Readings in American Naval Aviation

The First Yale Unit tells the story of 29 young men, most of them college students at Yale University, who while World War I was being fought in Europe, realized it was only a matter of time before it would touch America, and of their own initiative taught themselves to fly the dangerous aircraft of the time; when the United States entered the war, they offered their services to the Navy: not only did they prove to be an exceptional group of pilots, three of them giving their lives, but in many ways the Yale Unit laid the foundation of U. S. Naval aviation. The book, published seven years after the war, draws on a deep array of primary sources and has thus preserved their story for posterity.

[ 9/11/13: 679 pages of print
— 50 webpages, 132 photographs ]

At the end of World War II, the Navy's Aviation History Unit was tasked by the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations (Air) to tell the story of The Navy's Air War. The result is a dense, detailed book on every facet of American naval aviation in the Second World War: Pearl Harbor of course, then the forces and organization on hand at the beginning of the war, the war in the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, and especially the Pacific; and several interesting chapters on the logistics behind it all.

[ 9/11/14: 415 pages of print
— 38 webpages, 55 photographs, 3 maps ]

Archibald D. Turnbull and Clifford L. Lord's History of United States Naval Aviation, though not an official Navy publication, is about as close as you can get, published in 1949 by two high-ranking naval officers who had been respectively Deputy Director of Naval Records and History, and Head of the Naval Aviation History Unit. The authors trace the history of the Navy's air arm from the earliest heroic and tentative days thru the end of World War II, and make the case for naval aviation independent of any unified air force such as had just been established as the third major arm of the American military.

[ 5/26/15: 331 pages of print
— 31 webpages, 46 photographs ]

Finally, this small item:

"John Rodgers' Flight to Hawaii", an official Navy account of the first attempted flight from the American mainland — a landmark in naval aviation.