At age 91, Ted Rys is among the ranks of the quickly diminishing World War II veterans.
But Rys said he has clear memories of the past, including leaving his home at 19 in the Pullman neighborhood of Chicago to enlist on his own terms.
“I said to my mother, ‘I’m going to sign up because I want to go where I want to go,'” Rys said.
Two of his neighbors — one a very close friend — died on the battleship Arizona when it sunk during the Dec. 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, he said.
Rys, now of Mokena, said he felt he had to somehow honor their sacrifice by joining the Navy and putting his own life on the line.
As Americans celebrated Independence Day earlier this week, Rys said he was still “very proud” of his service.
“I would do it all over again if there were a war like World War II,” said Rys, who acknowledged that he had to kill a woman as a soldier. “I would give my life to do it again.”
He was a Seabee with the 135th Naval Construction Battalion, a carpenter’s mate third class. It was a good fit for the son of John Rys, a trim carpenter for the Pullman Co., and a man who left an impression on his son even though he died at age 39.
“(My father) made all those mahogany windows that they had in the special (Pullman train) cars,” Rys said.
He said when money was tight “during the Depression,” John Rys made jewelry boxes from scrap mahogany and sent his son to sell them to Marshall Field’s and Carson’s department stores.
Rys said his father’s creations were uniquely embellished with dried flowers embedded that Rys’s mother Mary would prepare.
Years later, Rys’s work as a carpenter’s mate didn’t require so fine a touch.
He said his job as a Seabee was mainly to level mountains and make them into airstrips in the Mariana Islands of Guam, Saipan and Tinian. His work with a jackhammer or bulldozer, a crane or well digger, or whatever equipment he was asked to handle, might be on a tropical island as beautiful as a golf course or on a swampy, leech-infested place with temperatures over 100 degrees, he said.
As varied and challenging as the landscape was, Rys said his most vivid, lasting memories involved the plight of the native people on the islands. He remembers women and children on Saipan running off cliffs because they had been told American soldiers would brutally mistreat them. Rys said he saw soldiers swept over the cliffs to their deaths when they tried to stop the women and children.
Rys said another memory that haunts him still is “killing a woman.” He said he saw her conceal a chemical weapon and move towards a small group of soldiers Rys was with at the time. And although he had no choice but to shoot the woman to save himself and his fellow Seabees, he said, it is his most difficult memory.
“That lady, sometimes I see her face,” Rys said.
Many of his memories are personally documented. Rys still has one of three albums of photos and print memorabilia he assembled during the war.
He said the other two albums were lost when the amphibious landing vehicle he was on was beached on a coral reef and later sank with most of the sailors’ belongings.
The photos in his remaining album were developed with chemicals Rys got from naval supplies and were taken with a box camera he made himself, he said.
The vintage pictures show very young men — often shirtless in the heat and wearing khaki shorts and combat boots — in poses of casual camaraderie against a backdrop of palm trees and sky.
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The men are often smiling, despite the dire circumstances that faced them every day.
“You get to a point where fear disappears momentarily,” Rys said.
Rys, who lives in Clarendale of Mokena, a senior living facility, raised his three sons Larry, Nicky and Vincent in Country Club Hills with his now-deceased wife Jeanne nee Dobrinski.
Rys was trained as a machinist before the war and worked at Sheaf Machine Shop on Chicago’s South Side, and after the war he worked as a carpenter with the Vanetten Brothers in the Roseland neighborhood for about 25 or 30 years, he said, and then continued doing carpenter work on various jobs,
After 70 years, he said one his fondest wishes now is that the diary of an Air Force pilot of a B-17 fighter plane be shared with others. Rys found the diary among the papers of his deceased brother-in-law Eddie Dobrinski.
Rys said Dobrinski was a member of the B-17 crew that flew more than 35 missions over Germany and lived to tell about it.
“I would like to see it published …so they could understand exactly what these boys went through,” Rys said.
Ginger Brashinger is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.