by ROBERT BECKHUSEN
The U.S. Navy’s armored, steam-powered fleet carriers carried the United States to victory over Japan in World War II. But it wouldn’t have been possible without the help from two coal-burning paddle carriers that sailed Lake Michigan.
The USS Wolverine and Sable do not immediately comes to mind when thinking of war-winning weapons. They never saw combat or tasted salt water. Their home port was Chicago, not Pearl Harbor. They were originally paddle-driven, coal-powered passenger vessels for leisurely voyages along the Great Lakes. But the two reconfigured vessels were crucial for training thousands of pilots when the fleet carriers were needed at sea.
The United States went to war with Japan on Dec. 7, 1941 with eight aircraft carriers, only three of them in the Pacific. Tokyo had 10 … with more on the way. Shipbuilding is a time-consuming job, and it wouldn’t be until the following December before America’s next carrier entered the war.
The Navy needed pilots, who needed training. Practicing taking off and landing from conventional airfields was a start, but there’s no way to fully capture the precision, complexity and mental acuity required for a carrier landing without the real thing or something very close to it. And this was in a time before optical landing systems and computerized simulators.
Hence the two coal-powered paddle carriers.
