The USS Wolverine, the Paddle-Wheel Carrier That Trained Fifteen Thousand Naval Aviators, and the Warbirds Still Coming Up from the Floor of Lake Michigan
Two converted paddle-wheel steamers on Lake Michigan trained 15,000 carrier pilots during WWII - and their lost aircraft are still being recovered from the lake floor today.
Two converted passenger steamers on Lake Michigan - USS Wolverine and USS Sable - qualified approximately 15,000 naval aviators for carrier operations during World War II. Dozens of training aircraft lost during those operations still rest on the lake floor, and the cold freshwater environment has kept many in remarkable condition. Recovery efforts dating to 1990 have already returned several aircraft to public display.
The Crisis That Made Lake Michigan a Carrier Training Ground
By spring 1942, roughly four months after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Navy faced a problem with no obvious solution. Building carrier pilots required carrier time, and every operational carrier was committed to the Pacific or Atlantic. Nothing remained for training duty.
New construction wasn’t viable - American shipyards were already running at capacity, and a purpose-built training carrier would take at least a year to complete. Operating it on either coast posed its own danger: German submarines controlled the Atlantic approaches, and the Pacific was an active combat zone. Protected water, well clear of both threats, was essential.
The solution was inland. Lake Michigan - fresh water, fully enclosed, close to the existing Midwest aviation training infrastructure - offered everything the Navy needed. No submarine could reach it. The only adversary was weather.
How USS Wolverine and USS Sable Were Built
The Navy identified two Great Lakes passenger steamers for conversion. The first, the City of Erie, had spent peacetime ferrying tourists between Cleveland and Detroit. Workers bolted a wooden flight deck to its hull, strung arresting cables, and painted a centerline. It was commissioned as USS Wolverine in August 1942.
The Greater Buffalo followed months later, commissioned as USS Sable. Both ships operated out of Glenview Naval Air Station, just north of Chicago.
Neither ship could transit the Panama Canal - their side-wheel paddle design made that impossible - so both were permanently assigned to the lake. That limitation was the point. These ships would never deploy. They existed solely to put student pilots through carrier qualification.
What Carrier Qualification on Lake Michigan Actually Looked Like
A student arriving at Wolverine had already spent nearly a year in the training pipeline. He had soloed, completed instrument work, flown formation, and drilled extensively in the Navy’s FCLP program - field carrier landing practice, touching down on a painted rectangle on a standard runway until the approach became automatic.
None of it fully prepared him for Wolverine.
The ship made 15 knots into the wind, trailing coal smoke across the water. The flight deck was roughly 60 feet wide and 500 feet long. In a Grumman F4F Wildcat - 12,000 pounds at max gross, landing speed approximately 72 mph indicated - the deck moved in ways no runway ever does.
The only landing guidance came from a Landing Signal Officer stationed at the deck’s edge with two hand paddles. No electronics. No glide slope. No PAPI lights. The LSO’s paddle signals communicated everything: too high, too fast, or the cut - both paddles brought sharply to his thighs, the signal to chop the throttle and commit to the deck.
A successful trap stopped the aircraft in roughly 60 feet. A missed wire meant full throttle off the bow, a go-around over open water, and another approach.
The Accident Record and the 136 Aircraft That Didn’t Come Back
Conditions on Lake Michigan were genuinely harsh. By November, water temperatures dropped into the forties. Winds gusted off the Wisconsin shore. Swells built to four and five feet within hours. Under those conditions, a training operation running hundreds of landings per day produced steady attrition.
Best estimates put the number of aircraft lost in Lake Michigan at approximately 136. Wildcats, Avengers, Dauntlesses, and Hellcats - each one a training accident, each one sinking to the bottom while the deck kept its cycle going and the next student lined up on approach.
By war’s end, Wolverine and Sable together had supported more than 17,000 carrier landings and produced approximately 15,000 qualified naval aviators. Those pilots went on to fly from Essex-class carriers at Leyte Gulf, the Philippine Sea, and the Marianas - every major carrier operation of the Pacific campaign.
