 |
| The U.S.S. Wolverine with Chicago's skyline in the background (www.navsource.com) |
“Chicagoans will
see the commissioning of the United States aircraft carrier Wolverine at 3 p.m.
today, when the navy formally will take over the vessel off Madison Street,” The Chicago Tribune reported on this day
in 1942. It’s hard to believe today, but
just eight months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a remarkable transformation
had occurred as the nation turned its full attention to the war effort. The U.S.S. Wolverine was a stunning example
of the quickness of that turnaround.
At the beginning of
World War II the Navy had a big problem.
The attack on Pearl Harbor had clearly shown the effectiveness of
carrier-based airplanes, and the service figured that it needed to crank out
45,000 carrier pilots in short order if it had any chance of catching up to the
Japanese.
But there were
three problems in getting those pilots trained.
First, every available carrier that existed was urgently needed as part
of the war effort. The inventory of
carriers wasn’t large enough to allow even one ship to be steaming back and
forth, as new pilots tried to figure out how to land and take off on a pitching
deck.
Secondly, even if
there had been a carrier or two to spare, the coastal waters, especially those
of the Atlantic coast, were patrolled by the unpredictable terror of enemy
submarines. It was rightly concluded
that carrier training was a high-risk proposition under such conditions, and
the decision was made to conduct the training in the protected inland waters of
the Great Lakes. It wouldn’t make taking
off or landing any easier for prospective pilots, but at least they could count
on a ship being there instead of a roiling patch of water left behind after a
torpedo attack.
That brought on the
third problem . . . even if there were a way to get a carrier detached from
active duty, there was no way to get the vessel to the Great Lakes. No
carrier was narrow enough to fit through the Welland Canal, the only
passage between the Atlantic Ocean and the Great Lakes.
There was no time
to build a new carrier from scratch to meet the demand, so the decision was
made to find a couple of suitable ships that could be rapidly converted into
flat-tops for use in fresh water. Two
factors drove the selection process -- the ships had to be able to handle a
500-foot long flight deck and make 18 knots.
 |
| The launch of the Seeandbee in 1913 (Google image) |
According to Paul
M. Somers in his book Lake Michigan’s
Aircraft Carriers, two ships made the final cut. One was a car ferry owned by the Pere
Marquette Railroad, the USS City of
Midland. The other was a 1913 Great
Lakes excursion vessel, the Seeandbee
(the ship’s original owner was the Cleveland & Buffalo Transit Company – C
& B), a gilded queen with 24 ornate parlors and 62 staterooms. Find a great old silent video of a Ford Motor Company Merit Club cruise aboard the Seeandbee here.
The Pere Marquette was slower than Seeandbee, and Seeandbee also had the advantage of being 500 feet long, the right
length for the conversion. So Seeandbee got the nod, and the
conversion began. The Navy laid out
756,000 dollars for the luxury ship, stripping her of amenities in Cleveland in
the early months of 1942. On the sixth
of May of that year the Seeandbee was
towed from Cleveland to Buffalo where 1,200 workers worked around the clock to
convert the ship to a training carrier [www.cruiselinehistory.com].
 |
| The Seeandbee in Buffalo enroute to becoming the U.S.S. Wolverine (www.navsource.com) |
The flight deck was
550 feet long and extended well beyond the ship’s bow and stern. There was no hangar deck and no elevators, no
maintenance facilities, and no catapults since planes would not be kept on the
ship. Once a lucky pilot got a plane on
the deck, he took off again.
Two characteristics
separated the Wolverine and her
sister ship, the Sable, from every
other ship in the fleet. First, they
were coal-powered and, secondly, they were propelled by side-wheel paddle
wheels instead of propellers.
In normal
conditions the 18-knot maximum speed of the Wolverine was fast enough, when the
carrier was sailing into the wind, to accommodate most aircraft of the
time. On calm days, though, the wind
over the deck was insufficient to accommodate the faster planes being pressed
into service. During operation 120
planes were lost, but only eight pilots died, thanks in part to Coast Guard
craft that trailed the carrier during operations. 135,000 landings took place on the Wolverine and the Sable, qualifying 17,820 Navy and Marine aviators. Find a short video of the carrier during operations here.
Trainees would
leave the Glenview Naval Air Station and rendezvous over the easily identified
Bahai Temple in Wilmette before being directed to the carrier. It wasn’t easy to face the bucking flight
deck in the middle of winter.
Regulations required that the cockpit canopy be open during takeoffs and
landings so that a pilot could more easily escape a sinking plane. With blasts
of freezing air stinging their eyes, the prospective pilots approached a deck that
was often clouded by the thick black smoke the carriers made when travelling at
full speed. [www.nnapprentice.com]
President George H.
W. Bush recalled of his training flights out of Glenview, “I remember those
Great Lakes flights very well in the open cockpit that winter. Coldest I have ever been in my life.”
 |
| The U.S.S. Wolverine during operations (www.navsource.com) |
Imagine what it
must have been like back in the mid-1940’s, watching these two carriers receive
and send off aircraft, sometimes a little less than a mile off the shore of the
second largest city in the country! It
only lasted three years. The USS Wolverine was decommissioned on
November 7, 1945. On November 28 of that
year she was removed form the Naval Vessel Record. In December of that year she was sold for
scrap and subsequently broken up in Cleveland, Ohio.
Another first for
Chicago 71 years ago today – a paddle wheel aircraft carrier, with a name that
honored the state of Michigan began operations off the Windy City’s shores.
Posts
3 comments:
Wow, I never knew this story. Thanks for bringing it to life again. Fascinating.
It is kind of cool to think that a paddle wheel steamer was converted into an aircraft carrier and worked for three years off the Chicago shores. What a city!
Thank you for this excellent article about the Wolverine.
I have one small, really inconsequential nit-pick that I can't walk away without making: Steam catapults for aircraft carriers was a post-WWII innovation. None of the carriers that saw service during WWII from Wolverine or Sable on up to the Essex-class fleet carriers had catapults.
In every other way you're absolutely right to describe Wolverine as lacking the ancillary facilities common to even the CVE carriers.
Post a Comment