15 July 2007
Wolverine
USS Wolverine and Lake Michigan Ore Carrier, 1944
I'm happy the North Koreans opened up their reactor to inspection, and I am a little dismayed that the Russians pulled out of the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, though Congress had never gotten around to formally ratifying the treaty anyway.
It seems like we have lived this all before, and are probably doomed to live it again. So I am more interested this sunny July morning in the matter of new starts rather than old, if vital, business.
My son just moved to Chicago to start his life, or at least end the old one he was living at the Big Kegger in the groves of higher education. For a number of excellent reasons, he spent his college time in the Wolverine State of Michigan, a lovely peninsula surrounded completely by mostly pure sparking fresh water.
Life is a series of linked coincidences, and the place of his matriculation has a natural tug toward the commerce of the Windy City, and it was with some trepidation at the distance that I helped bankroll his migration to an apartment over a bar. Starting tomorrow, he starts his matriculation in the school of hard knocks, joining what one of his buddies darkly calls “The Class of 2055.”
His first paycheck is only weeks away, and there is no one who is looking forward to it more than me.
He is not far from DePaul University, and Oz Park and the Near North Side. I am happy he is starting out in vibrant and exciting place. I got my start in Detroit, which had been strangled and was the city of the walking dead.
Chicago is the city that survived, and there is a breathing living link there to the past. When I was there a couple months ago, I walked up to Rush Street, past the old water tower, and the Hancock Building, just soaking it in. A retired Flag Officer of my acquaintance trained near there in the edgy days just before the Second World War.
The honky-tonks of Rush Street were off limits to the young officers, and had just that much more attraction. It is a little strange these days to think of Chicago as a Navy town, aside from the odd name for the great pier that protrudes into the Great Lake. But it was all that, and more.
All that fresh water…and so far from the U-boat packs that lurked off the approaches to the East Coast. In what the Germans called “The Happy Time” of Operation Drumbeat in 1942, Hitler's submarines operated with virtual impunity off the ports from New York to Miami.
A land-locked ocean was just the ticket for a nation suddenly struggling with wars in two worlds. We forget now that the Japanese made forays against the West Coast, too, once shelling an oil refinery near LA and launching pyrotechnic balloons against the Pacific Northwest.
The Navy took its carrier-landing training inland to Lake Michigan. Flying within sight of Lakeshore Drive, nearly twenty thousand pilots got their carrier qualifications on two converted side-wheel excursion boats.
The ships were purchased in the darkest days of the war, while Operation DRUMBEAT still continued. The USS Wolverine (IX-64) was commissioned in Buffalo, in August of 1942. Laid down in 1913, Wolverine was originally named the “Seeandbee” after her owners, the Cleveland and Buffalo Transit Company, she was converted quickly. The amenities for the passenger trade were ripped off, a great flat deck installed, and a small superstructure raised on the starboard side, just like a real carrier.
This was serious business. During an inspection in late October, 1942, Wolverine briefly broke out the four-star pennant of the Commander in Chief of the United States Fleet, stern Admiral Ernie King. One of the thousands of aviators who qualified on her deck later became President George H.W. Bush.
A second mini-carrier, the USS Sable, was brought on-line in May of 1943.
Fitted with a 550-foot flight deck, Wolverine began her new job in January 1943, operating out of Navy Pier near The Loop.
It must have been agony to work on her flight deck in the grip of the cruel Midwestern winter, but there was a war on. Pilots operating all the aircraft in the Navy inventory flew out of Naval Air Station Glenview to bounce on her decks, and trainee Landing Signal Officers (LSO) manned the stern, waving their signal paddles at the incoming aircraft.
For the rest of the war, summer and winter, the two carriers deployed almost daily from Navy Pier downtown. The main complaint from Chicagoans was that when the ships got underway, black coal soot from their stacks soiled the laundry drying on lines. Attentive to public opinion, the Navy ordered them to sortie before dawn, before the clothes were hung.
There were limitations, of course. Even with flight decks more than five-hundred feet long, there were no elevators or hangar deck below like the Fleet carriers. If a student aviator (“Nugget,” then and now) pranged his airplane and fouled the deck, there was little alternative to suspending operations and return to port.
The Nuggets of 1943-44 did not visit the carriers for long. In those days, just eight successful take-offs and landings were required to make their qualification, and then it was off to the Fleet. The CarQual process often took only two to three days.
There were inherent problems to operations on the lakes. Unlike the ocean, the winds were often fickle. Carriers operate high performance aircraft by combining the speed of the ship with the relative speed of the air around it. To conduct flight operations, the ship turns into the prevailing wind, which can generate thirty or more- sometimes much more- knots of “wind over the deck.”
It is an important fact of aviation on the ocean. I recall when the Nimitz all-nuclear battle group was ordered to make “best speed” on her reactors around Cape Horn to join us off Iran in 1980 they rounded the tip of Africa and roared into the prevailing winds of the Indian Ocean. They reported more than seventy knots of wind down the flight deck and had to double and triple chain their aircraft.
But that was not the necessarily the case for Wolverine and her sister. Landing the hot Grumman Hellcats and gull-winged Corsairs required a substantial amount of relative wind. Since the ships could not steam much faster than twenty knots on their own, the conditions were often dicey.
The loss of aircraft and pilots were more accepted then. As many as 200 aircraft were lost “at sea,” and most of them still litter the lake floor off Chicago's Gold Coast, which has led to a curious thing. The fresh water and lack of oxygen has remarkable powers of conservation; there is a freighter in the upper lakes that went down in a storm in the 1920s with a cargo of Henry Ford's Model T's that are reported to still have air in their tires.
The same thing is true of the Navy's warbirds. Over thirty aircraft have been pulled from their watery tombs, some of them one-of-a-kind combat veterans of the war in the Pacific, recycled for training and lost in the lake for fifty years.
The Navy is notoriously short-sighted in conserving its past. Of the 1,978 F4F Wildcat fighters built by Grumman, exactly none survived demobilization. There was likewise no surviving SBD Dauntless Divebomber, the hero of the battle of Midway, which my Dad trained in.
The only place that examples of these historic aircraft might be found was below the blue waters of Lake Michigan. In addition to the Hellcats and the Dauntless, the only existing Vought SB2U Vindicator was brought up, and there are Corsairs and every other Fleet model, some from the earliest days of carrier aviation, sleeping in the deep.
The preservative qualities of the fresh water are now in question. The introduction of the foreign Zebra Mussel is reported to be tearing apart some of the airplanes that remain underwater, and with that may end the physical history of the Great Lakes Carrier navy.
The Naval Historical Center is the supposed to be the villain of the piece, and for lack of funds has declared that a full archeological survey be conducted of each wreck to ensure accountability; but by the times such operations can be conducted, the airplanes may be beyond restoration. Still on the lake floor is a F4U Corsair, the model flown by legendary hard-drinking Marine Pappy Boyington of the famed Black Sheep Squadron.
The Navy is a ruthlessly practical institution. The carriers, like the aircraft that landed on them, were just tools of metal. Wolverine was transferred to the War Shipping Administration on 26 November 1947, and sold later that same year for scrap. Sable was struck from the Navy list on 28 November 1945, and sold to the H. H. Buncher Co., on 7 July 1948, and scrapped fifty-nine years ago this month.
Since he is in the neighborhood now, perhaps my son will see the Corsair or some other ancient veteran come into Navy Pier someday on a barge. The clock is ticking on that, as is any evidence at all that Chicago was once as much a Navy town as San Diego or Norfolk.
As my long-retired friend the Admiral recalls, though, it was a hell of a liberty port. According to my son, it still is.
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com