America's Paddlewheel Aircraft Carriers

Yes, you read that correctly-- paddlewheel aircraft carriers. Fresh-water paddlewheel aircraft carriers, no less.

At the advent of the Second World War, two things became apparent to military staffers-- first, that aircraft carriers would play a much larger role in the coming battles than had previously been thought, and second, that the impact of carriers would depend largely on the overall preparations of the pilots they carried.

In response to this reality, US planners came up with a massive plan-- a program planned to start in 1943 to prepare 45,000 qualified Navy pilots. In addition to the existing naval air school in Pensacola, Florida, two new schools were opened: one in Corpus Christi, Texas, and one in Jacksonville, Florida. But there was a hurdle to be overcome. Although it was possible to teach pilots how to fly, the skill of taking off from or landing on an aircraft carrier was something that could only be learned through experience. Only a limited amount of learning could be had from landing at ground-bases. For pilots to truly demonstrate that they were ready to be shipped out to carriers, they should have to show their ability to successfully take off and land on one. The Navy stipulated that they should do this not once, but ten times before being considered ready.

The problem with this plan is that there were no carriers for student-pilots to take off from or land on. All the existing carriers were engaged in theater operations, and couldn't be spared for this duty.

Captain Richard Whitehead came up with a solution-- convert existing passenger steamships operating in the Lake Michigan into training aircraft carriers. Admiral Ernest J. King took up the idea, and put the Navy on the fast-track to constructing a pair of training carriers out of two existing paddlewheel steamships.

Over the course of 1942, the Navy acquired the Greater Buffalo and the C & B, two passenger ferries, and began converting them into carriers. They were large ships (C & B was known as "the Titanic of the Great Lakes"), but were still only coal-fired, steam-powered paddle-wheelers that had been constructed nearly thirty years prior. Nevertheless, the shipbuilders began the task of stripping off their superstructures, and building flight decks on them. Their decks were equipped with eight flight arrestors, but no hangars, elevators, or catapults were built. They both lacked any armament, operating safely far away from battle.

The USS Wolverine (formerly C & B) was the first to be put to work, commissioned in August of 1942. She was joined shortly by the USS Sable (formerly Greater Buffalo) in March of 1943. Both ships set almost immediately about their tasks. The Air Force Flight School in Glenview, Illinois had opened a naval branch by this time, and future naval pilots were shipped there following graduation from the schools in Florida and Texas. Trainees would take off from Glenview, just north of Chicago, fly out to the carriers, land, take-off again, and return to base. Roughly 300 landings and take-offs were made per day on each ship. By the end of the war, more than fifteen thousand pilots had flown to and from the ships. Both ships were decommissioned on November 7th, 1945.

At the start, the curriculum demanded that pilots make no less than 8 landings and take-offs from their flight decks, but by the end of the war this number had been reduced to 4. Over the course of their war careers, roughly one hundred planes missed their flight decks and sank to the bottom of Lake Michigan. By the time each pilot was shipped out to his carrier in the operational theater, he had two years of preparation and between 300 and 360 hours of flight time under his belt. Among those pilots who had landed on and taken off from the USS Sable-- future-President George H.W. Bush.

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