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1350 -- Plane S.B.D. #B2 crashed into sea of port quater, in 55 feet of water, bearing 080° (t): distance 7.6 miles from Chicago Harbor Light, in Latitude 41° 54.5’N., Longitude 87° 26.7’ W: pilot Maynard, Dale Leroy, Ens., USNR, sustained injuries as follows: laceration and contusion fo upper lip: shock due to cold
Comments about "Cornfields and Carriers" article:
... My [first carrier landing] came aboard the USS Sable on Nov. 28, 1944. Each fledgling aviator was required to complete eight successful landings. A successful landing meant that one didn't crash on the flight deck or land in Lake Michigan.
I flew upwind on the starboard side of the carrier with the canopy open to the freezing wind and my nerves stretched pretty thin (understatement). As I passed the Sable's bow, I snapped the aircraft into a hard 180-degree port turn. The wheels, flaps, and landing hook came down as activated and the aircraft flew downwind to the carrier's port bow. Next came the gentle turn into the landing groove to sight the landing signal officer (LSO), receive his "cut" signal, and make my first arrested landing on a carrier.
... Due to the sudden deceleration, when the hook engages the arresting wire, one must lock the canopy open, remove the hand from the throttle, and remove the feet from the brakes. I forgot all three. ... When my Wildcat hit the deck and grabbed the cable, the canopy slammed forward - my hand shoved the throttle to full power, and my feet applied the brakes! The Wildcat's nose went down and the tail went up. With luck, no damage was done.
The air boss was standing on the deck in the freezing wind in a full-length leather coat, was about 6 feet 4 inches tall, and looked as if he could eat ensigns alive - and very nearly did. Afterward he made his way to the next aviator to come aboard and was mumbling something about "idiots in airplanes."
This was the first of many hundreds of carrier landings [to come in] my naval service, but I will always remember that first on the USS Sable.
Lt. Cmdr. G. Vaughn, USNR-Ret.
Granbury, Texas
Rob Newell's article delighted us two old-timers and brought back many memories! George Cole was a plank owner of the USS Sable, serving as flight deck officer in 1943 and 1944, succeeded by Fred Durant, who served until decommissioning after V-J Day. Both the Sable and the USS Wolverine are enshrined in the Maritime Hall of Fame.
The article stated well the challenge of qualifying thousands of naval aviators to land on and take off from carriers. Both ships actively competed in a number of landings per day. When Sable arrived, 18 was the greatest number of pilots qualified in one day aboard Wolverine. With experience and the outstanding performance of LSOs and flight crews, this number doubled and redoubled. The Sable's record of 528 landings and takeoffs in one day still stands. Cole recalls that 28,000 landings were made during his tour. This number includes those made by young Ens. George H.W. Bush, USNR. But we were all young then!
Cmdr. F.C. Durant III, USNR-Ret.
Lt. George M. Cole, USN-Ret.
Jacksonville, Fla.
"Cornfields and Carriers" ... was fascinating. Of those 17,819 "other" pilots who received their pilot qualification for carrier duty on those two ships almost 60 years ago, I hope those still with us all read and enjoyed it as much as I did. We probably all have similar memories of those first terrifying landings, but if I may, I'd like to add mine to the list.
... On my last of eight landings required for qualification, I received a wave-off from the LSO for some minor infraction. No problem, but as I circled the ship in preparation for my next attempt, I was cold, so I opened my shoulder harness to close the canopy. As I passed the ship's island on my downwind leg, I could see my mates watching me, which ... didn't soothe my nerves a bit.
... [On my] second attempt, I was lined up perfectly in the groove and was shocked to receive a second wave-off because, thank God, the LSO noted that my canopy was not open. On top of that, I soon realized that I had forgotten to resecure my shoulder harness, completely essential for the sudden stop of carrier landings. Now I was really shaken up and considered flying back to Glenview, Ill., on my own but that would have been a real career shortener.
