Remembering Pearl Harbor & The Role Swim Training Played

“December 7th, a day which will live in infamy,” FDR’s address to the nation a day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor was a pivotal moment that signified the United States would be entering the war against Japan. The U.S. would later declare war on Germany and Italy on December 11th, only hours after both countries declared war on the United States.

During the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, the majority of Americans could not swim. When the war shifted from the sea to the skies that morning in December, the fate of swimming as a sport was forever altered.

Due to a critical lack of pilots, the United States military increased its efforts in every aerial branch to train and recruit more aviators. The V-5 Naval Aviation Cadet Training Program was one of the most rigorous and prestigious training routes, producing thousands of Top Gun Navy pilots.

More Than 50% of Pilots Could Not Swim

According to a U.S. Navy outdoor-survival instructor, more than half of the incoming Pre-Flight cadets could not swim when they shipped into basic training, despite the fact that swimming was a life-or-death skill for pilots flying combat missions over the ocean. Even though 75% of the Navy’s pilots who were shot or forced down landed safely, only 5% of those men made it because they were unable to swim or find food or water on islands and unfamiliar terrain.

Olympic swimmers, major league baseball players, professional football players, and athletes whose images endorsed Wheaties’ “Breakfast of Champions” campaigns were among the tens of thousands of young men, aged 18 to 26, who applied for this daring naval aviation program. V-5 Pre-Flight schools, which modeled their training after Annapolis’, were able to recruit some of the best swimming coaches in the country thanks to their commitment to using their expertise for free across five campuses located in various parts of the country. To put it in today’s context, picture Michael Phelps training naval cadets how to swim.

Before getting behind the controls of some of the military’s most potent warplanes, cadets had to endure 90 days of rigorous physical training and study of navigational academics. Several former cadets claimed that “swimming was the most difficult course at Pre-Flight,” and that it was responsible for the elimination of roughly a quarter of the cadets. Several students drowned or otherwise perished during this ground training program, but the rigorous standards and inherent dangers were understandable given the context of a time of war.

In order to survive gunfire and the suction of a sinking airplane, cadets in the Navy’s Pre-Flight swimming course had to swim one mile and dive fifty feet. In a matter of weeks, cadets who were unable to swim were jumping off of platforms into pools of burning oil. The cadets also had to go through the infamous Dilbert Dunker, a mock cockpit used to teach pilots how to escape from a sinking plane and made famous in the film “An Officer and a Gentleman.”

Given that eighty percent of these seaborne pilots would likely have to land on water during combat, training centered on stamina and the ability to stay afloat for hours in rough waters until rescue. Pre-Flight used competition with top swimming universities like Stanford and other military bases like Camp Lejeune to boost morale. In 1944, cadets at the St. Mary’s College Pre-Flight School in Moraga, California, set new records in the following swimming events: the 50-yard freestyle in 24.3 seconds, the 100-yard freestyle in 55.2 seconds, the mile in 23 minutes, the underwater 25-yard swim in 13.6 seconds, and the 25-yard carry swim in 20.8 seconds.

During the course of the war, these schools saw an influx and rotation of roughly 80,000 cadets and over 1,000 instructors. President George H.W. Bush (one of the youngest cadets to enter the program) and Lt. Gerald R. Ford coached Pre-Flight swimming.

Today, swim training still plays an important role in Pearl Harbor. Naval Aviation School’s Command Detachment Pearl Harbor screen and train prospective search and rescue swimmers prior to schooling, teach open water survival skills, administer second-class swim tests and directly assist Afloat Training Group Middle Pacific with training of SAR swimmers at Pearl Harbor.