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Wally Young

One of the first contacts Jim Stuart provided me was Ray Bailey of the USS Franklin CV-13 Museum Association. He suggested that Mr. Bailey might be able to put me in touch with a Franklin survivor who knew my father. I eagerly wrote to Mr. Bailey.

About a week later, on September 5, 2002, Mr. Bailey phoned me. We had a wonderful chat, during which he told me about his experiences as a 17-year-old gunner on the Franklin and about his rescue on the Santa Fe.

Mr. Bailey hadn't known Ace, but he did give me some names, one of which was Wallace ("Wally") Young, who had been, he said, either an Ensign or a Lieutenant JG in Ace's torpedo squadron. An actual pilot in the VT5 squadron!

Mr. Bailey cautioned me that Young contradicts everyone else about what happened, that he insists that the Japanese pilot dropped only one bomb instead of the two in the official version. I got the impression that Mr. Bailey regarded Wally Young as a crackpot, perhaps a little demented.

The very second that my phone call with Mr. Bailey was over, I called Mr. Young, who answered the phone himself. I told him I was Allan Edmands, Jr., the son of Lieutenant Commander Allan C. Edmands, the skipper of Torpedo Squadron 5, and that I had been referred to him by Ray Bailey.

Almost immediately Mr. Young took my breath away with the following statement:

"I was right beside Commander Edmands when he was killed."

Mr. Young had my full attention.

He went on to tell me that Ace was going to be the first one of the squadron to take off in the run on Kobe. Ensign Young, as wing man, would take off as number two.

He went on to explain that the attack did not happen the way all the published stories said it did. He said he saw the Japanese plane coming from a great distance. He said that he saw the Japanese pilot (whose name, he said, was Ko Harada) drop a single "one-thousand-pound" bomb "from dead astern" and then fly on.

Mr. Young said Captain Gehres's stories--that the plane had suddenly appeared out of a cloud bank, that there were two "five-hundred-pound" bombs, and so on--were contradictory and blatant lies.

He promised to send me a "tape" he had prepared, explaining the details of his version of events.

In his excitement about telling me all these things, he forgot more than once who precisely I was--was I a cousin of Commander Edmands?--even though I had clearly explained to him that I was Lieutenant Commander Edmands's son.

He knew right away how to spell my surname when I was trying to tell him my address. That he did not trip over that odd a in the middle of Edmands meant that he was familiar with the name. But since his hearing was poor and I was repeating the street and phone number several times, his wife came on the phone and took down the details and gave me their address.

In the midst of all this excitement and confusion, I did not get a clear picture from Mr. Young of what had happened to Ace that day. Clearly, his explanation about my father was sidetracked by his eagerness to tell me his version of the overall events.

That night I wrote a letter to him, quoting Lt. Carr's letter to my mother and Capt. Gehres's letter to my grandmother. I told him some of the anecdotes of Ace's sense of humor. "As you can imagine," I wrote, "I was quite startled when you said that you were beside him when he was killed."

I hope you don't mind my asking you to tell me as many details about this as you can, because I know very little about it. . . . After so much time has elapsed, I certainly do not need to be sheltered from the facts, no matter how gruesome they might be. I really wish to know the truth.

I very much appreciate your taking the time to share some memories of the remote past with me.

After fully quoting both Lt. Carr and Capt. Gehres in the letter, I noticed that each had a slightly different version of events, which may or may not be contradictory. (I hadn't really paid attention to this before.) Lt. Carr had stated that Ace was "forced to go over the side" to avoid the fire. Capt. Gehres had stated that Ace was in his plane on the flight deck at the time of the bombing (0707), that he somehow managed to get out of his plane and was seen on the stern, hangar deck level, at 0747--40 minutes later--and was not seen after that.

Of course, both Lt. Carr and Capt. Gehres had been relaying hearsay; neither of them had been eye witnesses. In contrast, Ensign Wally Young had been on the scene, and he might be able to clear up all the apparent contradictions.

I realized, though, that I would have to sift through an epic of conspiracy to glean a few kernels of observations of my father, which was my real interest from the beginning. (Should I care whether it was one or two bombs that dropped on the Franklin?) I just hoped that some of his reflections on my father might help me fill in the missing pieces of the story.

On September 9 I received the "tape" that Mr. Young had referred to--a homemade videotape. On the following day, I received a letter from him. Both had been mailed the morning after my call--obviously before he had received my letter to him (or even knew that I would send one).

As soon as the video arrived, I put it into my VCR.

It was a patched-up piece, intended to prove his version of the events of March 19, 1945. Much of it was copied from The Ship That Wouldn't Die, the 1988 video produced by Bob Garthwaite (a colleague of my former mother-in-law), commemorating the attack on the occasion of the scrapping of the Franklin in the 1970s, a tape I had possessed for years.

Mr. Young patched in his own comments, and an interview with a seaman from the destroyer Hunt, and another documentary I was not familiar with. Overall, the video quality was poor, but the audio was intelligible. (You can read a more detailed description of the video.)

[From the video narration:] Here we are viewing two twin five-inch cannon mounts on the starboard edge of the flight deck. Above the forward cannon mount on the left, or port side, of the flight deck, you can view the large chunk blown out of the flight deck. This is where I was sitting in the cockpit of my TBM Avenger. I was the next plane to take off, behind the TBM at the center line of the flight deck. He [Ace] was just spreading his wings prior to spooling up for takeoff.

