Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
February/March 1987 | Volume 38, Issue 2
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
February/March 1987 | Volume 38, Issue 2
As Captain Beach explained in his essay on naval aviation (“Navy Power: A View from the Air,” October/November 1986), Pearl Harbor instantly made the aircraft carrier the capital ship of the Navy, and our survival depended upon our grasping that fact and acting quickly. We had already started a moderate building program, and we immediately accelerated it. But construction was the easy part; how could we quickly train the thousands and thousands of pilots and other specialized crew members who were needed to man the ships?
In December 1941 we had only eight aircraft carriers, and by the summer of 1942 we had lost two of these, with two more to be lost in a few months. We didn’t have enough ships to defend ourselves, let alone train more men to take the offensive.
An ingenious solution to the problem was proposed by Comdr. R. F. Whitehead, a Navy pilot then on the staff of the commandant of the Ninth Naval District (the Chicago area). Why not train new pilots on the protected waters of the Great Lakes, he said, using ships that could be converted from ones already available? He easily convinced his commandant, who, on January 16, 1942, made the official recommendation to the chief of naval operations that two lake steamers be purchased and converted for training purposes.
The plan was approved for one vessel, a large 1913 passenger steamer called the Seeandbee . The Navy bought her on March 12, 1942, and conversion started less than two months later. The Seeandbee was a truly splendid vessel. Almost five hundred feet long, she was as large as many oceangoing ships. Planned by the famous marine designer Louis O. Keil, she had 470 staterooms and 24 magnificent parlors. But all her sumptuous fittings had to go. Her superstructure came off at Cleveland, and she was stripped bare right down to her automobile deck, only about five feet above the waterline. Then she went to Buffalo, where her flight deck was installed, and on August 12, 1942, she was commissioned USS Wolverine . Her career as an aircraft carrier had begun.
She entered twentieth-century Navy life with two unusual characteristics: she was a coal burner, and she was propelled by paddle wheels. Her machinery was so sound that no mechanical changes were necessary. From the very beginning, Navy men had been leery of paddle wheels. They were complicated and fragile and, rising as they did above the water, vulnerable to enemy fire. But the Wolverine was never going to see service off the Great Lakes, and her machinery proved to be so sound that the engineers in charge of the conversion decided no mechanical changes were necessary. So the Wolverine paddled her way through her Navy career, with the unfailing reliability that her new job demanded. She offered the Navy