0K, calm down, follow your checkoff list, and set it down properly - but that was not to be. The LSO determined that I was too low and slow in the groove and gave a last-minute frantic wave-off. I shot the throttle to the fire wall and the war-weary engine faltered momentarily before my tail hook caught No. 9, the last arresting cable on the deck, just as I was banking off to my left.
This caused my nose to drop; the landing gear plus a good portion of the edge of the carrier deck were torn off, and the plane went straight down into an extremely cold and uninviting Lake Michigan. Fortunately it settled on its belly rather than its back, and I was able to dive overboard and inflate my life vest.
... [A] Coast Guard cutter was by my side almost instantly and plucked me out. ... [O]n the ride back to Navy Pier, the cutter was notified to hold me at the pier until the ship came in as the skipper wanted to see me. Oh boy! What would he do? Would I have to pay for it? Was I now a seaman second class? Would he throw me back in the lake? The suspense was killing me.
Finally, after watching the carrier tie up at the end of the pier, I saw the skipper and his entourage walking toward me. Needless to say I felt like an idiot, and I'm sure I looked like a jerk standing there in my sweat suit and boots trying to throw a snappy salute. His big smile slowed my pulse rate a bit while he held out his hand holding a flight helmet with bent and broken goggles.
"Is this yours, Ensign?" he asked.
Certainly. There was my name stenciled in it. ... It seems that a sailor assessing the damage had found it on a catwalk under the severe overhang of the flight deck. The skipper and I (by now we were almost buddies ...) theorized that when the landing gear hit the edge of the deck, centrifugal force yanked the helmet off my head and snapped it outside the cockpit and down, still secured to the plane by its plugged-in radio cord. Trust me, my next carrier landings on the newly commissioned USS Princeton in an F6F Hellcat went much [more smoothly].
Thanks again for reviving the nostalgia, and I was glad to read that mine was only one of the estimated 200 Navy aircraft to hit the drink in Lake Michigan during those unique qualifications. Misery loves company.
Lt. J.G. R. Woodruff, USNR-Ret.
Merced, Calif.
Source
New pilots had to make eight successful landings and takeoffs to become carrier qualified, and many of them did so in a single day. Whether it was in the searing 100degree heat of a humid August pressure cooker or in the bitter minus40-degree gales of a freezing January, operations continued. Having completed flight school at Pensacola, Corpus Christi, or Gross lle, naval pilots received approximately 300 hours of flight time, They first practiced on a flight deck mock-up and then transited to the Carrier Qualification Training Unit at NAS Glenview. There the LSO put them through one day of classes, one day of practice landings, and the third day was the real thing,
At its commissioning, CQTU had 14 fighters, 14 scout bombers, and eight torpedo bombers at its disposal. The young naval pilots would use whatever tired aircraft were available - high-time Texans, Dauntlesses, Wildcats, and later Hellcats, Corsairs or Avengers.
The lightly seasoned pilots would take off from the station's criss-cross runways. Usually they were led by an experienced staff pilot who would guide the novices to their designated landmark - the Baha'i Temple in Wilmette called Point Obo - and then head out to "sea" making radio contact with one of the two mini-flattops. "Fox 28 this is Wolverine. Your bearing is 280 degrees." After sighting the ship, which would be flying two black balls to designate it was prepared to take on aircraft, flight operations would commence. The seasoned pilot would land first, not only showing the young pilots the way, but also bolstering their confidence enough to give them the edge needed to succeed in their own subsequent attempts.
An Ensign Harding logged the 1000th landing on 17 September, just 22 days from the beginning of flight operations... the first casualty occurred 21 October when Ens. Fred Morgan, flying an F4F Wildcat crashed into the deep. His body was never recovered. Most of the attempts, though, were successful. Indeed, on 11 June 1943, while the US 7th Division on the other side of the world landed at Attu in the Aleutian Islands, Lt. Roemer made the 10,000th landing on the Wolverine. Only 289 days had elapsed since operations had been inaugurated, By the time the venerable ship was decommissioned, there had been only 113 barrier crashes and 38 other deck crashes, with three fatalities recorded. However, photographer's mate Ulysses Buffington remembers that "we averaged about one fatality per month." On the USS Yorktown in Charleston, SC, there is an exhibit to honor pilots and crew that died on “all” US aircraft carriers. Why are not the pilots and crew, who died, from the USS Sable and USS Wolverine not honored in that exhibit?
