Part 1 (of 6) of the narrative "What happened to Ace on that day?"

I never knew my father, Allan C. "Ace" Edmands, Sr. To me as a child with the same name, he was a ghost hero, without whom, in my child mind, the U.S. possibly would not have won World War II. I heard how he had been a Navy pilot in the Battle of the Coral Sea and the Battle of Midway and the Battle of Guadalcanal and the Battle of Tarawa in the Gilberts--and how, shortly before the war was over, he had been killed on the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Franklin right near Japan.

I heard how he had not regarded himself as a hero at all. He always said, I was told, "I'm just doing my job." What a job! To me he was a hero all the same.

He was a hero, but he was gone. He had been killed in action during the terrible disaster on the Franklin on March 19, 1945. Killed in action. Must have been. But we never had a funeral, we never saw a body, we never had a gravestone--so how could we know for sure?(1)

He must have been killed in action, but there was always some hope that somehow he hadn't been killed, that somehow he was going to come home to us. We--Ace's mother (my grandmother), Ace's wife (my mother), Ace's children (my sisters and I), Ace's sister and brother and in-laws (my aunts and uncles)--we didn't know what actually happened to him on that day.

My younger sister, Janna, was not even six months old when the Franklin was hit. I was only two years and nine months old. Maybe it's understandable that we would have not the slightest memory of our father. But my older sister, Christine, was nearly seven years old, and she doesn't remember him either.

He was off fighting a war--cruising to various archipelagoes in the South Pacific, training and leading his squadron, dropping torpedos on Japanese targets, writing reports and dealing with the Naval bureaucracy, doing his damnedest to win the next stripe on his uniform--and was very rarely home.

My mother did not have fond memories of being a Navy wife--moving from San Diego to Pensacola to San Diego to Honolulu to San Diego to Long Beach to San Diego, kowtowing to the wives of superior officers, struggling on a small budget, and raising very young children by herself.

There were many letters and telegrams between my mother and father, of course; one sweet telegram in my album says: "DARLING I LOVE YOU KEEP THE HOME FIRES BURNING ILL BE SEEING YOU = ALLAN." For a while my Grandmother Edmands came to live with us to help, and for a long time my Aunt Janie, my mother's best friend, lived with us, too. But Ace was seldom home. There was a war going on.

When he was home, a lot of photographs were taken. That's fortunate, because without my seeing these photos, I would have had a hard time believing that Ace had ever existed. Here's a picture of Ace with his mother (my grandmother), my sister Christine, and me in front of our home in Long Beach during the Christmas holiday in 1943 (click it to enlarge it). Everyone seems so happy in these photos that, as a growing child in the early 1950s, I sometimes entertained the weird notion that World War II was a jolly old time.

But the war was actually quite wretched, and it seemed that it might endure forever. For months at a time, my mother did not hear from my father and had not the slightest assurance that he was safe. Even as the enemy empire dwindled, its borders retracting closer and closer to the Japanese home islands, the prospect of the "final push," a coming invasion of those islands of determined resistance, was very frightening.

Taking advantage of whatever time Ace was available, my mother on November 30, 1944, decided to spend the holidays with him. She traveled over 500 miles north to Santa Rosa, where he was training his squadron in night landing and submarine fighting. She took me with her, leaving Christine and Janna home in San Diego with Aunt Janie. We were there with him for seven weeks.

But the interlude of togetherness had to end. On January 17, Ace took us into San Francisco and left us there to travel back home. He had to get back to leading and training his squadron in exercises out of the Santa Rosa Naval Air Station. (They were flying their TBM Avenger planes in torpedo practice at Monterey, rocket practice at Humboldt Bay [Arcata], and night flying exercises at Modesto.) Furthermore, my mother and I had to get back to the rest of the family in San Diego.

I try to imagine them kissing good-bye. That was the last time we saw him.

A few weeks later, Ace embarked with his squadron to Hawaii, there to connect with, and ship out on the Franklin back into the Pacific war. In mid-February he was still in Hawaii, spending a week practicing night carrier landings at Kanoehe Marine Air Station on Oahu. That week was the last time Ace was able to communicate with his family back home. It was during that week, perhaps on Valentine's Day, that he wrote my mother that the "final push" might take an entire year.

Then he and his shipmates cruised westward into the war zone, out of contact with loved ones, toward the Ulithi Atoll staging area and then northward toward Japan.

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