Ships
- USS Pope (DD-225) Captain, 20 July 1940 to 23 January 1941
Henry Theodore Wray was born in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, on 22 November 1897. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy with the class of 1921 and made his career in the Navy. On 30 June 1937 he was promoted to lieutenant commander, the rank he held when he received a destroyer in the Asiatic Fleet.
On 20 July 1940 he took command of USS Pope (DD-225). She was a Clemson-class destroyer, built by William Cramp and Sons in Philadelphia, launched in 1920, and named for Commodore John Pope. By the time Wray came aboard she was one of the old flush-deck destroyers kept on the Asiatic Station and working from Philippine waters. His command covered the last months of American neutrality, while the fleet watched the war in Europe and the rise of tension with Japan.
Wray had Pope from 20 July 1940 to 23 January 1941. Richard Nott Antrim was officer in charge after him, and Welford Charles Blinn took the ship on 10 February 1941. Wray was not her captain at Balikpapan.
The fighting that made Pope famous came a year after he left. On 24 January 1942 she was one of four American destroyers that attacked Japanese transports off Balikpapan. In late February she sailed from Surabaya with HMS Exeter and HMS Encounter. On 1 March 1942, after gunfire destroyed the two British ships, Japanese dive bombers sank Pope in the Java Sea. She was struck from the Navy list on 8 May 1942, with two battle stars and a Presidential Unit Citation for that wartime service. Wray lived long after the war. He died in Coronado, California, on 19 February 1991, at the age of ninety-three.