Second World War Carrier Campaigns

Award-winning historian David Wragg’s Second World War Carrier Campaigns explores how aircraft carriers changed the course of the war for Allied victory.

Without the aircraft carrier, the Japanese would not have brought the United States into the Second World War through their attack on Pearl Harbor; without the carrier, the United States could not have rolled back the Japanese forces spread across the wide reaches of the Pacific and carried the war to Japan itself. Thus is can be argued that aircraft carriers were the decisive naval weapons system of World War II. Yet they had an uncertain start, with HMS Courageous sunk two weeks after the outbreak of war, followed by her sister, Glorious, the following spring.

Featuring eyewitness accounts, Second World War Carrier Campaignsis an authoritative, concise and hugely readable account of carrier operations throughout the conflict.