The Aircraft Carriers of the Great Lakes

I like to use my own picture for this blog but sometimes I run across a subject where it would be difficult to do so.  The Naval Institute's Naval History Magazine was once again the inspiration for this article.  Since it has something to do with my favorite topics - the Great Lakes, ships and planes, I had to do a posting.  And based on the name of one of the ships I just had to do a post.  All of the pictures used in this post come from the Naval Historical Center.

World War II was the coming of age for the Aircraft Carrier.  Part of that was out of necessity on the part of the United States since the Japanese did a pretty good job on the US Battleship Fleet at Pearl Harbor and part of that was because of the effectiveness of the airplane in modern warfare.

The US entered World War II with 7 Aircraft Carriers and by the end of the war would have several times that.  It's one thing to build ships, it's another thing to train the men that would eventually fly off those ships.  So the US built some ships which would serve that purpose and that's where we come in.

This is probably one of my favorite pictures from World War II is this picture.  This was taken near the end of the war and shows a handfull of aircraft carriers and was entitled "Murderer's Row" (named after the famed Yankees lineup of the 20's).  So a nation that started with 7 Carriers would have almost that many in one spot.

 The first of these training carriers would start out life as the Seeandbee and was built by the American Shipbuilding Company of Wyandotte, Michigan in 1913.  She was a steam powered side wheeled excursion ship of the Cleveland and Buffalo Transit Company (C & B get it).  It would go between Cleveland and Buffalo until 1939 when the Great Depression caused the liquidation of the company.

 In March of 1942, the Navy purchased the steamer and started to convert her into an aircraft carrier.  She was designated as IX-64.  IX is the designation used by the Navy for ships that aren't otherwise classified.  She was named the Wolverine because she would operate mostly in Lake Michigan and Michigan was known as the Wolverine State.  She was commissioned on August 12, 1942 (exactly several years before my birthday).

 She was fitted with a 550 foot long deck constructed with douglas fir and began her job as an advanced trainer in January of 1943.  She would operate out of Naval Air Station Glenview (in Illinois) and served to train carrier pilots and landing signal operators.  She and her sister (the Sable covered next) were not proper carriers by any stretch.  Neither had a hangar deck or flight elevators.  So if a plane crashed, training would end for the day.   Also, because of wind over deck (the speed of the wind over the deck) minimums for some of our advanced planes were higher than some of the prevailing winds on Lake Michigan, training would be halted for days at a time.  But they still got the job done.

 Once the war was over, so was her mission.  The Wolverine was decomissioned on November 7, 1945 and removed from the Naval Registry in November 28 of the same year.  Two years later she was scrapped.

 As I mentioned, the Wolverine had a sister ship.  She started out the war as the Greater Buffalo and was built by the American Shipbuilding Company at Lorain, Ohio in 1924.  Like the Wolverine, she was also a sidewheeled excursion steamer and she was part of the Detroit and Cleveland Company but she was used to move passengers from Detroit to Cleveland.  She served in this role from her construction until 1942.

 On August 7, 1942, she was acquired by the US Navy and renamed the USS Sable and designated as IX-81.  Unlike the Wolverine, she was built with a steel deck.  She began operations in May of 1943.  She is famous because it was on her decks that future President George H.W. Bush would learn to fly off carrier decks.

Together the Wolverine and Sable would train 17,820 pilots and there would be 116,000 landings on their decks.  The Sable was decomissioned and stricken from the Naval Register on the same days as the Wolverine.  She would be scrapped in 1948.

There were an estimated 135 to 500 aircraft lost during training.

Both ships represented one of many contributions that the Great Lakes Region made to the War Effort in World War II.  It's kind of a shame that they were scrapped after the war though.