During the 1920s and 1930s Adm. Joseph Mason Reeves (1878–1948) emerged as the most important flag officer in American naval aviation. He took command of the U.S. Navy’s nascent carrier arm during a critical period and, imagining the aircraft carrier’s possibilities as an offensive weapon, transformed it from a small auxiliary command in support of the battle line into a powerful strike force that could attack far in advance of the fleet. All the Factors of Victory is the first full-length...
In the years following WWI, the U.S. Congress was more interested in disarmament than in funding national defense. For the military services this meant lean budgets and skeleton operating forces. Billy Mitchell’s War recounts the struggle between the Army and Navy air arms for the resources needed to define and establish the role of aviation within their respective services in the period between the two world wars. When Billy Mitchell returned from WW I, he brought with him the...
On 4 June 1942, three squadrons of U.S. Navy Dauntless dive bombers destroyed Japan's carrier force at Midway and changed the course of the Pacific war. As Wildenberg demonstrates in this book, the key ingredient to the Navy's success was the planning and training devoted to the tactic of dive bombing. Examining how political, economic, technical, and operational factors influenced the development of carrier airpower between 1925 and 1942, he shows why dive bombing became the...
