The Royal Navy s Fleet Air Arm grew from a small force into a powerful strategic weapon during World War II, with British carrier-based aircraft fighting throughout the world. This complete history describes their activities in the Home, Mediterranean, Eastern, and British Pacific Fleets, together with forces created for specific operations, and lists aircraft and units embarked during the various phases. The author also covers carrier operations in the Pacific between 1941 and 1945, noting that both the U.S. Navy and Imperial Japanese Navy watched the Royal Navy s early carrier operations in the European Theatre and benefited from the lessons. This work combines material from two earlier studies by J. D. Brown and adds information the author was compiling for a third volume at the time of his death.
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About the Author
J. D. Brown, a Fleet Air Arm carrier pilot and head of the Naval Historical Branch after his retirement, is the author of official histories and a number of well-received books.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Decent history narrative, but dated research,
This review is from: Carrier Operations in World War II (Hardcover)
This book is a reprinting of two volumes of JD Brown's Carrier Operations of World War Two series, with a third volume added by David Hobbs from Brown's notes after Brown's death in 2001. The book retains the three volume configuration.
This book is a good overall narrative, with all of the basic information on carrier operations in World War II. It is formatted reasonably well, plus it is free of the annoying editorial problems that seem to be much more of an issue of late than in years past. Some of the illustrations are well-known, while others are published here for the first time. However, the book has one major shortcoming: Despite the 2009 copyright date, this is NOT a new book. The original two volumes were first published in the early 1970s, and the writing and research for all thre volumes reflects this era. For example, the reference lists are missing such notable volumes as Gordon Prange's "At Dawn We Slept" and "Miracle at Midway," Walter Lord's "Incredible Victory," and John Lundstrom's noteworthy "First Team" books, all of which are late 1970s or early 1980s works. None of the listed Volume 2 references dates from after 1968. In the last twenty years, there have been considerable changes in the scholarship and sources regarding the Pacific War, and these changes have accelerated in the past ten years (e.g., Parshall and Tully's "Shattered Sword"), but due to the age of the notes and original text, this new information is absent. This book also does not have footnotes or individual citations, and there is no comprehensive reference list, so back-tracking the sources used is not possible. Again, not a bad book as a conventional narrative, but it is not really a new book. If you're looking for new or recent work, with new sources and interpretations, this is not the book for you. If you want a decent quality all-around history of WWII carrier ops, and are willing to overlook its age, it might be worth a look. The illustrations are nice, but there aren't quite enough "new and interesting" pictures to recommend it on that basis only. The three stars are due mostly to age, and not an indication of other qualities of the work.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
CARRIER OPERATIONS IN WORLD WAR II,
By
This review is from: Carrier Operations in World War II (Hardcover)
CARRIER OPERATIONS IN WORLD WAR II
J.D. BROWN EDITED BY DAVID HOBBS NAVAL INSTITUTE PRESS, 2009 HARDCOVER, $72.95, 320 PAGES, ILLUSTRATIONS, PHOTOGRAPHS, INDEX, ABBREVIATIONS Carrier warfare varied with the theater of operations. In the Atlantic and Mediterranean, British Royal Navy carriers fought submarines and land-based aircraft. In the Pacific, U.S. and Japanese carriers first fought each other; then, when U.S. carriers had virtually wiped out Japan's carrier pilots (at the Philippine Sea), U.S. carrier forces went after Japanese naval and merchant ships and also fought successfully against Japanese land-based air forces. In the Okinawa Campaign (April-June, 1945), U.S. Navy carriers (supported by a British Royal Navy carrier task force) were primarily fighting land-based Japanese kamikaze aircraft. By the end of the war, U.S. carrier aircraft were ranging over Japan's home islands. In the Pacific Theater of Operations (PTO), carrier warfare began with a massed carrier raid by Japan on Pearl Harbor (which caught none of the U.S. carriers in port) and the retaliatory Doolittle Raid, then progressed to violent carrier-against-carrier duels-one of them, the Battle of the Coral Sea, was the first-ever naval encounter in which neither side's warships were visible to the other's-and finally circled back to massed raids by U.S. carriers against Japan. When the Pacific War began, both U.S. Navy and Imperial Japanese Navy carrier aircraft complements were heavily weighted towards bombers and torpedo planes. Both sides understood the need to attack first, with overwhelming power, and at the longest possible range. In pursuing this doctrine, the Imperial Japanese Navy went so far as to deprive its pilots of adequately armored aircraft. In addition, U.S. carriers faced a special dilemma once U.S. forces began to invade Japanese-held islands: whether to establish and maintain air supremacy during an amphibious assault or to hunt Japanese carriers, and by failing to solve it Vice Admiral Fletcher very nearly turned initial success into disaster, at Guadalcanal. The 1942 carrier battles were decided by which side found the other first, and by the striking power each side could deliver before suffering its own losses. By 1944, however, things had changed. Radar-directed air patrols and radar-dorected ships' anti-aircraft guns downed Japanese pilots faster than the Imerial Japanese Navy could train them, allowing the U.S. Navy simultaneously to cover amphibious landings and defeat Japanese carrier attacks. U.S. carriers survived massed kamikaze attacks at Okinawa because, unlike the British Royal Navy at Malta, their fighter complements were large and their fighter-control system based on improved radars. Despite these advances, however, eight large, one light, and three escort carriers were seriously damaged by suicide aircraft. Massed kamikaze raids were such a threat to the carriers and the amphibious forces that B-29 bombers were ordered to crater the airfields where the Japanese aircraft were organized for their assaults. However, despite the damage they sustained at Okinawa, U.S. carriers demonstrated that carrier aviation could wage sustained campaigns against land targets. That undertsanding formed the basis for the development of modern carrier battle groups armed with nuclear weapons. CARRIER OPERATIONS IN WORLD WAR II is a very well-written, comprehensive primer on the operational history of American carriers during World War II. This is a truly outstanding reference work. Lt. Colonel Robert A. Lynn, Florida Guard Orlando, Florida
1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Worth looking for, especially for operatons of IJN,
By robbieandrose (New England) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Carrier Operations in World War II: v. 2 (Hardcover)
including carrier strengths, plane types, and the size and composition of the US groups that were on the US carriers. Recommended.
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