the Mare Island shipyard where the first thing we saw was a ship that had been hit in the Leyte Gulf in the Philippines by a kamikaze bomber. Both smoke stacks of the super structure were missing.”
It was a omen of sorts, he now knows, of what was ahead. For the next year, Tee would be in the midst of some of the worst sea combat of World War II. Aboard the Ammen, he was part of a convoy of ships stationed between the Philippines and Japan, that protected Okinawa as an American held territory and fought off the Japanese kamikaze pilots who were attempting to take it.
The invasion of Okinawa happened on April Fool’s Day 1944.
“Very little has been written about it,” Tee said. “I was assigned to radar duty. There was one row of ships about 25 miles out and another row of destroyers about 50 miles out from Okinawa.”
Tee said the worst part was being closer to Japan.
“Our job was to intercept the kamikazes trying to get to the bigger (U.S.) ships,” he said.
Most of the time, Tee was in the “powder stores” handling cans of gun powder, sending them up through an eight-inch hole to feed the five-inch guns.
“Basically, you’re trapped in there,” he said. “If the ship were to get hit, there was no escaping.”
He and the other sailors were assigned to general quarters from dusk to dawn. At night there was no stopping to rest. Sometimes, they could catch some sleep during the day. The battle went on 82 days.
“It seemed like it was forever and ever,” Tee said. “I thought it would never stop.”
During that time, 35 U.S. Destroyers were sunk and another 122 were scrapped or sunk. Five thousand sailors were killed and another 4,832 were wounded. Tee knows that now, but at the time, the losses were kept very quiet. About 80 percent of the U.S. ships in the area were lost.
“The U.S. didn’t want those at home to know that we were losing the war in the South Pacific,” he said. “At the time, nothing was reported in the media and no one talked about it.”
His ship, the Ammen had a near miss with a 500-pound bomb.
“It disabled us for awhile,” Tee said.
The Japanese planes were suicidal and when they flew into U.S. ships, the pilots blew themselves up, along with damaging the ships and killing Navy sailors. While the U.S. losses were great, Japan finally ran out of airplanes. The war was still on, Tee said, when Okinawa was secured.
Some of the ships were then sent to bombard Japan, with sailors abroad who were unaware that the U.S. planned to drop atomic bombs on Japan.
After those bombs were dropped on Aug. 9, 1945, Tee and his shipmates were sent into Nagasaki to secure the city.
“It was very frightening,” he said. “There was a sense of quiet that was unusual. It was a huge city and there was no one. Not even the sound of a bird singing. There were no automobiles, no horns honking.”
What he saw was unbelievable.
“The atomic bombs had such intense heat that it melted everything,” Tee said. “If it wasn’t concrete…well…”
Tee pulled out his Kodak Brownie 127 camera and snapped a few photos. Cameras were not allowed and he wasn’t suppose to have one. But he did.
“I know my superiors saw me,” he said. “But there was such a sense of everything being overwhelming that no one cared.”
He went on with his assignment which was to help find and release prisoners of war.
“They threw open the gates and the POWs were on their own,” he said. “The Japanese guards fled and we took care of the POWs the best we could.”
Among them were Americans, Australians, English and Filipinos. Soon the U.S. Navy’s hospital ship “The Comfort,” arrived and the POWs were taken aboard.
It wasn’t until Tee arrived home at the end of the war in June of 1946 that he remembered the film he sent home from Hawaii to be developed. He looked at the tiny 2 by 4 inch photographs and put them away in an Army green tin box, along with some Japanese occupational money and some jewelry he traded cigarettes for while in the Philippines.
It wasn’t until 2002, when he attended a World War II Kamikaze Survivors Reunion that he thought about the photos. It was then, too, that the photographs were first published in a local newspaper.
His service is something that he is proud of. But being a quiet person, he wasn’t the kind to talk about it much. He was ready to get on with his life and he did.
Back home, he met his wife, Helen, through a friend. They were married on Jan. 18, 1948, and have been married for 66 years.
“When I met Ray, I was engaged to another guy at the time,” she said. “But I knew he was the one for me.”
The Tees stayed in Spokane and eventually, Ray joined the Navy Reserves and served in the Korean War. He was stationed on the Destroyer Escort as a machinist mate third class. He was assigned to the engine room and was located in Tacoma.
“I served in the battle of Tacoma,” he said jokingly.
In 1952, he went to work in the insulation business and he and his wife had two children, David in 1953 and Delores in 1956. They have three grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
The family moved to Alaska in 1957 and Ray spent 20 years working for the Alaska ferry system. They then retired to Kitsap County to be closer to family. They had a larger home in Poulsbo, until about a year ago when they downsized to the County Cottages retirement living in Silverdale.
Today, Tee spends time in the two greenhouses near his cottage. He’s known by the neighbors as someone with a green thumb.
The entrance to his cottage bears the proof, with pots of pansies and geraniums. And he has a “pea patch” out back where he grows a few vegetables.
Looking back at his Navy experiences, Tee knows that it forced him to grow up quick.
“What I saw made me respect life more. Just seeing so much…” he trailed off.
He is sometimes bothered by the fact that those who died at the hands of the Japanese kamikaze pilots aren’t often remembered in history.
“They gave their lives,” he said. “It was a difficult time because we were not winning. People don’t want to remember that.”
He knows that is the reason why the bombs had to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even though seeing the aftermath was more than anyone should ever have to bear.
“It was very frightening,” he said, noting that they had no protective gear on. “Troops came in and mine swept and cleared the harbor and then we went on land. It was a city of 100,000 or more and there was not a soul alive that we could see.”