Product Description

The beginnings of the aircraft carrier were difficult. Guy Robbins' detailed history tells of the early days in World War One, when seaplanes had to be lowered from the ship to take off from the sea, and whinched aboard again on their return. These impracticalities led eventually to aircraft that could take off and land from a long, flat deck. The author examines Royal Navy, American, and Japanese progress in career development and strategy through the interwar years, showing how naval powers gradually shifted their thinking to favour the carrier. Together with sharply reported accounts of wartime engagements, both successes and failures, this book offers a valuable new account of the most significant weapons platform to have emerged in the mid-20th century.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1205751 in Books
• Published on: 2001-09-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

About the Author
Guy Robbins was born in Kent. He is a naval and military historian and researcher, until recently attached to one of Britain's leading military archives, and now writing full time from a new home in Calais, Maine in the USA.

Customer Reviews

Poorly organised
I was very dissappointed by this book. There is a wealth of detailed information here but it is poorly ordered and organised with too much repition. The individual threads are incredibly lacking in context, with the roles of many key protagonists outside of aviation development are simply inferred (Jellicoe, Beatie, Mitchell...). The use of (well researched) photos is extremely distracting, they are inserted in the text (rather than centre mounted) but never appear on relevant pages. Reading about Japanese conversions, whilst perpetually flicking backwords in the text to view them was unecessarily irritating...

When compared to the structural quality of other naval texts (N.A.M. Rodgers books have set the bar very high -- awaiting his book on this era...) this was a let down.