Ships
- USS Edsall (DD-219) Captain, 17 May 1923 – 18 December 1924
Robert Todd Young was born in Marquette, Michigan, and graduated from the United States Naval Academy with the class of 1910. In 1916 the Navy designated him Naval Aviator No. 31. He remained in the service after the First World War and held the rank of lieutenant commander when he was ordered to a destroyer.
On 17 May 1923 he took command of Edsall (DD-219), relieving William Callender Irving Stiles. The Clemson-class destroyer had been launched at Philadelphia in 1920 and commissioned that November under A. H. Rice. Halsey Powell had commanded her for a few months in 1921. By the spring of 1923 she had been nearly a year with the U.S. Naval Detachment in Turkish Waters, the force sent to look after American lives and property while the Near East was still unsettled.
Young's tour covered the last part of that cruise. Edsall went on calling at ports around the Mediterranean and kept up gunnery and torpedo practice with the other American destroyers on the station. On 1 June 1924 she passed the Strait of Gibraltar in company with the destroyer Bulmer and shaped a course for home. She reached Boston on 26 July 1924 and went into overhaul.
He stayed in command through the yard period. On 18 December 1924 he turned Edsall over to Lemuel Earl Lindsay. Early in January 1925 the destroyer sailed to join the Asiatic Fleet and arrived on the China coast that June. Young's duty in her had already ended.
He retired from active service in 1931, still a lieutenant commander, and returned to Marquette. On 8 June 1938 he married Evelyn L'Huillier there. Young died in Marquette on 4 January 1947, at the age of 58.