Author : Richard Harding
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 316 pages
File Size : 42,16 MB
Release : 2004-11-25
Category : History
ISBN : 1135753717
This book explores innovation within the Royal Navy from the financial constraints of the 1930s through to the refocusing of the Royal Navy after 1990.
Author : David Hobbs
Publisher : Seaforth Publishing
Page : 402 pages
File Size : 32,45 MB
Release : 2014-09-30
Category : History
ISBN : 1848321384
This book is 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.
Author : David Hobbs
Publisher : Pen and Sword
Page : 462 pages
File Size : 22,35 MB
Release : 2015-10-30
Category : History
ISBN : 184832412X
“A comprehensive study of the bittersweet post WWII history of British naval aviation . . . will become a standard reference for its subject.”—Firetrench In 1945 the most powerful fleet in the Royal Navy’s history was centered 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. “Makes a timely and welcome appearance . . . will make compelling reading for those with serious concern for our naval affairs.”—St. Andrews in Focus
Author : Richard Harding
Publisher : Psychology Press
Page : 328 pages
File Size : 49,51 MB
Release : 2005
Category : Electronic books
ISBN : 9780714657103
This book explores innovation within the Royal Navy from the financial constraints of the 1930s through to the refocusing of the Royal Navy after 1990.
Author : William M. Arkin
Publisher :
Page : 110 pages
File Size : 19,12 MB
Release : 1989
Category : Marine accidents
ISBN :
Author : Leo Marriott
Publisher :
Page : 144 pages
File Size : 26,1 MB
Release : 1985
Category : Aircraft carriers
ISBN : 9780711015616
Author : Edward Hampshire
Publisher : Seaforth Publishing
Page : 707 pages
File Size : 23,53 MB
Release : 2024-07-30
Category : History
ISBN : 139904124X
During the period covered by this new book the Royal Navy faced some of its greatest challenges, both at sea confronting the increasingly capable and impressive Soviet Navy, and on shore when it faced policy crises that threatened the survival of much of the fleet. During this remarkable period, the Navy had rarely been so focussed on a single theater of war – the Eastern Atlantic – but also rarely so politically vulnerable. The author sets out to analyze shadowing operations and confrontations at sea with Soviet ships and submarines; the Navy’s role in the enormous NATO and Warsaw Pact naval exercises that acted out potential war scenarios; individual operations from the Falklands and the 1990–91 Gulf War to the Beira and Armilla patrols; the development of advanced naval technologies to counter Soviet capabilities; policy-making controversies as the three services fought for resources – including the controversial 1981 Nott defense review; and what life was like in the Cold War navy for ratings and officers. The book, the first to cover this subject in depth for more than thirty years, will make use of the full range of archival sources that have been publicly available over the last two decades, but of which little use has been made by historians. This work is destined to become a definitive naval history of the period, and also provide a fascinating and gripping narrative of a navy under threat from many directions but which survived and eventually prospered, winning a remarkable victory in the far South Atlantic more than 7,000 miles from its expected battleground in the North Atlantic. Elegantly written for a wide audience, it will be a very significant volume for professional and enthusiast alike.
Author : Jon Robb-Webb
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 362 pages
File Size : 15,37 MB
Release : 2016-03-16
Category : History
ISBN : 1317039815
The British Pacific Fleet was formed in October 1944 and dispatched to fight alongside the USN in the Central Pacific under Admiral Nimitz. Deploying previously unpublished documents, this book reveals how relations between the UK and US forces developed from a starting point of barely repressed suspicion, to one where both navies came to understand each other and eventually find a remarkable bond. Born out of a shared experience of Kamikaze attacks, extended operations against bitterly hostile shores, the pooling of knowledge and experience, the two navies underpinned the diplomatic moves in both Washington and London. The book carries the legacy of this experience through to the next Anglo-American participation in war, Korea. It illustrates and explains how and why certain lessons were incorporated into the composition, behaviour and structure of the post-war Navy. It demonstrates the significance of what was learned from the USN by the RN and by USN from the RN. As well as examining the background to the largest fleet the Royal Navy ever put to sea, the book also charts its effects on Anglo-American relations, multinational operations, alliance building, and the ways naval forces are shaped by and in turn shape politics. It addresses a period of rapid technological development that witnessed profound changes in the international system, and which raised fundamental questions of what navies were for and how should they operate and organize themselves. In so doing the study illustrates how the experience of a few long months at the end of the war in the Pacific would cast a long shadow over these issues in the very different circumstances of the post-war world.
Author : M. Hopkins
Publisher : Springer
Page : 249 pages
File Size : 11,90 MB
Release : 2002-12-13
Category : History
ISBN : 140391978X
Britain and the Cold War, 1945-1964 offers new perspectives on ways in which Britain fought the Cold War, and illuminates key areas of the policy formulation process. It argues that in many ways Britain and the United States perceived and handled the threat posed by the Communist bloc in similar terms: nevertheless, Britain's continuing global commitments, post-war economic problems and somestic considerations obliged her on occasion to tackle the threat rather differently.
Author : Angus Konstam
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 49 pages
File Size : 18,35 MB
Release : 2023-04-27
Category : History
ISBN : 1472856902
The history of the Royal Navy flagships that led the fleet through the Cold War, ensured victory in the Falklands War, and saw action in Iraq and the Balkans. 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.
