Aircraft Carriers is the definitive history of world aircraft carrier
development and operations. Norman Polmar's revised and updated,
two-volume classic describes the political and technological factors
that influenced aircraft carrier design and construction, meticulously
records their operations, and explains their impact on modern warfare.
Volume I provides a comprehensive analysis of carrier developments and
warfare in the first half of the twentieth century, and examines the
advances that allowed the carrier to replace the battleship as the
dominant naval weapons system. Polmar gives particular emphasis to
carrier operations from World War I, through the Japanese strikes
against China in the 1930s, to World War II in the Atlantic,
Mediterranean, Arctic, and Pacific theaters. It begins with French
inventor Clément Ader's remarkably prescient 1909 description of an
aircraft carrier. The book then explains how Britain led the world in
the development of aircraft-carrying ships, soon to be followed by the
United States and Japan. While ship-based aircraft operations in World
War I had limited impact, they foreshadowed the aircraft carriers built
in the 1920s and 1930s. The volume also describes the aircraft operating
from those ships as well as the commanders who pioneered carrier
aviation.Aircraft Carriers has benefited from the technical
collaboration of senior carrier experts Captain Eric M. Brown and
General Minoru Genda as well as noted historians Robert M. Langdon and
Peter B. Mersky. Aircraft Carriers is heavily illustrated with more than
400 photographs--some never before published--and maps.Volume II, which
is forthcoming from Potomac Books in the winter 2006-2007 (ISBN
978-1-57488-665-8), will cover the period 1946 to the present.
