Download or read book Pacific Carrier War written by Mark Stille and published by Osprey Publishing. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A detailed and comprehensive study of the carrier formations of the Pacific War, including their origins, development, and key battles from the Coral Sea, through Midway and Guadalcanal to the battle of the Philippine Sea. The defining feature of the Pacific Theater of World War II was the clash of carriers that ultimately decided the fate of nations. The names of the battles become legendary as some of the most epic encounters in the history of naval warfare. Pre-war assumptions about the impact and effectiveness of carriers were comprehensively tested in early war battles such as Coral Sea, while US victories at Midway and in the waters around Guadalcanal established the supremacy of its carriers. The US Navy's ability to adapt and evolve to the changing conditions of war maintained and furthered their advantage, culminating in their comprehensive victory at the battle of the Philippine Sea, history's largest carrier battle, which destroyed almost the entire Japanese carrier force. Examining the ships, aircraft, and doctrines of both the Japanese and US navies and how they changed during the war, Mark E. Stille shows how the domination of American carriers paved the way towards the Allied victory in the Pacific.
Download or read book The Ship that Held the Line written by Lisle A Rose and published by Naval Institute Press. This book was released on 2012-04-15 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American fleet aircraft carrier Hornet is widely acknowledged for the contributions she made to the war effort. The Doolittle Raid, launched from the Hornet's deck, inaugurated America's Pacific counteroffensive and transformed the aircraft carrier into one of the world's prime strategic weapon systems. She was one of three carriers to participate in the victory at Midway and the fighting around Guadalcanal. Through the experiences of this key warship and the eyes of her crew and the aviators who flew from her deck, Lisle Rose recreates the first desperate year of the war in the Pacific. He tells how the Hornet was molded into a deadly weapon of war, how the ship was fought and ultimately lost, and what it was like to live aboard her at a time when the fate of the United States depended on the Navy's tiny carrier fleet. In chronicling the carrier's operational history, the author contends that the fate of the Hornet's air group at Midway remains one of the great controversies in modern naval history and that the ship's importance in helping to keep the Japanese juggernaut at bay during the most critical period of the Pacific war is incontestable. His arguments ring true today as the controversy continues. Rose succeeds both in letting the reader see things the way the men of the Hornet did and in placing their experiences in a broad historical context.
Download or read book Japanese Carriers and Victory in the Pacific written by Martin Stansfeld and published by . This book was released on 2022-01-15 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japanese Carriers and Victory in the Pacific focuses on the pre-war debate between building a new generation of super-battleships or adopting aircraft carriers as the capital ships of the future. An Asian power in particular sees carriers as a way of challenging the USA and the colonial empires initially losing the contest yet coming out all right in the Cold War aftermath. Martin Stansfeld examines the much-overlooked genesis of Japan's so-called shadow fleet that was a secret attempt to bring about parity with the US in carriers--albeit only with slower speed conversions of liners and auxiliaries but along with the super battleships cluttered launch facilities when these could have been devoted to keel-up fast fleet carrier Production. This first analytical look at what major launch facilities were available in Japan shows that the Imperial Japanese Navy could have doubled its fast carrier fleet thereby able to give sufficient air cover for an invasion of Hawaii rather than just the raid on Pearl Harbor, but only providing nobody noticed they were building all these carriers. This is shown to have been entirely possible given the IJN's extraordinary success at covering up their super battleship and shadow fleet production. This secret fast carrier fleet program is given the name "phantom fleet" by Stansfeld who proceeds to demonstrate how the strategy of the Pacific War would have been transformed. Weaving through the chapters is an exotic cast of characters led most notably by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the conceiver of Pearl Harbor and a figure of mythic status to Japanese today and famous around the world thanks to the movies. Stansfeld dwells on the ironies of war, notably how, without the "day that will live in infamy", America might never have become the worldwide super-power it is today.
Download or read book Pacific Carrier War written by Mark Stille and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-10-14 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A detailed and comprehensive study of the carrier formations of the Pacific War, including their origins, development and key battles from the Coral Sea, through Midway and Guadalcanal to the battle of the Philippine Sea. The defining feature of the Pacific Theatre of World War II was the clash of carriers that ultimately decided the fate of nations. The names of these battles have become legendary as some of the most epic encounters in the history of naval warfare. Pre-war assumptions about the impact and effectiveness of carriers were comprehensively tested in early war battles such as Coral Sea, while US victories at Midway and in the waters around Guadalcanal established the supremacy of its carriers. The US Navy's ability to adapt and evolve to the changing conditions of war maintained and furthered their advantage, culminating in their comprehensive victory at the battle of the Philippine Sea, history's largest carrier battle, which destroyed almost the entire Japanese carrier force. Examining the ships, aircraft and doctrines of both the Japanese and US navies and how they changed during the war, Mark E. Stille shows how the domination of American carriers paved the way towards the Allied victory in the Pacific.
