Aircraft carriers - Royal Navy: books - history and types

British Aircraft Carriers - Design, Development & Service Histories

A meticulously detailed history of British aircraft-carrying ships from the earliest experimental vessels to the Queen Elizabeth class, currently under construction and the largest ships ever built for the Royal Navy. Individual chapters cover the design and construction of each class, with full technical details, and there are extensive summaries of every ship's career.

Apart from the obvious large-deck carriers, the book also includes seaplane carriers, escort carriers and MAC ships, the maintenance ships built on carrier hulls, unbuilt projects, and the modern LPH.
It concludes with a look at the future of naval aviation, while numerous appendices summarise related subjects like naval aircraft, recognition markings and the circumstances surrounding the loss of every British carrier.

As befits such an important reference work, it is heavily illustrated with a magnificent gallery of photos and plans, including the first publication of original plans in full colour, one on a magnificent gatefold.
Written by the leading historian of British carrier aviation, himself a retired Fleet Air Arm pilot, it displays the authority of a lifetime's research combined with a practical understanding of the issues surrounding the design and operation of aircraft carriers. As such "British Aircraft Carriers" is certain to become the standard work on the subject.

British Aircraft Carriers 1939-45 (Osprey)

With war against Germany looming, Britain pushed forward its carrier program in the late 1930s. In 1938, the Royal Navy launched the HMS Ark Royal, its first-ever purpose-built aircraft carrier. This was quickly followed by others, including the highly-successful Illustrious class.
Smaller and tougher than their American cousins, the British carriers were designed to fight in the tight confines of the North Sea and the Mediterranean. Over the next six years, these carriers battled the Axis powers in every theatre, attacking Italian naval bases, hunting the Bismark, and even joining the fight in the Pacific.

This book tells the story of the small, but resilient, carriers and the crucial role they played in the British war effort.

Fleet Air Arm Carrier War

This is the story of British naval flying from aircraft carriers, from its conception in World War One to the present day. It includes the types of aircraft and the men who flew them, the carriers and the evolution of their designs, the theatres of war in which they served and their notable achievements and tragedies.
It traces navy flying from the early days of the biplane, through the rapid developments during World War Two to the post-war introduction of jet-powered flight.

The British inventions of the angled flight deck and later vertical landing jets revolutionised sea warfare and allowed the carrier to play a vital part in many recent land wars when naval aircraft flew in support of Allied land forces.

Although the British carriers have always been smaller than their American counterparts, the Royal Navy and its aircraft have always been in the van of the development of ships and aircraft. This is the proud history of British Naval flying and ships such as HMS Eagle, HMS Hermes, HMS Glorious, HMS Ark Royal and many more.

British Escort Carriers 1941-45 (Osprey)

In 1941, as the Battle of the Atlantic raged and ship losses mounted, the British Admiralty desperately tried to find ways to defeat the U-Boat threat to Britain's maritime lifeline. Facing a shortage of traditional aircraft carriers and shore-based aircraft, the Royal Navy, as a stopgap measure, converted merchant ships into small 'escort carriers'. These were later joined by a growing number of American-built escort carriers, sent as part of the Lend-Lease agreement.

The typical Escort Carrier was small, slow and vulnerable, but it could carry about 18 aircraft, which gave the convoys a real chance to detect and sink dangerous U-Boats. Collectively, their contribution to an Allied victory was immense, particularly in the long and gruelling campaigns fought in the Atlantic and Arctic.

Illustrated throughout with detailed full-colour artwork and contemporary photographs, this fascinating study explores in detail how these adaptable ships had such an enormous impact on the outcome of World War II's European Theatre.

Geleitflugzeugträger - USA, England, Japan 1939-1945 (Typenkompass)

Ce livre de référence présente les porte-avions d'escorte utilisés par les marines des Etats-Unis, le Japon et le Royaume Uni pendant la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale.

Chaque type est présenté à l'aide d'une photo, d'une description historique et d'une fiche technique.

British Aircraft Carriers 1945-2010 (Osprey)

NEW

In 1945, at the end of World War II, the Royal Navy's carrier fleet proved essential to the post-war world. Royal Navy carriers fought in the Korean War with the UN fleet, in the debacle at Suez, and in British operations in the last days of Empire, in Malaya, Borneo and Aden. But most famously, they were the key to the Royal Navy's victory in the Falklands campaign, and they went on to fight in the two Iraq wars.

Illustrated throughout with new profiles of the key carriers and their development, as well as a cutaway of HMS Victorious and superb new illustrations of the carriers in action, this book explains how the Royal Navy's air power changed throughout the Cold War and beyond.

Renowned naval historian Angus Konstam explains how the World War II carriers were rebuilt in a pioneering modernization that allowed them to operate a new generation of naval jets.
As carriers became more expensive to operate, the Royal Navy had to scrap its conventional fast jets and introduce a new generation of light carriers designed for the innovative Harrier 'jump jet'.
When the Falklands War broke out, it was one of these new carriers and one veteran carrier from World War II that gave the Task Force the fighters it needed to defend itself in hostile waters and retake the islands.

Covering a period of dramatic change for the Royal Navy, this book is a history of the Royal Navy's most important ships throughout the Cold War, the retreat from Empire, and the Falklands and Iraq wars, up to the moment Royal Navy fixed-wing air power was temporarily axed in 2010.

The British Carrier Strike Fleet - After 1945

In 1945 the most powerful fleet in the Royal Navy's history was centred on nine aircraft carriers.

This book charts the post-war fortunes of this potent strike force - its decline in the face of diminishing resources, its final fall at the hands of uncomprehending politicians, and its recent resurrection in the form of the Queen Elizabeth class carriers, the largest ships ever built for the Royal Navy.

After 1945 'experts' prophesied that nuclear weapons would make conventional forces obsolete but British carrier-borne aircraft were almost continuously employed in numerous conflicts as far apart as Korea, Egypt, the Persian Gulf, the South Atlantic, East Africa and the Far East, often giving successive British Governments options when no others were available.
In the process the Royal Navy invented many of the techniques and devices crucial to modern carrier operations - angled decks, steam catapults and deck-landing aids - while also pioneering novel forms of warfare like helicopter-borne assault, and tactics for countering such modern plagues as insurgency and terrorism.

This book combines narratives of these poorly understood operations with a clear analysis of the strategic and political background, benefiting from the author's personal experience of both carrier flying and the workings of Whitehall. It is an important but largely untold story, of renewed significance as Britain once again embraces carrier aviation.