Civil Air Patrol this week began its 85th anniversary communications season, a scheduled recitation of founding lore organized around a newly designed historical timeline branded “Be a Part of the Story.” The first tile is “Eyes of the Home Skies, Part 1,” a title that promises sequels and treats the 1942 coastal patrols as the organization’s creation sacrament: privately owned light aircraft, a compass, a single radio, and, in the earliest sorties, inner tubes and kapok duck hunter vests, asked to do work the Navy had already declined.
Headquarters still prefers the elevated register. Brave. Heroic. Greatest Generation. The supporting inventory is more specific.
A Shortage of Ships, Followed by a Surplus of Volunteers
From January to March 1942, 52 tankers were sunk, often within sight of people on shore. Army Gen. George C. Marshall said the losses off the Atlantic seaboard and in the Caribbean “now threaten our entire war effort.” The Tanker Committee of the Petroleum Industry War Council urged that Civil Air Patrol be used to watch the sea lanes. The Navy initially rejected the idea. The Army decided it had merit. Patrols began in March 1942. By late March the Navy, having reviewed the same arithmetic a second time, began using the civilians as well.
Oil companies paid for shore radios. Most of the airplanes and emergency gear were furnished by the people flying them. The assigned tactic was to report U-boats and force them under, where they would drain batteries — a theory of deterrence in which a Stinson is treated as a floating inconvenience with national markings.
The airplanes, mostly Stinsons and Fairchilds, were painted red and yellow with a blue circle and white triangle, the sort of identification scheme that assumes the other party is looking. Crews flew as far as 60 miles offshore, generally in pairs, daily, in all seasons, including winter, when ditching in cold water was understood to be fatal. So many contacts were claimed that the light aircraft were armed with small bombs and the larger ones with 325-pound depth charges. The anniversary copy presents this as an evolution of the mission. It is also a record of what a volunteer organization will strap to a civilian airframe if someone issues a paint diagram.
The 1943 recruitment poster that later supplied the series title was designed by V. Clayton Kenney of Cleveland, himself a member of Squadron 511-3 in Chagrin Falls, Ohio. Even the artwork was an in-house production.
Success, Logged in Miles
Eddie Edwards, thereafter a “renowned subchaser,” was perhaps the first CAP pilot to spot a Nazi U-boat. He radioed the position, as instructed. The submarine crash-dived and went farther out. Headquarters counts this as the start of a deterrent and does not linger on the possibility that a submarine might dive for reasons of its own.
From 21 Coastal Patrol bases the crews logged more than 24 million miles, reported 173 suspected submarines, and attacked 57, figures the timeline recites with the confidence of an organization that has been asked, for 85 years, to prove the sorties counted. By mid-July 1942, Adm. Karl Doenitz withdrew his last boats from the American coast. The materials treat the causal chain as closed. They also treat it as the reason Civil Air Patrol later became the official auxiliary of a service that did not yet exist under its present name.
On Feb. 17, 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt presented Air Medals in the Oval Office to CAP 1st Lt. Edmund “Eddie” Edwards and Maj. Hugh R. Sharp Jr. for the July 21, 1942, rescue of 1st Lt. Henry Cross, down 20 miles off Delaware. They put a Sikorsky S-39 into 8- to 10-foot swells, which crushed the left pontoon. Edwards climbed onto the right wing and stayed there, half-frozen, overnight until a Coast Guard boat water-taxied the unflyable aircraft to shore. “We spotted a body, so we made an emergency landing and fished him out,” Edwards said in 2006. “He was alive, but we never found the other guy.” Headquarters files the episode under valor. It is also a mission report.
In 1948, 824 Air Medals were issued to CAP members. Coastal patrols stood down on Aug. 31, 1943. Lester Wolff, who commanded a squadron at Mitchell Field on Long Island, supplied the after-action line the anniversary series cannot improve: “We who served asked for nothing in return and got nothing.” Subsequent decades of timeline products have been devoted to adjusting that ledger.
The Rest of the Tasking
Sixty-nine members died in the war effort, 26 of them at sea. First Lt. Margaret J. Bartholomew, flight leader of Flight C, Squadron 5111-1, the original Cincinnati unit at Lunken Airport, was killed Oct. 18, 1943, in a snowstorm returning from a courier run — the only woman lost in CAP service during the war. Col. Robert Arn, flying anti-submarine missions from Coastal Patrol Base No. 14 in Panama City, Florida, from September 1942 to June 1943, said of the 12 original pilots at that base, “we lost six of them.” He flew 179 missions and 557 hours. Wolff noted that many of the airplanes, though not built for the work, had bombs and depth charges strapped to them, a detail the tile presents as both hazard and résumé.
Once the coastal flying had been declared useful, additional taskings arrived in the volume volunteer aviation attracts after someone notices the airplanes: 20,500 missions towing targets for live anti-aircraft fire; 30,000 hours along the Rio Grande; a courier run that moved 3.5 million pounds of cargo. Cadets were authorized in October 1942. Some 20,000 joined quickly; by war’s end the number was 80,000, growth the series records with the same satisfaction it applies to depth charges.
Membership reached more than 200,000. Headquarters, still proving national breadth, notes that this included a Hollywood director, a pianist, a Munchkin from “The Wizard of Oz,” a sitting governor, a Wall Street financier, a pioneering Black woman aviator, future Tuskegee Airmen, a brewery head, and the founder of a doughnut chain. The list is offered as evidence that everyone served. It is also evidence of what an organization remembers when it has spent a lifetime explaining that it was there.
By 1944, one in four members was a woman; more than half of the WASP passed through CAP at some point. An April 1943 executive order moved the outfit from the Office of Civilian Defense to the War Department. The approved totals are more than 750,000 hours, 68 dead, and about 150 aircraft lost — “a credit to the organization’s emphasis on organization and safety,” a sentence that places the safety program next to the duck hunter vests without further comment.
Year 73
Col. Steve Patti, who joined in January 1942 at Vail Field in Los Angeles and later served with the 12th Task Force Anti-Submarine Patrol in Brownsville and San Benito, Texas, said he “personally never gave it any more thought after the war.” In 2014 the House followed the Senate in approving a Congressional Gold Medal for the World War II service. The medal was presented Dec. 10, 2015, on Capitol Hill. Then-National Commander Maj. Gen. Joe Vazquez and Wolff accepted it from Speaker John A. Boehner, with Sens. Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid and Reps. Michael T. McCaul and Nancy Pelosi looking on. Most of the original members were not present. Most had died in the interval between the inner tubes and the ceremony.
Patti called it “a great honor to be brought into the limelight of recognition,” a result that required 70 years, two chambers of Congress, and a newly designed timeline to complete.
The series will continue weekly until Dec. 1. The remaining tiles have not yet been asked to compete with 325-pound depth charges, an Oval Office Air Medal, or a 2015 medal for work completed in 1943. They will try.