He rose about a hundred feet and then executed a vertical reverse and then came in at a shallow angle toward the forward aircraft [Ace's], the plane that was sitting right next to me, spreading his wings. I was the next plane to launch.

I went running back under the tail of my TBM, and all of a sudden just a BAAA!! and I went flat. And that propeller of the plane, this far [about two and a half feet] behind me, could have parted my hair. There were two pilots who did not duck and were ground into hamburger. One of them, I believe, was Commander Allan Edmands, our commanding officer of the torpedo squadron. The only thing the record said of it was "MIA--missing in action." They made no attempt to identify one of the two pilots that had been killed.

In the letter that Mr. Young hadn't known I had sent I had told him to spare me no details, "no matter how gruesome they might be." The video had been made some years before, before Mr. Young knew of my existence. But even in real time, I was certain that Mr. Young would have none of the tact that Lt. Carr had shown my mother.

In Mr. Young's letter, which came the following day, he was responding to me in real time. He assumed that I, as well as my father, was a Lieutenant Commander. And he explained how he had confused me with my father's "cousin":

Dear Lt. Comdr. Allan Edmands

My first comment is what a thrill it was to receive your phone call. And secondly I had made a comment about your father's first cousin Sonny N. W. Edmands. His wife Rita had received from her brother  . . . a copy of one of my reports on the Franklin of March 19, 1945. I mentioned your father Lt. Comdr ALLAN EDMANDS and how I was only 50 feet from him when he was killed. I truly believe he was killed in the initial explosion. But the Avenger just behind him, the pilot Glen Druliner was killed also. But two other things that may have happened. ALLAN may have perished by falling in the huge hole the 1000lb Bomb made just behind the tail of his Avenger. Or the other possibility, he may have been one of the pilots who ran into a propeller and was ground to hamburger. I can say he never arrived at the fantail where 40 or 50 Airmen collected prior to grabing [sic] a rope and sliding down to the water. As Rita Edmands says "her husband was a survivor of the Pearl Harbor attack and fought all over the Pacific and returned to Massachusetts with the highest number of points." Her brother is a retired Lt COL US Army. . . .

Mr. Young enclosed in the letter an enlarged picture of the torpedo squadron, on which he identified himself ("Ensign Wally Young") and my father ("Lt Commander ALLAN EDMANDS our C.O. and a very good man"). He also annotated the photo with a short harangue about Capt. Gehres's damnable irresponsibility.

One result of this letter: I realized that "Sonny Edmands" was the same person as Nelson Wilfred Edmands, Jr., my father's first cousin, the son of my grandfather's older brother, Nelson Wilfred Edmands, Sr., 1875-1950. I had some data on Nelson, Jr., in my genealogical records, but "Sonny" I had been unaware of. His parents, like mine, must have wanted to avoid calling him "Junior" and so had given him this nickname.

I searched my grandmother's diaries for references to Sonny, and I found many of them. I also entered his name in the Web and found an interview with him about his experiences as an Army Private at Schofield Barracks during the Pearl Harbor attack.

Reading the interview, which included his picture, I discovered where Sonny and his wife, Rita, resided. I found their telephone number through directory assistance and called them up. We had a delightful chat, which inaugurated a continuing correspondence.

Sonny had always admired his older cousin Ace. During the phone call, Sonny, now 80 years old, asked me if I was as good-looking as my father had been (I told him I was not). Later Sonny sent me the certificate of how he had donated an interment flag in honor of Ace at the "Avenue of Flags" wall in Hawaii's Punchbowl Cemetery.

The second result of Mr. Young's letter: I realized that Ensign Young had had far too many things to think about and deal with when the bomb exploded to be a totally reliable eye witness of my father's death. He "truly believed" Ace had been killed in the initial explosion. But he might have perished by falling in the hole. Or he may have been ground into hamburger, as some of the men were, by the whirling propellers of the bouncing, careening, burning, exploding planes. Mr. Young had to concentrate on his own survival, and there was confusion and thick, greasy smoke everywhere.

I think I will have to establish a detective agency to compete with the famous Pinkerton agency that was so famous in the mid to late 1800's. In your last letter or was it phone call you posed what could have been an incredible problem when you mentioned that your fathers wedding ring and dog tags were in your possession. This really shook me up and posed a question that is almost unbelievable. Could your father had a premonition that he was to suffer his supreme sacrifice and cause him to take that ring off. This is exactly what happened. I started going through my suitcases full of correspondence and came across the "BIG BEN" directory which has the name of everyone that could be accounted for on that carrier. I found the name of Lt. Charles Carr and also Thomas King who is the vice president of the Franklin Association. I decided to call Lt. Carr to start with it was a stroke of incredible luck his widow still lives in their original house in Fremont California. And her daughter and husband live in an adjoining house and handle all of her mail. When I told her daughter what I was attempting to do "This part is as exciting as your first call to me" she said. My Goodness yes I have that original letter and it spoke of a man who searched Comdr Edmands quarters and found the wedding ring and dog tags that he surrendered to Lt. Carr. If you could study the pictures of the flight deck I'm sure you will agree with me. That huge hole in the flight deck just about 15 ft. in back of where he was sitting is what happened to your father. The huge fire and smoke that came out of that area. I know I lived through it. you could not see because 115 octain [sic] aviation gasoline was so thick I had to lie on the deck and shove my mouth in a hole in the grating to try to get air. had I remained in this position for another 30 seconds I would have perished. But someone on the bring [bridge?] had brought that huge ship crosswind and the 35 knots of wind cleared the deck of smoke.

Sincerely
Wally Young

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