BLURB Kenneth Whiting was well-known in the Navy of his day. During his early years after graduating from the Naval Academy, he commanded several early submarines and was known as the first man to escape from a downed submarine. After being trained to fly by Orville Wright, he was the first naval officer to conceptualize a ship that was to become the most important in the US Navy--the aircraft carrier. After submitting his first three unsuccessful proposals to build such a ship, his creativity and aggressiveness were recognized at the start of World War I when he was asked to lead the Navy's First Aeronautical Detachment to France. The FAD was the first American unit to travel to Europe, and within a few months, he negotiated a plan with the French Navy for a system to build naval air stations and train his men in anti-submarine warfare from the air. When the US Navy Department approved the plan, he was transferred to the command of NAS Killingholme on England's North Sea Coast. He built Killingholme into the largest naval air station in Britain. Returning to the US at the end of the war, he found the Navy Department much more willing to talk about building aircraft carriers. Upon the approval of this new ship type, he was placed in charge of converting or building the first six. Along the way, he developed the new systems for the operation of launching and landing aircraft on the new flat flight decks. For his developmental work with the first six carriers and commanding two of them, he is frequently called the Father of the Aircraft Carrier in books and publications about the ship, which was to take the place of the battleship as the king of the seas. Along the way, naval aviation took advantage of his ability to effectively and smoothly advocate for many of the then-fledgling naval aviation's important goals in the public arena. Because he had publicly spearheaded much of those goals, the battleship admirals who ran the Navy of that era were able to take revenge on him and prevent him from being promoted to admiral rank. His tragic death in the middle of World War II became part of the reason his name has been largely forgotten outside the Navy, but naval aviators know him because the field where they are all trained, Whiting Field NAS in Pensacola, is named for him. The military exploits of this American sailor are worth recounting, but the victories of Whiting and his family racing yachts on Long Island Sound make him even more interesting. The goal of this first biography of Kenneth Whiting is to enable those who empower one of today's most important functions--naval aviation--and the Americans who have benefitted from Whiting's work, to remember this hero of naval aviation and submarines.

The men who ventured into the air in the Navy’s first frail aircraft were not only daring—they had vision, persistence, and a nearly unlimited determination to convince the skeptics that their frail kite-like structures could someday possess military value. This is the story of their trials, tragedies, and triumphs. They patched cooling systems with chewing gum, they lived by “crash, repair, and fly again,” but they succeeded in developing this new service into an effective arm of the fleet. Wings for the Fleet, first published in 1966, covers the fascinating details of those pioneering days from 1910 to the entry of the United States into World War I. All of the heroic “early birds” are here with full accounts of their exploits. Admiral van Deurs, himself a naval aviator since the early 1920s, has rendered a significant service by his careful preparation of this well-balanced, thoroughly illustrated historical account, which comes complete with appendixes listing early naval aviators and the planes they flew. Over one hundred photographs were selected from official and private sources to illustrate this book.

A survey of Chinese warfare, both internal and international, from the opium wars of the 1840s through to the end of Vietnam.

A theory of tactical air power explaining US air power effectiveness in Vietnam and the modern air wars that followed.