Ships
- USS Trathen (DD-530) Captain, 8 January 1944 – 28 April 1944
Fondville Lee Tedder was a commander in the United States Navy. On 8 January 1944 he took command of the destroyer Trathen (DD-530) as her captain, and he held that command through 28 April 1944.
Trathen was a Fletcher-class destroyer, a fast fleet escort built for the Pacific war. She carried five-inch guns, torpedoes, depth charges, and a dense battery of anti-aircraft weapons. A wartime crew of about three hundred officers and enlisted sailors lived aboard her. The captain was responsible for the engineering plant, the watches, the guns, and the ship's place in formation.
His tour fell in the Central Pacific offensive of early 1944. After the Gilberts campaign of late 1943, American forces landed at Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands at the end of January and seized Eniwetok in February. Destroyers with that fleet screened aircraft carriers, guarded anchorages, patrolled for submarines, and closed the shore to fire on targets when the orders required it. In March and April the fast carrier groups struck farther west. Landings at Hollandia, on New Guinea, opened on 22 April 1944, in the final week of Tedder's command.
The appointment lasted a little under four months. Trathen had already been in commission through 1943, and after 28 April 1944 she continued in the Pacific under later captains as the fleet's war moved toward the Philippines and the islands nearer Japan. For the sailors who served under Tedder, those months were the ordinary, exacting duty of a destroyer in a task force: fueling at sea, night steaming, general quarters, and long hours on a screening station.
Alvord John Greenacre and John Raymond Millett also served in Trathen and are counted among his shipmates from that wartime service. Tedder's recorded duty in this period is that of a commander, United States Navy, captain of Trathen from 8 January 1944 to 28 April 1944.