Aircraft Carriers: A History of Carrier Aviation and Its Influence on World Events, Volume II: 1946-2006 (review)

Norman Polmar's recent study, Aircraft Carriers: A History of Carrier Aviation and Its Influence on World Events, is a two-volume work that has been almost four decades in the making. In one sense, these volumes can be seen as an expanded second edition of the Polmar book that was first published in 1969—Aircraft Carriers: A Graphic History of Carrier Aviation and Its Influence on World Events (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company). Yet, in another sense, they represent a significant reexamination of the subject based on a careful evaluation of the vast amounts of new historical material on carrier aviation that have appeared in the past forty or so years.

The volume under consideration here covers the years stretching from the end of World War II through 2006. This period saw a tremendous ebb and flow in the numbers of operational aircraft carriers available not only in the U.S. Navy but in navies as diverse as Britain's Royal Navy, the French Navy, the Spanish Navy, the Indian Navy, and the Soviet (now Russian) Navy. Although the author places his principal emphasis in this book on examining U.S. carrier aviation, he devotes significant portions of several chapters to discussing the carrier aviation of these other navies as well.

Throughout the book, Polmar furnishes the reader with a solid narrative history of aircraft carriers and carrier aircraft—moving from discussions of development and construction matters to detailed accounts of how they functioned operationally in peacetime exercises and in combat during conflicts as varied in nature and severity as Korea, Vietnam, and the Falklands. Throughout the book, the narratives in particular chapters are heightened by information supplied to Polmar by various participants in the events. For example, in the chapter entitled "Atomic Bombs Aboard Ship," the author's account is buttressed by information he obtained from retired Vice Admiral John T. "Chick" Hayward, the original commanding officer of VC-5—the Navy's first atomic-capable attack squadron. In a similar fashion, in the chapter entitled "Carrier Controversies," retired Vice Admiral Donald D. Engen, the skipper of the carrier America during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, furnished Polmar with the information on how his carrier responded to the aerial attack on the U.S. intelligence ship Liberty located off the coast of the Sinai Peninsula.

In addition to its narrative text, the book contains five appendices, covering subjects such as aircraft carrier characteristics and U.S. carrier modernizations. Its twenty-two pages of endnotes and useful bibliography of sources provide the reader with additional material of interest. Filled to the brim with fascinating information and illustrated with hundreds of well-chosen photographs, the second volume of Norman Polmar's Aircraft Carriers will serve general readers and historians alike as a valuable reference source for many years to come.