Customer Reviews

Carrier Operations in World War II

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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

including carrier strengths, plane types, and the size and composition of the US groups that were on the US carriers. Recommended.

Although I haven't read the main text of this book (and I reserve the option of changing my rating when I do, for better or worse) I have serious reservations about the late author's research after nothing more than reviewing the photographs and reading their captions. There are a number of significant errors, some of which defy understanding as to how they could possibly have occurred given the resources available.

1. Page 117 - The late author states the Pearl Harbor photograph was taken "toward the end of the first strike" and "Arizona at the extreme left has sunk." This photo was obviously taken EARLY in the attack because Oklahoma [outboard ship of the right hand pair] had capsized within 15 minutes of the attack's beginning and, in this photo, has only just begun to capsize. In addition, the ship on the tail end of battleship row [extreme left] was and always shall be NEVADA, not Arizona. Arizona's position is also verifiable because at the beginning of the attack, the smaller repair ship Vestal was moored outboard of her which matches the leftmost pair of ships. Arizona's magazine has not yet detonated because the forward part of the ship is still intact and she's not obscured by the tremendous amount of smoke generated after her magazine explosion, again showing this photo is from early in the attack. Nevada appears to be sunk because smoke from a different fire drifting overhead has obscured her decks, giving the erroneous impression of her being underwater. With the overwhelming wealth of material on this infamous attack, there's simply no excuse for such monumental errors in timing and ship identification.

2. Page 128 - Anyone familiar with World War II-era U.S. carrier operations can see these aircraft have NOT just landed and taxiied into position to be serviced "before the pilots are out of the cockpits." This tight deck park is the result of patient and careful handling to minimize the area required for the aircraft yet still leave enough space for routine maintenance and is obviously not occurring in the immediate (and hectic) aftermath of a mass [note the number of aircraft visible] landing. The irony of this particular caption has to do with the editor because in his own book "A Century of Carrier Aviation," David Hobbs uses the same photo on page 142 where it's gloriously full-page and far more accurately labeled.

3. Page 145 - With regard to the statement "one recovered to the ship" concerning the fate of the twelve (12) TBDs launched from Yorktown during the Battle of Midway, actually not a single one of those Devastators survived the battle. Ten (10) of the torpedo bombers were shot down over the Japanese fleet while two (2) aircraft amazingly made it all the way back to Task Force 17. Unfortunately, they arrived in the midst of the first Japanese strike on Yorktown but couldn't be recovered while she was under attack and both were eventually forced to ditch for lack of fuel. This information is part of the official record and could have been checked with the Department of the Navy but current readers are directed to "A Glorious Page in Our History" by Robert Cressman, et al (Missoula, Pictorial Histories Publishing Company, 1990).

4. Pages 176-177 - This caption, while technically correct, doesn't come close to telling the whole story. No, O'Brien didn't sink in the immediate aftermath of this torpedo hit but the late author failed to note the damage it inflicted did cause the destroyer to later break up and founder as she was attempting to steam back to Pearl Harbor for full repairs. Therefore, at best, the caption is highly misleading because O'Brien did indeed sink as a result of the torpedo strike, just later rather than sooner. Her history can now be read on-line at the Naval History & Heritage Command's website in the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships (DANFS) but has long been available in any number of sources given this incident was, for many years, considered the most successful single attack [Wasp sunk, North Carolina damaged, O'Brien fatally damaged] by a Japanese submarine on the U.S. Navy in World War II until further research cast doubt on whether responsibility rested with a single sub or two separate ones.

5. Page 261 - In my 30+ years of reading naval history, I've never before seen this photograph captioned as "the identity of this 'one-trip ace' is not known to the author." It's painfully obvious the late author contacted no one in the American naval history community in conjunction with this trilogy because they would have quickly informed him this is an extremely well known photo of Alex Vraciu. It's currently viewable on the Naval History & Heritage Command's website and, in another bit of irony, on Alex Vraciu's personal website [!], but even without the benefit of the Internet, it's been featured in numerous other popular books in widespread circulation for decades, including several in my own personal library.

6. Page 282 - Although taken from a different perspective than the far more widespread photographs of this same line of Essex-class carriers at anchor, this is only the second time in my nearly lifelong study of naval history I've seen these ships identified as "Marauders' Row." This is the same sort of P.C. nonsense that changed Big Ugly Fat F__ker [from the B-52's acronym BUFF] into Big Ugly Fat Fella so's not to offend the sensibilities of people who can't handle the rawness of combat humor. The correct phrase in this well known photo is actually "Murderers' Row" and one place to confirm this is on page 144 of Richard Humble's "United States Fleet Carriers of World War II" (New York, Sterling Publishing, 1984). However, his book was certainly not the first time this photograph had appeared in print and most anyone from the American naval history community should have been able to recognize the discrepancy.

7. Page 286 - This photograph is not of Independence but of her sister-ship Langley and is viewable on the Naval History & Heritage Command's website in Langley's photographic collection. Perhaps the late author mistook a photo captioned as an "Independence-class carrier" for Independence herself?

There are several other questionable captions in this one-volume trilogy but these mistakes are the most egregious examples of the late author's apparent lack of research, at least concerning U.S. naval aviation history. At this point, the best I can state is that while the late author's knowledge of Royal Navy carrier operations may have been quite extensive (judging by the apparent lack of errors in the photographs of Royal Navy ships) his command of U.S. naval aviation history was, sadly, not as extensive and thus a substantial portion of the information in this book may not be trustworthy, given the lion's share of "Carrier Operations in World War II" were the realm of the United States Navy.