Naval Aviation In The Second World War (Images Of War - Rare Photographs From Wartime Archives)

Aircraft Carriers first made their appearance in the early years of The Great War, and these primitive Seaplane Carriers were more often then not built upon converted hulls that had already been laid down as capital class warships. It was not until the late 1920s that the first true Carrier's started to appear - Designed, Equipped, Constructed and Commissioned specifically for that role - although there was still some degree of disagreement as to what exactly that role would be. All of those endless arguments between Admirals over the modern Carriers role inside that of a larger Naval fleet were by 1942 shown up for the wasteful fallacy they always were. This was due mainly to the efforts of the British and Commonwealth Naval forces successful use of the Carrier against naval targets and facilities in the Mediterranean, and against specific targets like the KMS Bismarck. Any remaining doubts were removed by the series of Air Raids that the Imperial Japanese Navy undertook over 1941-42 against targets as far away as Hawaii - Australia - Ceylon, and the results that they achieved against Allied Naval bases and shipping. The Naval Author and Photographer Philip Kaplan illustrates the story of the Second World War Aviators in this work who operated all across the world, and in all kinds of sea and weather conditions, in what were quite taxing flying conditions even on the best of days. As well as having to deal with all the usual wartime difficulties of Anti-Aircraft Fire and Fighters, Naval Aviators also had to deal with several unique issues all of their own. One major issue was the difficulty that came from navigating without landmarks, another was the limited range of the aircraft themselves, then there were things like large dust storms, sudden wind gusts which could make an easy landing approach become fatal or worse still cyclonic winds and waves which could make landings next to impossible and endanger the carrier itself.