About this ebook
It is the complete story of America’s aircraft carrier Task Force 58, told in stirring narrative form and illustrated with 200 pictures and maps, and features frank discussions of strategy, accounts of personal heroism, and lays bare many new facts of sea war in the Pacific.
Primarily an action story, told in terms of people, dialogue and split-second accounts of air and sea battles, “Carrier War” is nevertheless a comprehensive history of the Central Pacific campaign. It begins with the arrival of the first new carriers at Pearl Harbour and describes the growing power and fury of the Navy’s campaign—through Marcus, Wake, Rabaul, the landings at Tarawa and Kwajalein, the great raids on Truk, Saipan and Palau, the landings at Hollandia, the panoramic battles of the Philippine Sea.
Throughout, Admiral Mar Mitscher’s Task Force 58 is the protagonist, although large parts of the story are built around the adventures of the redoubtable Yorktown and Essex and their two air groups, Five and Nine, whose full war records were released for the first time.
“Carrier War” reveals a great deal about the nature of U.S. naval fliers and their lives. It is a shrewd appraisal of the enemy. It explains in simple, non-technical terms how carriers work and how sea battles are fought. It contains excerpts from ships’ logs, official action reports. Besides the good, it describes the bad, telling how mistakes were made, and corrected. It tells how U.S. ships, as well as the enemy’s, were hit, and contains many exciting stories of how the men were rescued from the sea.
About the author
Lieutenant Oliver O. Jensen (April 16, 1914 - June 30, 2005) was a U.S. Naval Reserve officer, co-founder and later editor of American Heritage magazine, and author of many historical books and articles.
Born in Ithaca, New York, the son of Dorothea and Gerald E. Jensen, who taught English at Connecticut College, he earned a bachelor’s degree at Yale University in 1936 and began a career in advertising and radio. By 1940 he was on the staff of Life magazine as a writer.
During World War II, he served in the U.S. Naval Reserve on a destroyer in the Atlantic and an aircraft carrier in the Pacific. He left the Navy as a lieutenant and resumed his work at Life.
In 1954, along with Joseph J. Thorndike Jr. and James Parton, he launched American Heritage with historian Bruce Catton as editor. Jensen’s article “The Old Fall River Line,” about the era of side-wheel steamboat travel on Long Island Sound, led off the first issue. Within five years, the bimonthly magazine had grown from 10,000 subscribers to more than 300,000. Jensen was the magazine’s managing editor from 1956-1959 and editor from 1959-1976.
He also served as editorial director of Horizon magazine during the 1960s and was editorial director of the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (1969). From 1981-1983, he was chief of the division of prints and photographs at the Library of Congress.
Other books that Jensen wrote, co-wrote or edited include “The Revolt of American Women” (1952), “American Album” (1968) and “High Honor: Recollections by Men and Women of World War II Aviation” (1989).
He died 30 June 2005 aged 91.
