Yorktown and After

At the end of December, Ina, my wife, Max, my son, and I journeyed to South Carolina, where we became acquainted in person with my cousin Sonny Edmands and his wife, Rita. We had already been writing back and forth for a couple of months, ever since my communication with Wally Young had alerted me to their existence. Sonny, now 80 years old, had been a 19-year-old Army Private at Schofield Barracks when Hawaii was attacked by the Japanese on December 7, 1941. He had been with General MacArthur's forces in the retaking of the Philippines and he can talk for hours about the combat at Leyte Gulf.

Sonny remembered Ace, his first cousin, very well. A few years before, he had arranged for a flag commemoration of him at the Punchbowl Cemetery on Oahu.

Sonny and Rita went with us on our tour of the Essex-class aircraft carrier U.S.S. Yorktown (CV-10), the "Fighting Lady," at Patriot's Point--sister ship of the Franklin (CV-13), which decades ago had been sliced up with a cutting torch and sold as scrap metal--to Japan. (To enlarge the picture, click it.)

On this massive warship, we lingered in the room dedicated to the Franklin. Here is a painting in that room of the Franklin catastrophe (click the picture to enlarge it).

Sonny, wearing his "Pearl Harbor Survivor" hat, was approached by strangers who asked him about his experiences. He gladly told his war stories. I could tell that the strangers assumed that I was Sonny's son. Most of the time, I, a tourist like them, a civilian for my entire life, did nothing to correct the assumption, proud to be associated with Sonny.

On one occasion, however, I did correct it. I explained that I was actually Sonny's cousin, that I was the son of a pilot who had been killed in combat on a ship just like the Yorktown.

I was able to get a close-up look at a real TBM Avenger, the plane that Ace flew. We toured the flight crew's ready room. And I found out exactly what a fantail is on a carrier.

We followed the tour along narrow corridors, and I imagined them filled with thick smoke. I felt the steel walls and imagined how they could be too hot to touch. We wound around belowdecks and I stepped into compartments, imagining how it would feel if the breatheable air were giving out in them. I closed my eyes and imagined hearing terrifying explosions and screams.

On the flight deck, I stood in an aft area, approximately corresponding to where Ace's torpedo squadron, the VT5 Torpcats, must have been revving up the engines of their Avengers, pointing forward, readying for takeoff from the Franklin nearly 58 years before. The aircraft now displayed on the Yorktown's flight deck are much more modern, but I squinted my eyes and imagined them as Avengers.

Then I imagined chaos in that area after the ship was hit, the Pandemonium of the planes bouncing, careening, tipping over, burning, exploding, their propellers whirling, gnashing, chopping, shredding.

As I walked aft, a tourist in the last week of 2002, I imagined myself crawling in March 1945, along a deck slick with oil and blood, choking in thick, greasy, black smoke, hearing shrieks, more explosions, and the awful clangs of hot shrapnel striking metal surfaces.

When I reached what would have been the landing signal officer's station at the port stern of the flight deck, I stood for a while at the safety fence and looked out into Charleston Harbor, where the terrible American Civil War had begun. The fence had been installed by the Patriots Point Naval and Maritime Museum to protect tourists like me from falling off the side of the deck. On a working carrier, as the Franklin was, there would have been no fence interrupting this landing strip for incoming aircraft.

I leaned against the fence and turned around, looking forward toward the bow. I imagined being with men trapped where I was, an unstable perch on a March morning long ago, nothing but hell forward from them. And under them, too--I imagined the hot fury raging on the hangar deck right below, a ghastly giant fireworks show of rockets, bombs, and aviation gasoline, and the terrible danger of more explosions impending.

The men trapped there were tiny on the gigantic, shuddering ship that had been home to three thousand of them. The distressed ship was tiny on the surface of the cold North Pacific Ocean, which was temporarily disturbed by a flaming oil slick and the flotsam of human warfare. The ocean, here at the edge of its Nankai Trench, was nearly a mile deep.

It would have been obvious that the only course was to go over the side.

I'm not a particularly spiritual person, and I don't pretend to know a lot about souls. But at that place, what would have been the Yorktown's landing signal officer's station, I made a silent prayer for the repose of the soul of the skipper of the Torpcats, Ace, Lieutenant Commander Allan C. Edmands, Daddy Allan, my father.

After months of communicating with Franklin survivors, all heroes, especially after talking with VT5 gunners McGuckin and Hagan, after touring the Yorktown, after writing this long narrative as part of my overall family history project, I feel I have perspective on what happened to my father on March 19, 1945, and on the prodigious and awful impact that day had on my life.

I have made some friends among the survivors, and I met several of them at the Franklin reunion in Pittsburgh in June 2003. My sisters attended with me. Here are a few of the pictures (you can click them to enlarge them).

Ace's children in Pittsburgh, June 2003 Christine Barrett, Allan Edmands, Janna Yarnot
Jim Stuart and Jack Hensel	Richard Simms on the banjo (Richard was the other "war orphan")
Allan Edmands, Christine Barrett, Janna Yarnot, Jan Stuart, Jim Stuart

On the dinner cruise on Pittsburgh's three rivers, we shared our table with three Franklin survivors and their wives, people I've come to regard as friends. At one point after dinner, a couple of the guys were sharing memories of the ship and stories of what they've been doing in the decades since. They remarked on how at each reunion the contingent of Franklin survivors grows ever smaller, on how so many of their shipmates are passing on. One of them said, "Well, I'm happy that I'm still on this side of the grass!" and the other guy, a wide smile on his face, heartily agreed.

Then suddenly they became quiet, and I was aware that they were embarrassed that I had overheard this declaration. I realized that I represented to them the shipmates they had known who were now dead--in fact, the shipmates who had been killed as young men on the ship.

One of them started to explain to me that he had meant no harm, but I immediately reassured them both. I told them how happy I was that they were on this side of the grass, how much it has meant to me to talk to them about what it was like on the ship, about what kind of a man my father was.

I was struck by the fact that attendees at the reunions consist almost entirely of survivors and their families. Other than my sisters and I, there was only one other attendee whose father had been killed on the Franklin. This is a shame. I now appreciate how much we "war orphans" can benefit from meeting and talking with survivors of the disaster. Also, as one of the wives of the regular attendees confided to me, getting to know people like us can help the Franklin shipmates still on this side of the grass deal with lingering "survivor's guilt."

What happened to Ace on that day? I will never know the complete story, but I know so much more than I used to. I've come to understand how the mystery of his disappearance from my life affected my childhood, and even the years beyond.

Such an impact this mystery had!--as though my father's soul had been restless, groping for some kind of resolution. As I said, I don't know a lot about souls, but I pray that his soul can now find peace.

I think I know my father.