Find, Fix & Strike!
The Fleet Air Arm at War 1939-45
Winton, John
First Edition
"Their Lordships are of the opinion that they [aeroplanes] would not be of any practical usetothe Naval Service." So wrote the Admiralty to the Wright Brothers in 1908. It is perfectly true to say therefore that at the outbreak of World War Two the Royal Navy had a rather better Fleet Air Arm than it deserved. The Service began World War Two with only seven aircraft carriers and a couple of hundred obsolescent aircraft, and ended with more than fifty carriers of various types and several thousand front line aircraft. Here, in Find, Fix and Strike! John Winton charts the Fleet Air Arm's progress, from those first painful lessons learned in the Norwegian campaign in the spring of 1940, to the final triumphant massed carrier operations of the British Pacific Fleet as part of the US 3rd Fleet off the mainland of Japan in the summer of 1945.
Told from the aircrew's own point of view are the great headline stories: the historic strike at Taranto; the Bismarck hunt; the gallant sortie of Esmonde and his squadron in the English Channel; the long summer campaign against Tirpitz in 1944; the Atlantic and Arctic convoys. An authoritative text is backed up by vivid eye-witness accounts, each brilliantly illuminating some facet of the Fleet Air Arm at war: the Skua dive-bomber attack on Königsberg (the first major warship ever sunk by enemy air attack); a Messerschmitt 'kill' by a Battle of Britain pilot high in the sunlit sky over southern England; the huge black shape of Bismarck, rippling fire along her whole length, seen from a Swordfish cockpit; a Fulmar ditching in the Atlantic, miles off the shipping routes; a brush with a Junkers Ju 88 in the Mediterranean dusk above a Malta convoy; Seafire and Swordfish combining to sink an Arctic U-boat; dogfights with Japanese Zeros, ten thousand feet above the oil refineries of Sumatra; and the feelings of a young squadron CO on losing the bravest of his pilots who won a posthumous Victoria Cross.
Hardcover with dust jacket
152 Seiten / pages
60 black and white photographs, 8 maps
very good condition
London - 1980 - B.T. Batsford
Art.Nr. 24981
