The creation of the Civil Air Patrol

On 1 December 1941 Fiorello La Guardia, Mayor of New York and, since May, also director of the federal Office of Civilian Defense, signed Administrative Order No. 9. It brought into being the Civil Air Patrol (CAP), a volunteer organisation intended to gather America’s civilian pilots and their private aircraft and place them at the disposal of the nation’s defence. As its first national commander La Guardia appointed Major General John F. Curry, an Army Air Corps officer with experience from the First World War. The order was announced on 8 December, the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

According to popular accounts, the CAP was created “for American coastal patrol”. The order of 1 December, however, said nothing about hunting submarines. It laid down the organisation and command of the new body, which was to perform various auxiliary tasks: liaison, courier, training and observation. The patrols over coastal waters for which the CAP became famous began only in March 1942, when German U-boats were sinking ships just off American beaches.

An idea of civilian aviators

The initiator was Gill Robb Wilson, a First World War pilot, Presbyterian minister and, from 1930, director of aeronautics for the state of New Jersey. In 1938 he visited Germany as an aviation journalist and saw how the Reich authorities had brought all sport and private flying under their control. In countries that went to war, civilian flying was usually banned, since any light aircraft could serve a saboteur. Wilson concluded that the same fate awaited America’s private pilots unless they showed that they could be useful. In New Jersey he organised a state civil defence air service, and similar groups were formed in other states as well, including Florida.

On 20 May 1941 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt established by executive order the Office of Civilian Defense, which was to coordinate the preparation of the population for war: blackouts, fire protection, social welfare. It was headed by La Guardia, himself a First World War airman who had fought on the Italian front. Wilson, together with the publisher Thomas Beck and the Maine newspaper owner Guy Gannett, presented him with a plan for a nationwide organisation of civilian pilots. La Guardia accepted it and entrusted them with working out the details. In the autumn the plan was assessed by a board of Army Air Forces officers appointed by the commander of the Army Air Forces, General Henry Arnold. The board endorsed it and recommended that key training and supply posts be filled by military officers. Hence the choice of a professional general, Curry, as commander. Wilson became the new organisation’s chief of staff.

The first days

The new organisation came into being in the week in which the United States found itself at war. On 8 December the aviation authorities grounded all civilian aircraft other than airliners. The ban was lifted after two days, except on the West Coast, but private airfields were thenceforth placed under closer supervision. CAP tradition credits one of the impulses for tighter control to Earle Johnson, an Ohio flyer who in December, to show how defenceless factories were, dropped sandbags from his light aircraft on three defence plants and the next morning informed their owners that they had been “bombed”. In March 1942 Johnson succeeded Curry as commander.

Pilots, mechanics, radio operators and observers of both sexes could join the CAP. Curry stressed that women flyers were “indispensable” to the organisation. Members flew their own aircraft, at first largely at their own expense. Wilson and Curry made no secret that the survival of private flying was also at stake: without such an organisation, Curry said, it might disappear for the duration of the war.

Coastal patrol

At the beginning of 1942 the German U-boat commander, Admiral Karl Dönitz, sent U-boats to the east coast of the United States in Operation Drumbeat (Paukenschlag). The US Navy, which since the autumn of 1941 had been waging an undeclared war in the Atlantic and since November had also had the Coast Guard under its orders, did not have enough ships or aircraft to protect coastal shipping, and tankers burned in full view of bathers on the beaches. The CAP command asked the War Department for permission to fly patrols over the sea. The military had long had doubts, but in the end agreed. On 5 March 1942 the first patrols took off from airfields at Atlantic City, New Jersey, and Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. The organisation was given 90 days to prove its worth. The trial succeeded and the patrols were extended. At its peak the Coastal Patrol operated from 21 bases scattered from Maine to the Gulf Coast.

At first the aircraft – single-engined light planes such as the Piper Cub and somewhat larger machines, including Grumman Widgeon amphibians – flew unarmed. Their task was to look out for submarines, survivors and mines, report by radio and circle over the target until the military arrived. According to the CAP’s history, in May 1942 a patrol crew off the coast of Florida circled for more than half an hour over a U-boat that had run aground, but before the bombers arrived the submarine managed to free itself. After this incident CAP aircraft began to be armed with bombs and depth charges, although most of the light aircraft could carry only a single 100-pound bomb.

According to CAP figures, by 31 August 1943, when the Coastal Patrol was disbanded, its crews had flown more than 86,000 sorties and spent more than 244,000 hours in the air. They reported 173 submarine sightings and dropped 82 bombs or depth charges. They helped rescue 363 survivors, located 91 ships in distress and flew 5,684 convoy escort sorties. The organisation credited its aircraft with sinking two U-boats, but later research in German records has confirmed neither of these successes. More important was the mere presence of aircraft over the water: U-boat commanders preferred to dive when they saw a plane they could not tell apart from a military one. The price was the death of 26 Coastal Patrol airmen and observers. Many of them were lost at sea when their aircraft had to ditch after engine failure far from shore.

Place in the war

On 29 April 1943 Roosevelt transferred the Civil Air Patrol from the Office of Civilian Defense to the War Department, and the organisation came under the supervision of the Army Air Forces. Coastal patrol was soon taken over by military aircraft and navy airships, but the CAP flew on: it patrolled the Mexican border, towed targets for anti-aircraft artillery and fighters, carried mail and spare parts, searched for missing aircraft and trained young people in a cadet programme created in 1942. According to the organisation’s figures, between 59 and 68 of its members were killed during the war, and more than 90 aircraft were lost.

After the war a 1946 Act of Congress made the CAP a non-profit organisation that would “never again” take part in combat, and in 1948 it became the official civilian auxiliary of the newly created United States Air Force. In 2014 Congress awarded the CAP’s wartime veterans the Congressional Gold Medal. La Guardia’s order of 1 December 1941 gave America, which within days would be at war, a cheap and readily available instrument. In the Battle of the Atlantic its contribution was modest compared with that of the army and navy, but in the hardest months of 1942, when the coast was short of everything, volunteers in light aircraft filled a gap that nobody else could fill.