BILL RAAB
Age: 85
Born: Sept. 19, 1924
Hometown: Oak Park, Ill.
Residence: Indio
Military branch: U.S. Navy; USS Ammen (DD-527)
Years served: June 1942- December 1945
Rank: Water tender second class
Family: Wife Vivian; four children, Barbara Saunders of Redondo Beach, Michael Raab of Georgia, Carol Suman of Santa Rosa and Patricia Santana of Indio; 12 grandchildren; 13 great-grandchildren.
About this series
Staff writer Denise Goolsby will profile desert veterans from World War II through the end of 2010 — the 65th anniversary of the end of the war. Contact her at (760) 778-4587 or via e-mail at denise.goolsby@thedesertsun.com
Coming tomorrow
British Army veteran John Collaro of Palm Desert
LEARN MORE: Read about other Coachella Valley residents who served in World War II at mydesert.com/wwii
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Bill Raab lost a friend at sea, had a close call with an enemy bomber and visited the site of the last U.S. attack on Japan.
Just three of the many impressionable events experienced by the young Navy sailor before his 21st birthday.
Raab was 17 and fresh out of high school when he joined America's World War II effort.
“I graduated from high school in June of 1942 and I walked right down to the Navy recruiting office” — where he was told he was too young too enlist without parental approval.
Raab's father had died, but his mother reluctantly acquiesced.
“The next week, I was in the Navy,” he said.
Raab was assigned to the Great Lakes Naval Training Station near Chicago, where, for four months, “we slept in hammocks,” he said. “We didn't have cots or beds. Once you got in it, you didn't move. You stayed in that position all night.”
Raab's next four months were spent at the University of Kansas under much better living conditions — he slept on campus and “mothers cooked the meals,” he said.
He graduated as a machinist's mate and was assigned to the destroyer USS Ammen.
Raab got his first taste of combat in the Aleutian Islands, a U.S. territory west of Alaska.
Two of the western islands in the chain, Attu and Kiska, had been occupied by the Japanese.
The U.S. was preparing an invasion operation to regain control of the tiny, yet strategically important islands.
Raab, a water tender second class, worked in the fire-room at the rear of the ship, where he regulated the water levels in two big boilers.
The boilers generated the steam that powered the ship.
“We were recommended to stay in the fire-room 24 hours a day unless you had to use the head,” he said.
The ocean was so rough, the water came crashing over one side of the ship and carried all the way over to the other side.
It was a dangerous proposition navigating around the ship, but when nature called, there was no choice.
One day, Raab and his friend Frank “Gil” Gilhuly made their way together to the head.
After climbing down a hatch into the head and taking care of business, Raab began making his way up to the ship's superstructure — located one floor above the main deck.
That's when he noticed his buddy was going in a different direction. He was heading to the main deck.
“I said, ‘Gil, don't go out that door,'” Raab said.
His friend didn't heed the warning and Raab watched as a “big wave picked him up and threw him off the side of the ship,” Raab said.
Raab threw his buddy a life raft and the crew tried for 45 minutes to pluck the sailor out of the freezing, roiling sea. But as hard as they tried, the men were unable to rescue the young sailor.
“He'd be way up in the air and then way down there,” bobbing on the waves, Raab said. “You couldn't see him.
“We had to leave him there,” Raab said. “That's where he died.”
After bombarding the islands in preparation for the landing forces, the USS Ammen briefly returned to the U.S before heading to the South Pacific.
In Leyte Gulf in the Philippines, a Japanese bomber did major damage to the destroyer.
“A twin-engine ‘Frances' hit right between our two stacks and knocked them into the water,” he said. “Smoke came back into the fire-room. We were practically choking to death on the smoke.
“I was lucky throughout the entire war,” he said. “Two or three feet lower and it would have gone into the fire-room.”
After a while, “We had everything under control as much as we could at that point,” he said.
The destroyer was patched up just enough to get her back to California for more extensive repair work.
The USS Ammen returned to action and from April 1 through June 24, 1945, fought in the Battle of Okinawa.
The destroyer served as a radar picket ship, diverting Japanese aircraft by calling in U.S. air power to shoot down the enemy before they had a chance to get close to aircraft carriers, battleships and cruisers stationed closer to the island.
The USS Ammen nearly got nailed by a kamikaze in Okinawa.
“We knocked it out of the sky,” he said. “It landed 15 feet off of the fantail. The bombs exploded and about 10 guys were injured.”
The USS Ammen received a Navy Unit Commendation “For outstanding heroism displayed by her crew as a fighter direction ship on a radar picket station during the Okinawa Campaign”
A couple of weeks after the Japanese signed the formal surrender on Sept. 2, 1945, Raab visited the ruins of Nagasaki.
The Japanese city was destroyed when an atomic bomb was dropped on Aug. 9, 1945, effectively ending the war.
“You couldn't believe it,” he said. “Rubble all over the place people walking down the side of the road” in disbelief. “It was indescribable.”
