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    Lake Michigan's Aircraft Carriers
    Lake Michigan's Aircraft Carriers
    Lake Michigan's Aircraft Carriers
    Ebook130 pages32 minutes

    Lake Michigan's Aircraft Carriers

    By Paul M. Somers

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    About this ebook

    This is the story of the USS Wolverine and the USS Sable, two Great Lakes excursion ships converted for aircraft carrier training during WWII.


    Through the duration of the war, the United States Navy qualified 17,800 pilots for aircraft carrier operation. Training the pilots on either the Atlantic or the Pacific Ocean would have exposed the training ships to the danger of submarine attack, while requiring the escort of fighting ships that were needed elsewhere. It would also have involved arming and armoring the ships used for training. Commander R.F. Whitehead came up with an idea that solved all of these problems. He suggested doing the training on the protected waters of the Great Lakes.

    The USS Wolverine and the USS Sable were chosen and became the only fresh water, paddle-wheeled, coal-fired aircraft carriers in the history of the world. Author Paul M. Somers shares his collection of vintage photos and a lifetime of research to detail the history of these two great vessels-from their life as cruise ships to their contributions to the war effort and then to their eventual scrapping.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateNov 5, 2003
    ISBN9781439614778
    Lake Michigan's Aircraft Carriers
    Author

    Paul M. Somers

    Mr. Somers, a native of Chicago, grew up as a witness to these aircraft carriers on Lake Michigan. This book is a result of his continuing interest in those ships. Somers is also the author of Illinois Central Streamliners 1936-1946.

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      Book preview

      Lake Michigan's Aircraft Carriers - Paul M. Somers

      Center

      INTRODUCTION

      Veterans, historians, and authors often express opinions as to what person, what weapon, or what piece of equipment won World War II. The one thing which all such pronouncements have in common is that they are all wrong.

      No person—neither General Patton nor Audie Murphy, and no weapon—neither the A-bomb nor the M-1 rifle, and no piece of equipment—neither the USS Missouri nor the Willys Jeep single-handedly brought an end to the conflict. Substantial contributions to victory came from many sources. This is the story of two ships which played a major role in the defeat of the Japanese without ever leaving United States territorial waters: The USS Wolverine and the USS Sable.

      From the first moment of the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, it was evident that naval warfare in World War II would not consist of Jutland-type engagements with battleships hurling projectiles at one another within clearly-defined, relatively small areas. Though it was published a few months too late to save the Pacific Fleet, one of the most comprehensive analyses of what had happened to naval warfare and what was going to happen appeared, unlikely enough, in the July 1942 issue of National Geographic Magazine in an article by Melville Bell Grosvenor entitled The New Queen of the Seas.

      In that article, Grosvenor argued the need for more floating airbases—flight decks on cargo ships, on troop carriers, on tankers; indeed, on almost every type and size of ship involved in the war effort. His thesis was that such ships could deliver assembled and manned airplanes within flying distance of where they were needed, launch them, and see them delivered, ready for action, not crated, unassembled and with no simultaneously-delivered pilots! Such ships could also be defended en route by their cargo—launching their airplanes to meet an enemy attack by surface or air.

      Only on the next to last page of this article is there even the slightest mention of an adequate supply of pilots, and then, only obliquely in the caption of a photograph. It was under a photo of the Great Lakes cruise ship SS Seeandbee being converted to a practice carrier to train young flyers in take-offs and landings in preparation for combat situations.

      This is a story of how the SS Seeandbee and another Great Lakes cruise ship, the SS Greater Buffalo, made a major contribution to the defeat of the Japanese in World War II.

      One

      BEFORE PEARL HARBOR

      The concept of ship-borne aircraft in the U.S. Navy began on November 14, 1910, when Eugene Ely took off from an 83-foot downward-slanted flight deck which had been built on the bow of the light cruiser USS Birmingham. He flew his 50 horsepower Curtiss biplane to a safe landing on land. This was the first ever aircraft take-off from a ship.

      On January 18, 1911, Mr. Ely, again, made history by landing on a ship. This was done on a 102-foot platform added to the stern of the armored cruiser USS Pennsylvania. The deck was fitted with a simple arrestor system of cables, weighted down by sandbags, which was designed to catch a hook attached to the bottom of Ely’s plane.

      Both of these exercises were considered demonstration; it took until 1922 for the U.S. Navy to acquire its first dedicated carrier, the USS Langley (CV1). It was a conversion of the collier USS Jupiter. The Langley was 542 feet long with a displacement of 12,000 tons and a top speed of 14 knots. Its normal complement rose from 8 planes to 30 during its career. This flush-decked carrier served until 1936 when the forward one-third of its flight deck was removed in its refitting and reclassification as a seaplane tender (AV3). It was sunk by the Japanese early in World War II while ferrying Army Air Corps P-40s to Java.

      As the U.S. Navy’s only commissioned aircraft carrier from 1922 until the completion of the USS Lexington (CV2) and the USS

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