The new breed of American fast aircraft carriers could make
thirty-three knots, and each carried almost 100 strike aircraft.
Brought together as Task Force 58, also known as the Fast Carrier
Task Force, this awesome armada at times comprised more than 100
ships carrying more than 100,000 men afloat. By 1945, more than
1,000-combat aircraft, fighters, dive- and torpedo-bombers could be
launched in under an hour. The fast carriers were a revolution in
naval warfare - it was a time when naval power moved away from the
big guns of the battleship to air power projected at sea.
Battleships were eventually subordinated to supporting and
protecting the fast carriers, of which, at its peak, Task Force 58
had a total of seventeen. This book covers the birth of naval
aviation, the appearance of the first modern carriers in the 1920s,
through to the famous surprise six-carrier _Kid? Butai_ Japanese
raid against Pearl Harbor on 8 December 1941 and then the early US
successes of 1942 at the Battles of the Coral Sea and Midway. The
fast carriers allowed America, in late 1942 and early 1943, to
finally move from bitter defence against the Japanese expansionist
onslaught, to mounting her own offensive to retake the Pacific.
Task Force 58 swept west and north from the Solomon Islands to the
Gilbert and Marshall Islands, neutralising Truk in Micronesia, and
Palau in the Caroline islands, before the vital Mariana Islands
operations, the Battle of Saipan, the first battle of the
Philippine Sea and the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot. The strikes by
Task Force 58 took Allied forces across the Pacific, to the
controversial Battle of Leyte Gulf and to Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
Task Force 58 had opened the door to the Japanese home islands
themselves - allowing US bombers to finally get close enough to
launch the devastating nuclear bombing raids on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. Task Force 58 participated in virtually all the US Navy's
major battles in the Pacific theatre during the last two years of
the war. Having spent many years investigating naval shipwrecks
across the Pacific, many the result of the devastating
effectiveness of Task Force 58, diver and shipwreck author Rod
Macdonald has created the most detailed account to date of the fast
carrier strike force, the force that brought Japan to its knees and
brought the Second World War to its crashing conclusion.
General
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