U.S. Aircraft Carriers, Revised Edition: An Illustrated Design History

by Norman Friedman

This fully illustrated series offers detailed descriptions of the evolution of all classes of the principle U.S. combatant types, as well as plans, profiles, and numerous detailed photographs.

Genres: Military History, History, Nautical, Naval History, Aviation, Maritime, Military Fiction

424 pages, Hardcover

Published April 1, 1983

About the author

Norman Friedman is a prominent naval analyst and the author of more than thirty books covering a range of naval subjects, from warship histories to contemporary defense issues.

Reviews

[Dan Cowden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tracing the design of aircraft carriers from USS Langley, a converted collier, to USS Nimitz with its nuclear power, this book is a gem for anyone interested in how and why ships are designed in a particular fashion. Detailed exterior plans are shown for nearly all American aircraft carriers and much of the political infighting within the Navy about the role of carriers and the abilities which make the "perfect" carrier are covered in this volume.

[Ari · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one in a series of detailed design studies by Friedman. I had previously read the cruiser volume, and found this one considerably more readable.

This book does have the weaknesses of Friedman's other books in the series. The reader is still buried in details of alternate designs, committee approvals, and the dialogue between the design offices, the CNO, and assorted service representatives. As always, war experience is only fleetingly mentioned.

On the other hand, carrier development has a somewhat more cohesive story to it, and Friedman is able to bring out the interrelationship between aircraft design, carrier design and tactics. I felt like I mostly did follow the narrative and did learn things. Some points I hadn't previously understood:
- Back in the day, carriers had to maintain wind over the deck for air operations -- and that means that they have to be fast, and also that they are liable to have their movements constrained by wind and so might blunder into enemy surface forces.
- Because big hulls are more efficient than small hulls, there's always been an interest in having a self-escorting carrier, rather than a carrier plus inefficient and expensive escorts.
- The navy had extensive war-game experience with carriers before radar. The thing they learned was that it's hard for the defense to stop a major strike, so whoever strikes first, wins. Therefore, they emphasized large numbers of scouts and scout-bombers, rather than defensive fighters. Also, they believed carriers should be dispersed well away from the battle line to impede detection. This turned out to be a far-sighted doctrine and probably sensible up to about the time of the Battle of the Coral Sea when radar got good enough to manage massed escorts.
- The navy had been thinking about adapting the *design* of the Lexington-class battlecruisers, even before the hulls themselves became available. They were already thinking of very large fast ships.
- Aircraft specifications drive flight-deck size, and once the flight-deck size is set, there's a basic minimum tonnage for a useful ship -- you need a certain depth for structural reasons, and once you have a big steel box whose outer dimensions are set, the displacement is basically fixed.
- Before and during the war, it was infeasible to both launch and land aircraft at the same time. So the basic tactical concept for US carriers was to stack up most of the air group on deck for a strike, fly them all off, then land them all. This meant that there was also a maximum air group size for efficient operation, and the navy initially thought the Midway class were too big.
- Avgas is trouble for designs because it is explosive; jet fuel is not explosive and so this makes modern carriers easier to design. Enclosed hangers are no longer bombs in waiting.
- The aviators periodically pushed for a flush deck to ease flight operations -- but no design ever found a good way to dispose of boiler exhaust. It's interesting that nuclear flush decks never became a thing.
- Steel is cheap; aircraft and electronics are expensive. And even a small carrier needs several AEW, ASW, and CAP aircraft. Therefore, there are considerable economies of scale making the ships bigger.

To pop up a level of abstraction. Naval architecture is interesting because modern warships last much longer than the technical or strategic situation in which they are designed -- the designers have to think ahead years and decades. They often do surprisingly well, given that -- the Yorktown design worked pretty well even though the first combat use of the ships was

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Norman Friedman's book is an excellent work on the history and evolution of aircraft carrier design, from the U.S.S. Langley to the early Nimitz class. He covers both the big carrier classes, the "austere" smaller carriers adopted for the war, and the various proposed designs that were never built. It is an impressive work that highlights the challenges of designing and constructing such warships, as well as how those ships were adapted (with increasing difficulty) for the changing demands of the age. Yet Friedman's analysis suffers from the exclusion of any detailed coverage of how well the designs worked in service, something he did in his later book British Carrier Aviation: The Evolution of the Ships and Their Aircraft. Unlike that work, there is little examination of the effectiveness of various concepts in combat, only a summary of the lessons learned that were applied to subsequent classes. As a result, Friedman's book is frustratingly incomplete, as it denies readers a complete understanding of the factors behind the success or failure of the designs he describes.

[Jay · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a looong read, but as with all of Friedman's books, it's superbly researched and excruciatingly detailed.