Download or read book Carrier Warfare in the Pacific written by E. T. Wooldridge and published by Smithsonian Books (DC). This book was released on 1993 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Capturing the times when lives and victory were in peril, this book records the exploits of the men who fought in WWII in the air and on the sea, including pilots and air crewmen of carrier squadrons, officers and men of the ship's company, and admirals and their staffs. Compelling personal accounts. Illus.
Download or read book Task Force 58 written by Rod Macdonald and published by Frontline Books. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 653 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The new breed of American fast aircraft carriers could make thirty-three knots, and each carried almost 100 strike aircraft. Brought together as Task Force 58, also known as the Fast Carrier Task Force, this awesome armada at times comprised more than 100 ships carrying more than 100,000 men afloat. By 1945, more than 1,000-combat aircraft, fighters, dive- and torpedo-bombers could be launched in under an hour. The fast carriers were a revolution in naval warfare – it was a time when naval power moved away from the big guns of the battleship to air power projected at sea. Battleships were eventually subordinated to supporting and protecting the fast carriers, of which, at its peak, Task Force 58 had a total of seventeen. This book covers the birth of naval aviation, the appearance of the first modern carriers in the 1920s, through to the famous surprise six-carrier _Kido Butai_ Japanese raid against Pearl Harbor on 8 December 1941 and then the early US successes of 1942 at the Battles of the Coral Sea and Midway. The fast carriers allowed America, in late 1942 and early 1943, to finally move from bitter defence against the Japanese expansionist onslaught, to mounting her own offensive to retake the Pacific. Task Force 58 swept west and north from the Solomon Islands to the Gilbert and Marshall Islands, neutralising Truk in Micronesia, and Palau in the Caroline islands, before the vital Mariana Islands operations, the Battle of Saipan, the first battle of the Philippine Sea and the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot. The strikes by Task Force 58 took Allied forces across the Pacific, to the controversial Battle of Leyte Gulf and to Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Task Force 58 had opened the door to the Japanese home islands themselves – allowing US bombers to finally get close enough to launch the devastating nuclear bombing raids on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Task Force 58 participated in virtually all the US Navy’s major battles in the Pacific theatre during the last two years of the war. Having spent many years investigating naval shipwrecks across the Pacific, many the result of the devastating effectiveness of Task Force 58, diver and shipwreck author Rod Macdonald has created the most detailed account to date of the fast carrier strike force, the force that brought Japan to its knees and brought the Second World War to its crashing conclusion.
Download or read book The First Team written by John B Lundstrom and published by Naval Institute Press. This book was released on 2005-07-01 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hailed as one of the finest examples of aviation research, this comprehensive 1984 study presents a detailed and scrupulously accurate operational history of carrier-based air warfare. From the earliest operations in the Pacific through the decisive Battle of Midway, it offers a narrative account of how ace fighter pilots like Jimmy Thach and Butch O'Hare and their skilled VF squadron mates--called the "first team"--amassed a remarkable combat record in the face of desperate odds. Tapping both American and Japanese sources, historian John B. Lundstrom reconstructs every significant action and places these extraordinary fighters within the context of overall carrier operations. He writes from the viewpoint of the pilots themselves, after interviewing some fifty airmen from each side, to give readers intimate details of some of the most exciting aerial engagements of the war. At the same time he assesses the role the fighter squadrons played in key actions and shows how innovations in fighter tactics and gunnery techniques were a primary reason for the reversal of American fortunes. After more than twenty years in print, the book remains the definitive account and is being published in paperback for the first time to reach an even larger audience.