The Sable, though she gets less press, was no slouch in the operations department either. She claimed a record for one day catches on 28 May 1944 with 488 landings in 531 minutes, qualifying 59 pilots, Not to be outdone, the Wolverine snatched 500 aircraft two days before the Normandy invasion (Long puts the figure at 633). James Paxton said, "Both ships were very competitive from the captains down to the apprentice seamen in their attempts to qualify the most pilots. There were many real dock fights between the crews and sometimes the officers, even the captains, over who was the best while waiting for the last liberty boat back to the ships at midnight." (Though the authors could find no final tallies for deaths on the Sable, a newspaper article dated 6 April 1944 states, "A naval aviator operating from the USS Sable was the eighth fatality out of thousands of flights... over a two-year period.")
Source: AirClassics
Anyone who has ever worked on a carrier flight deck in the dead of winter can understand the kind of hardships the officers and men endured. Again, Cdr. Alden in his article When Airpower Rode on Paddle Wheels -'A captain, who subsequently commanded Sable, recalled that although the winter of 1944-45 was the most severe in the history of the Chicago Weather Bureau, nevertheless the ships operated continuously seven days a week from first light to darkness. Snow remained on the ground in Chicago for 66 days, and Lake Michigan was frozen over as far as 15 miles out, With the help of Coast Guard icebreakers, operations were maintained. Although adventures were many, casualties were few. The overall accident percentage among the pilots was less than one half of one percent."
Not only were operations very successful, the duty for pilots and crew certainly was not bad. WE Barret reported, "Living conditions were tops, food was the best, we had laundry and a two-chair barber shop. Liberty ashore in Chicago and Milwaukee area was the best." He continued, "The ships had liberty every night, each person had liberty every other night. There was a Budweiser place in downtown Chicago that a lot of us would meet (at) before going on to other places. (The) people treated us great. They would not let us pay for anything drinks or food." And it wasn't just the food on shore; the Wolverine's First Anniversary Commissioning dinner included fresh Maine lobster cocktail, Southern fried chicken, Idaho baked potatoes - even watermelon!
There were two 40-ft liberty boats to transport crew from ship to shore. As mentioned, the weather on the Great Lakes can be bitterly cruel. Robert Tidrow remembers an incident with one of the liberty boats and some of that Windy City bluster that Chicagoans like to brag about so much. "One morning (1) was coming back from liberty. When the wind is out of the north it whips up the lake in the southern part. This morning it was so bad we could not get the liberty boat alongside. They rigged up a rope ladder and hung it from the fantail and the liberty boat ran in under if. The waves and ground swells were terrific. They dropped the ladder by me and the Exec says 'go ahead,' (rather than in ranking order). By the time he said this the ladder was nearly 20 ff above me. Then suddenly it was there. I grabbed and climbed, not looking down or back. As my feet left the liberty boat I was swaying in mid-air with full uniform and a heavy overcoat. If I didn't hang on I would be in the water and with all these heavy clothes on, to the bottom I'd go. I got aboard and never looked back for I did not care to watch the rest coming aboard. But they all made it; fortunately."
Source: AirClassics
On 7 August 1942, while Marines were landing at Guadalcanal, the Navy requisitioned the side-wheeler Greater Buffalo. Her skipper of 18 years, Capt. Lee C. DeNike, toasted her from the bridge on her last voyage, "Anything to win the war," he said of the old veteran about to metamorphose into a new ship with a new life and a new mission. The Greater Buffalo had been launched 29 October 1923 at Lorain, Ohio, also as a passenger steamer, having been built by the American Shipbuilding Company of Lorain and Great Lakes Engineering Works of Ecorse, Michigan. The vessel had an overall length of 519 ft, a beam of 58 ft 3 in and a draft of 15 ft 5 in. With the paddle wheels, she measured 92 ft 2 in total width. Like the Seeandbee before her, the Greater Buffalo was conscripted into the Navy.
