Customer Reviews

From the Flight Deck: An Anthology of the Best Writing on Carrier Warfare

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This is an excellent collection of some 32 articles/stories about the development and use of aircraft carrier warfare. From its earliest days of development when there were no teachers, Gene Ely landed his Curtiss biplane on a makeshift deck on the USS Pennsylvania on January 18, 1911. He was to die in October of that same year in a plane crash.

Of course World War II established the supremacy of the carrier over the battleship - to the great chagrin of the battleship admirals. In addition to our well known stories of action in the pacific, here are articles on fighting the Germans in the North Atlantic, the British attack using the Swordfish at Taranto. Then came the big events: Pearl Harbor, Doolittle, Midway. After that came the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam and finally on to the Gulf and the Balkans.

Mr. Mersky has selected some of the best writing I've ever seen on military aviation. He has included a small amount of fiction, some humorous, some serious to go with the technical articles. It's a delightful read.

This is a great collection of excerpts from the best of naval aviation. It will make you want to read many of the original books, some of which are not at all mainstream or easily found. It tracks the evolution of carrier aviation in a logical progression through it's chapters. I highly recommend it.