Download or read book Japanese Carriers and Victory in the Pacific written by Martin Stansfeld and published by Pen and Sword Maritime. This book was released on 2022-01-30 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japanese Carriers and Victory in the Pacific focuses on the pre-war debate between building a new generation of super-battleships or adopting aircraft carriers as the ‘capital ships’ of the future. An Asian power in particular sees carriers as a way of challenging the USA and the colonial empires initially losing the contest yet coming out all right in the Cold War aftermath. Martin Stansfeld examines the much overlooked genesis of Japan’s so-called shadow fleet that was a secret attempt to bring about parity with the US in carriers -- albeit only with slower speed conversions of liners and auxiliaries but along with the super-battleships cluttered launch facilities when these could have been devoted to keel-up fast fleet carrier production. This first analytical look at what major launch facilities were available in Japan shows that the Imperial Japanese Navy could have doubled its fast carrier fleet thereby able to give sufficient air cover for an invasion of Hawaii rather than just the raid on Pearl Harbor, but only providing nobody noticed they were building all these carriers. This is shown to have been entirely possible given the IJN’s extraordinary success at covering up their super-battleship and shadow fleet production. This secret fast carrier fleet program is given the name ’phantom fleet’ by Stansfeld who proceeds to demonstrate how the strategy of the Pacific War would have been transformed. Weaving through the chapters is an exotic cast of characters led most notably by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the conceiver of Pearl Harbor and a figure of mythic status to Japanese today and famous around the world thanks to the movies. Stansfeld dwells on the ironies of war, notably how, without the ‘day that will live in infamy’, America might never have become the worldwide super-power it is today.
Download or read book Point Option written by Herschel Pahl and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A personal memoir of the author while he was a Navy Fighter Pilot, flying from aircraft carriers. The book covers the carrier actions of both the U.S. and Japanese Navy. Also includes exciting post war account of Pahl's experience chasing guide missiles being tested.
Download or read book War in the Pacific written by Harry Gailey and published by Presidio Press. This book was released on 2011-08-03 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historian Harry Gailey offers a fresh one-volume treatment of the vast Pacific theater in World War II, examining in detail the performance of Japanese and Allied naval, air, and land forces in every major military operation. The War in the Pacific begins with an examination of events leading up to World War II and compares the Japanese and American economies and societies, as well as the chief combatants' military doctrine, training, war plans, and equipment. The book then chronicles all significant actions - from the early Allied defeats in the Philippines, the East Indies, and New Guinea; through the gradual improvement of the Allied position in the Central and Southwest Pacific regions; to the final agonies of the Japanese people, whose leaders refused to admit defeat until the very end. Gailey gives detailed treatment to much that has been neglected or given only cursory mention in previous surveys. The reader thus gains an unparalleled overview of operations, as well as many fresh insights into the behind-the-scenes bickering between the Allies and the interservice squabbles that dogged MacArthur and Nimitz throughout the war. NOTE: This edition does not include a photo insert.
Download or read book The Imperial Japanese Navy in the Pacific War written by Mark Stille and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-11-20 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An highly illustrated examination of the key ships, tactics and operations of the Imperial Japanese Navy in the War in the Pacific in World War II. The Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) was the third most powerful navy in the world at the start of World War II, and came to dominate the Pacific in the early months of the war. This was a remarkable turnaround for a navy that only began to modernize in 1868, although defeats inflicted on the Russians and Chinese in successive wars at the turn of the century gave a sense of the threat the IJN was to pose. Bringing together for the first time material previously published in Osprey series books, and with the addition of new writing making use of the most recent research, this book details the Japanese ships which fought in the Pacific and examines the principles on which they were designed, how they were armed, when and where they were deployed and how effective they were in battle. The Imperial Japanese Navy in the Pacific War provides a history of the IJN's deployment and engagements, analysis of the evolution of strategy and tactics, and finally addresses the question of whether it truly was a modern navy, fully prepared for the rigors of combat in the Pacific. Illustrated throughout with photographs and detailed colour artworks, this is a valuable reference source for Pacific War enthusiasts and historians alike.
Download or read book Pacific Thunder written by Thomas McKelvey Cleaver and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-10-19 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On 27 October 1942, four 'Long Lance' torpedoes fired by the Japanese destroyers Makigumo and Akigumo exploded in the hull of the aircraft carrier USS Hornet (CV-8). Minutes later, the ship that had launched the Doolitte Raid six months earlier slipped beneath the waves of the Coral Sea. Of the pre-war carrier fleet the Navy had struggled to build over 15 years, only three were left: USS Enterprise, which had been badly damaged in the battle of Santa Cruz; USS Saratoga (CV-3) which lay in dry dock, victim of a Japanese submarine torpedo; and the USS Ranger (CV-4), which was in the mid-Atlantic on her way to support Operation Torch. For the American naval aviators licking their wounds in the aftermath of this defeat, it would be difficult to imagine that within 24 months of this event, Zuikaku, the last survivor of the carriers that had attacked Pearl Harbor, would lie at the bottom of the sea. Alongside it lay the other surviving Japanese carriers, sacrificed as lures in a failed attempt to block the American invasion of the Philippines, leaving the United States to reign supreme on the world's largest ocean. Now publishing in paperback, this is the fascinating account of the Central Pacific campaign, one of the most stunning comebacks in naval history, as in just 14 months the US Navy went from the jaws of defeat to the brink of victory in the Pacific.