In March of 1942, the American Shipbuilding Company removed the Seeondbee's superstructure down to the main deck. This was done in Cleveland. On 10 May, four days after the fall of Corregidor, the conversion of the paddle-wheeler began in Buffalo. With a deadline of 120 days to completion, 1200 men worked around the clock... with patriotism at a nationwide high, the project took only three months and two days. The shipyard won the coveted Army-Navy “E" for Excellence award.
A coal burner, the Wolverine's four stacks were moved to the starboard side, According to George C. Long, writing in American Heritage Magazine: "Her machinery was so sound that no mechanical changes were necessary." A small island was added to hold the navigation bridge and observation tower, and a steel framework was added to support the three-inch thick Douglas fir flight deck. There were no catapults for launching aircraft or hangar deck for storage and workshops. The mini-flattop had an eight-wire arresting system and, of course, a cable barrier for those aircraft which failed to catch any of the wires. The complete flight deck was only 26 ft off the water perhaps a bit too close for Naval pilots as ocean-going carriers had decks about 70 ft above the waves. Long continued, "This proved a little disturbing to the young pilots, since a slight dip after takeoff is a common characteristic of carrier aviation, probably the result of the abrupt transition from over-the-deck to over-water, and a drop of only 26 feet could bring disaster."
Initial cost of the ship was $756,000 and the conversion ran $1,935,343, Renamed the USS Wolverine, the new flattop was rushed to Chicago to start flight operations on 22 August 1942. Mr. James Christopher was freshly assigned to the Wolverine when she was commissioned. I ... arrived in Buffalo from Midshipmen's School, i.e. Columbia University (90-day wonder which actually took 120 days), found the uniform for commissioning was white - had no white shoes - took a fast ride into city on rear of a policeman's bike purchased cheap pair at Thom McAn store and made the commissioning exercise. Then after a trial cruise we left for a cruise through Lake Erie - Detroit River (people lined on both sides cheering us on), Lake Huron, then to Lake Michigan - tied up to Navy pier - Chicago."
Meanwhile, the Greater Buffalo conversion had started at Erie, Pennsylvania. by the American Shipbuilding Company, On 19 September 1942, renamed the LISS Sable, phase two began. A small island holding the navigation bridge and observation tower was added to the starboard side along with the relocation of the smokestacks - the original three were combined into two. At the last minute it was decided to try out two new steel flight decking designs along with eight different non-skid coatings. This made the Sable the first US carrier with a steel flight deck. The Sable was commissioned 8 May 1943.
Interestingly, both ships had rudders in their bows as well as their sterns to enable greater maneuverability in tight spots since the paddle wheels ran off of the same shaft, they could not operate independently, The Wolverine displaced 7200 tons while the Sable displaced 8000 tons. According to Cdr. John D. Alden in When Airpower Rode on Paddle Wheels, "Their coal-fired reciprocating engines had low pressure cylinders a full eight feet in diameter, connected by a walking beam to paddle wheels which could only turn in the same direction at the same speed." Both ships, the only coal burning carriers in the Navy, could produce a speed of 18 knots. There was going to be a third carrier built from the conversion of the Greater Detroit, but the program was canceled.
The Navy had two training ships, each carrying 300 officers and men, They were just what the Navy needed to not only teach novice pilots how to land on a moving deck, but also to train ships' crews, deck crews and LSOs in the operations of aircraft carriers. This was of great importance; as an example of the dire straits the Navy was in at the beginning of the war, Long recounts in his article The SideWheel Carriers that the Wolverine's 'LSO came down with appendicitis and had to be taken ashore for emergency surgery, The fragility of this whole operation is suggested by the fact that his illness brought all training to a halt for two weeks."
Source: AirClassics