Both ships were decommissioned and scrapped after the war. The lake kept what it had taken.
Why Lake Michigan Preserved What the Ocean Would Have Destroyed
At depth, Lake Michigan’s water temperature stays near freezing year-round. More critically, it is fresh - no salt, no saltwater marine organisms, none of the electrochemical processes that reduce an ocean wreck to unrecognizable fragments within a generation.
The aircraft that went into Lake Michigan during the war sat in cold, dark, fresh water for decades. Sport divers began finding them in the 1980s - shadows at 150 feet resolving into wings, gun bays, cockpit canopies. Instrument panels intact. Markings still legible on aluminum skin.
That preservation record is what made formal recovery feasible. These were not corroded hulks. Some were artifacts.
The Recovery Program: Bringing Warbirds Back from the Bottom
In 1990, the National Museum of Naval Aviation in Pensacola began a formal recovery program in partnership with the U.S. Navy. The goal was to document, assess, and where possible retrieve aircraft for permanent display.
The first significant recovery came in 1991: a Grumman TBF Avenger, bureau number 46094, which had been on the bottom for 46 years. The TBF Avenger was the largest single-engine aircraft the Navy flew in the Pacific war - 54 feet of wingspan - and it carried the full weight of the torpedo attack and anti-submarine mission. George H.W. Bush flew one; he was shot down in his Avenger over Chichi Jima in September 1944.
The Pensacola restoration team encountered challenges no standard maintenance manual addresses. Aluminum that survived the lake can be chemically compromised in ways invisible to the eye. Fittings that look intact may be bonded by decades of corrosion. Wiring insulation that held up underwater can become brittle within hours of drying out in open air.
The team developed recovery protocols from scratch - procedures specific to freshwater aircraft retrieval, built aircraft by aircraft through direct experience. When original parts couldn’t be sourced, period-correct fabrications were made from original manufacturing drawings. Markings were verified against wartime photographs and Bureau of Aeronautics records. The standard was accuracy, not approximation.
That Avenger is now on display at the National Museum of Naval Aviation in Pensacola.
Other Recoveries: The Dauntless and the Ongoing Work
In 1994, the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry partnered with the recovery effort to bring up a Douglas SBD Dauntless, now displayed in their World War II exhibit.
The Dauntless warrants specific attention. This was the aircraft that decided the Battle of Midway on June 4, 1942 - Dauntless dive bombers pushing over at 16,000 feet sank four Japanese fleet carriers, Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, and Hiryu, in a matter of minutes. The strategic balance of the Pacific war shifted in a single morning. The aircraft hanging in Chicago trained the men who flew those exact missions.
Additional recoveries - FM-2 Wildcats, Hellcats - have continued over the years, though the pace has slowed. The easier finds are gone. Remaining aircraft sit in deeper water, in worse condition, harder to reach. Sonar surveys still produce new contacts periodically, and each one requires a dive assessment and an institutional commitment to do the work correctly.
The distinction between salvage and recovery matters here. Salvage extracts what can be used. Recovery treats the whole aircraft as the artifact - preserving not just metal and instruments, but the specific history embedded in every rivet hole.
Key Takeaways
- USS Wolverine (ex-City of Erie) and USS Sable (ex-Greater Buffalo) were converted Great Lakes passenger steamers commissioned in 1942 that served as the Navy’s only inland carrier training vessels, operating from Glenview Naval Air Station outside Chicago.
- Together they supported more than 17,000 carrier landings and qualified approximately 15,000 naval aviators who went on to serve in every major Pacific carrier operation.
- Approximately 136 aircraft were lost in Lake Michigan during training operations; the lake’s cold freshwater environment preserved many in remarkable condition for decades.
- Recovery efforts led by the National Museum of Naval Aviation beginning in 1990 have returned multiple aircraft to public display, including a TBF Avenger at Pensacola and an SBD Dauntless at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry.
- Aircraft remain on the lake bottom. Sonar surveys continue to identify new contacts, and the question for each is not whether it can be found - but whether it can be recovered and preserved correctly.
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