Download or read book Fabled Fifteen written by Thomas McKelvey Cleaver and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The astonishing saga of Air Group's momentous six-month combat tour in the Pacific War.
Download or read book Combat Command written by Adm. Frederick C. Sherman and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2017-07-11 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: COMMANDING THE LEXINGTON DURING THE BATTLE OF THE CORAL SEA I saw the enemy torpedo planes coming in on both bows. The air was full of antiaircraft bursts and the din was terrific. I motioned to the helmsman for a hard left rudder, just as the enemy planes started disgorging their fish. The water in all directions seemed full of torpedo wakes. Bombs were dropping all around us. Great geysers of water from near misses were going up higher than our masts, and the ship shuddered from the explosions of the ones that hit. The enemy planes split up to fire on both bows, the hardest maneuver for us to counter. Then I remember seeing two wakes coming straight for our port beam, and there was nothing I could do about them. The wakes approached the ship’s side, and I braced myself for the explosion.... COMBAT COMMAND
Download or read book How Carriers Fought written by Lars Celander and published by Casemate Publishers. This book was released on 2018-07-19 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An in-depth analysis of aircraft carrier battles in WWII and the evolution of carrier operations—from technology and strategy to life among the crew. First built in 1921, the aircraft carrier brought a new dimension to military strategy as the United States entered World War II. How Carriers Fought examines the evolution of carrier operations with a special focus on the conflict in the Pacific between the US Navy and the imperial Japanese fleet. Starting with a discussion of the tools and building blocks of carrier operations, historian Lars Celander then provides an analysis of various carrier battles to demonstrate how strategy and operations developed during the war. Every aspect of carrier warfare is covered, from navigation and communication technology to life inside the cockpit. A world of tactical dehydration and amphetamine pills is explored, as well as the measures pilots used to reduce their risk of death in the event of being hit. The major carrier battles of the war are considered, from Coral Sea and Leyte Gulf to the Battle of Midway, where the Japanese decided to divide their forces while the Americans concentrated theirs. How Carriers Fought analyzes these tactics, exploring which worked best in theory and in practice.
Download or read book Carriers at War 1939 1945 written by Adrian Stewart and published by Casemate Publishers. This book was released on 2013-06-19 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author begins this fascinating book by tracing aircraft carrier development between the Wars. Eschewed by the Germans and Italians and with Britain squandering her early lead, the Americans and Japanese became front-runners.The Royal Navy learnt the hard way in the early stages of WW2 with the loss of HMS Courageous and Glorious but, following successes at Taranto and Matapan, the value of carriers was no longer in doubt. The sinking of Bismarck and the cataclysmic Pearl Harbor attack signaled the end of the Battleship era. Stung by such spectacular losses the US Navy threw its weight behind the carrier concept and the naval war in the Pacific (Guadalcanal, East Solomon Islands, Santa Cruz, Midmay and Leyte Gulf) revolved round carrier-borne aircraft.Meanwhile the carrier became pivotal in protecting vital convoys in the Atlantic, Arctic and Mediterranean. The author backs his arguments with copious examples of naval and air action.
Download or read book The Early Air War in the Pacific written by Ralph F. Wetterhahn and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2019-11-15 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the first 10 months of the war in the Pacific, Japan achieved air supremacy with its carrier and land-based forces. But after major setbacks at Midway and Guadalcanal, the empire's expansion stalled, in part due to flaws in aircraft design, strategy and command. This book offers a fresh analysis of the air war in the Pacific during the early phases of World War II. Details are included from two expeditions conducted by the author that reveal the location of an American pilot missing in the Philippines since 1942 and clear up a controversial account involving famed Japanese ace Saburo Sakai and U.S. Navy pilot James "Pug" Southerland.
