Civil Air Patrol rooted in World War II history

FROM MAINE TO MEXICO: With America’s Private Pilots in the Fight Against Nazi U-Boats, by Louis E. Keefer, COTU Publishing, Reston, Va., 1997, hardcover, 535 pages.

For those of us whose memory of World War II is limited to being carried on a parent’s shoulder to the VE or VJ day parades, it is inconceivable that the country was so unprepared for war in the fall and winter of 1941.

Though still technically a neutral power, the United States used destroyers in convoy operations to help guard the flow of goods to Europe. One was sunk and another heavily damaged in October 1941.

When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor Dec. 7, we were suddenly officially at war in the Atlantic as well as the Pacific. The U-boats, which had been operating out in the Atlantic on the convoy routes, took up residence close to shore along the entire Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Twelve merchant ships were sunk in January of 1942, 42 went down in March and by May the government was no longer making the losses public. Coastal cities went dark to avoid providing the U-boats a backdrop against which to measure their victims. Undermanned and under-equipped, the formal military service could do little to stop the losses.

A group of wealthy and well-placed civilians had been working for several years to convince the powers in Washington to recognize a civilian flying organization, which would be of use to the government in time of emergency. That organization became the Civil Air Patrol and the emergency presented itself in 1942. The job was to fly out over the Atlantic (and the Gulf of Mexico) in single-engine planes, many of which belonged to the men flying them. On these flights, they were to radio the position of any submarines they found as well as spot survivors of sinkings or, occasionally, air crashes. Because, the military brass was, understandably, mistrustful about the ultimate success of these missions, the coastal patrol was given a period of ninety days to prove itself. It soon did, operating successfully until mid-1943 by which time the military had built up to the point that the civilian coastal patrol was no longer needed.

The first base was officially activated on Feb. 28, 1942, at Atlantic City, New Jersey. The easternmost site in the group, designated as Bar Harbor base, was activated on Aug. 22, 1942, at the Trenton airport. The first mission was flown from Trenton on Sept. 5. The coastal patrol was not long on training or in most cases military discipline. You arrived at the base, were sworn in, and could be flying as an observer the next day. In its earliest days, Trenton had only two short runways and an 80-by-100 foot hanger. There were no facilities at the airport for people. The incoming flyers, who often brought their wives, found places to stay from Ellsworth to Bar Harbor. What the base lacked, they built. It was nothing to find a pilot and his observer return from a dawn patrol, get out of the plane and pick up a hammer and start working on the particular building under construction at that point.

Most of the fliers in the Bar Harbor group came from Connecticut and Wisconsin. They were either too old, too young, or physically unsuited for service in one of the armed services. They also soon realized that unlike their brother pilots to the south and west, eastern Maine did not have warm waters over which to fly or long stretches of sandy beach on which to make emergency landings. The winter days were short, cold and the ceilings inevitably low. On the other hand, there were many positive factors about being based in the Bar Harbor area. The natives received them well, taking them into as much of the local society as the fliers limited free time allowed. While the rest of the country was undergoing meat rationing, usually there were deer carcasses hanging outside the canteen in winter. Also, if they had remained civilians, they would have been forced to give up, for the duration of the war, the love that united them all — flying.

The book is totally made up of vignettes or remembrances of the men and women who served at each of the 21 coastal patrol bases. As such it is a gold mine of background material about a group of people who gave up part of their lives to do a job, which much of the military establishment, at least initally, didn’t realize they were doing. (Twenty-six of the fliers, including two from the Bar Harbor base, lost their lives in this volunteer mission.)

Unfortunately, there are some lapses in the histories of each of base. For instance, no date is given for when the CAP people stopped flying from Trenton and turned the base over to the military. It would have been nice to have more statistics about the entire operation.

But what little we are told is enough to make us proud to learn of the efforts of the CAP and the coastal patrol.