Most of the US Navy’s carrier pilots in the Second World War trained on a ship on a lake that had no weapons, no armor, and paddlewheel engines.
"Hidden History" is a diary series that explores forgotten and little-known areas of history.
USS Sable on Lake Michigan photo from WikiCommons
When the Pacific War began in 1941, Japan had the largest carrier fleet in the world, with 13 flattops of various sizes. The British Royal Navy had 9 carriers large and small (but nearly all of those were in the European Theater), and the US had 8, ranging from the Langley to the Hornet.
But by the middle of 1942, the tide in the Pacific War had begun to turn. The Japanese had lost the core of their carrier force at Midway, and they lacked the industrial ability to replace those losses. The US had also lost much of its Pacific carrier fleet (only Enterprise and Saratoga remained), but unlike Japan, the United States had virtually unlimited industrial power, and was already gearing up to not only replace its carrier fleet, but to expand it.
Even before the bombs had fallen at Pearl Harbor, the US had already begun the construction of three new Essex-class fleet carriers, and by January 1942 orders had been placed for ten more—a total of 24 of these would be launched before the war ended. These were quickly followed by contracts for light carriers (CVL) and escort carriers (CVE). In all, the US would construct an incredible 97 carriers of various sizes for the war, and the Royal Navy would build 85. The Imperial Japanese Navy only managed 24—less than twice as many as she had in the beginning.
To man all these carriers, however, the Navy needed pilots. The Navy’s pilot training program, like that of the Army Air Corps, consisted of four stages. New recruits were given pre-flight “ground school”, then went on to a “primary trainer” which taught them how to fly. Most pilots did their primary training at Pensacola FL or Corpus Christi TX. Students then went on to a “basic trainer”, in which they learned aerobatics and military skills such as instrument flying, formation flying and night flying. They were then sent to an “advanced trainer” which prepared them for whatever specialized type of military aviation they had been assigned to. In 1942, the Navy produced almost 11,000 pilots, then over 20,000 a year after that.
But these large numbers of student pilots produced an unforeseen bottleneck. The only way to train a student pilot in carrier landings was through actual practice, but the Navy needed every carrier it had for combat and could not spare any for training.
To solve the problem, the Navy took a page from the British, who had produced crude but effective aircraft carriers by stripping down a merchant ship hull and fitting a flat flight deck on top. Since the largest basic training school was at the Glenview Naval Air Station near Chicago, the Navy scoured the Great Lakes for a suitable civilian ship.
The one they settled on was the Seeandbee, a former 1500-passenger paddle-wheel cruise ship that began making runs on Lake Erie from Cleveland to Buffalo in 1913. The Navy purchased the ship, took off the superstructure and upper decks, and added a flat 550-foot wooden flight deck which overhung the hull.
The reborn ship, classed as an “auxiliary vessel”, was christened USS Wolverine. She was, basically, just a floating runway with extra arrestor wires. She had no hangar and no deck elevators, and with her coal-driven paddle-wheels producing a top speed of just 20 knots Wolverine was just barely fast enough for takeoffs. Newer and more powerful aircraft such as the Hellcat, which needed more speed for leaving the ground, were unable to fly off the ship unless there was sufficient windy weather.
By August 1942, Wolverine was making daily trips from Navy Pier out into Lake Michigan, where student pilots from Glenview could fly out, rendezvous, and make practice carrier landings and takeoffs. To qualify for graduation and assignment overseas, a student had to make eight successful carrier landings. The accident rate was actually not unexpectedly high, though today the mud at the bottom of Lake Michigan is littered with the corpses of some 150 aircraft of various types, from SJN trainers to Helldivers, that crashed onto, off of, or into the Great Lakes carriers. Many of these planes were as new as the pilots, having been delivered straight from the factory, and about 40 have now been recovered from the lakebed, restored, and put on museum display.
Within a short time, however, the backlog of new student pilots who needed to be carrier-qualified was too much for the Wolverine to handle, and the Navy decided to add another training carrier. In May 1943, the Pentagon purchased the sister ship of the old Seeandbee, the steam paddler Greater Buffalo, converting her into the USS Sable. Together, the two freshwater carriers became known as the “Cornbelt Fleet”. Some 18,000 Navy combat pilots earned carrier qualifications on their flat decks, logging over 125,000 landings.
When the war ended in 1945, the US cancelled the remaining fleet carriers that it had ordered and curtailed its pilot-training program. Within months, Wolverine had been sold for scrap and been broken up. The Great Lakes Historical Society offered to buy the Sable and convert her to a floating museum, but they were unable to raise enough money, and in 1947 Sable too went to the scrapyard.
NOTE: As some of you already know, all of my diaries here are draft chapters for a number of books I am working on. So I welcome any corrections you may have, whether it's typos or places that are unclear or factual errors. I think of y'all as my pre-publication editors and proofreaders. ;)