Porte-avions (depuis 1945) - Grande Bretagne : livres

British Aircraft Carriers 1945-2010

NOUVEAU

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.

The British Carrier Strike Fleet - After 1945

In 1945 the most powerful fleet in the Royal Navy's history was centred 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.