The Navy's Air War
A Mission Completed
by
the Aviation History Unit OP‑519B, DCNO (Air)

Edited by
A. R. Buchanan
Lieutenant, USNR

The Book and its Editor

The Navy's Air War, transcribed onsite in its entirety, was an official publication of the United States Navy, and tells a carefully circumscribed history of U. S. naval aviation in World War II.

▸ The "Chronology", by the way, is a particularly good timeline of Atlantic and Pacific naval air operations during the war.

The true purpose of the book seems to have been to bolster the Navy's argument against folding her aviation into any unified military aviation force on the horizon. In 1947, the year following the book's publication, the United States Air Force was established as a separate arm of the armed forces: but naval aviation did by and large preserve its independence.

As for the book's editor, here's what I can tell you with something like certainty about him, pieced together from scant details scattered over the Web: Albert Russell Buchanan was born in 1906 — or just maybe 1905 — probably in Yuma, AZ, and died in 2001, very likely in Menlo Park, CA. A 1927 graduate of Stanford University, he earned his Master's there the following year, and his PhD, also at Stanford, in 1935: both degrees in history. The following year he was named a Professor of History at the University of California at Santa Barbara and held the position until his retirement in 1973. He is best known, not for this book, but for three others in his later career: David S. Terry of California: Dueling Judge (The Huntington Library, San Marino, 1956); The United States and World War II (2 vols., Harper & Row, 1964); and Black Americans in World War II (Clio Books, Santa Barbara, 1977).

He was married to Mary Ethel O'Keefe (b. 1901 in Menlo Park, Stanford graduate 1921, d. 2000 also in Menlo Park); they had three children.

Contents

p. vii Illustrations

These illustrations, grouped as a separate section, will be found following page 112

These illustrations, grouped as a separate section, will be found following page 336

[These maps are not listed in the book's table of contents:]

Technical Details

Edition Used

The edition transcribed here is that of my own hard copy: marked simply "First Edition", with no date. Published by "Harper & Brothers Publishers, New York and London", the book bears no copyright notice — properly, since it is an official report of the United States Navy and thus in the public domain; details here on the copyright law involved.

Illustrations

The illustrations fall in two groups: 55 black-and‑white photographs placed on their own high-quality glossy pages bound in two signatures, as noted in the book's own table of contents above; and 3 maps (two of them serving as endpapers: almost illegibly signed, even in my original hard copy, by A. [Adrian] O. Van Wyen, Lt. USNR). I've taken advantage of the flexibility offered by the Web to redistribute them to appropriate places in the text.

Although the title page of the book states that it is "Illustrated with official U. S. Navy Photographs", the specific sources of the individual photographs are not given in the book. One of them is an exception, since it has to be a Japanese photograph: it shows planes taking off from a Japanese carrier on December 7, 1941.

Much of the book, especially the chapters dealing with the Pacific campaigns, would have benefited from additional detail maps.

Pagination and Local Links

For citation and indexing purposes, the pagination is shown in the right margin of the text at the page turns (like at the end of this line); p57  these are also local anchors. Sticklers for total accuracy will of course find the anchor at its exact place in the sourcecode.

In addition, I've inserted a number of other local anchors: whatever links might be required to accommodate the author's own cross-references, as well as a few others for my own purposes. If in turn you have a website and would like to target a link to some specific passage of the text, please let me know: I'll be glad to insert a local anchor there as well.

Proofreading

As almost always, I retyped the text by hand rather than scanning it — not only to minimize errors prior to proofreading, but as an opportunity for me to become intimately familiar with the work, an exercise I heartily recommend: Qui scribit, bis legit. (Well-meaning attempts to get me to scan text, if success­ful, would merely turn me into some kind of machine: gambit declined.)

My transcription has been minutely proofread. In the table of contents above, the sections are shown on blue backgrounds, indicating that I believe the text of them to be completely errorfree; a red background would mean that the page had not been proofread. As elsewhere onsite, the header bar at the top of each chapter's webpage will remind you with the same color scheme.

The printed book was very well proofread. The inevitable typographical errors were few, and all trivial: I marked them with a dotted underscore like this: as elsewhere on my site, glide your cursor over the underscored words to read what was actually printed. Conversions of measurements to metric units are given by a similar underscore, e.g., 10 miles. Where we read "miles" without qualification, I usually assumed them to be statute miles, although in fact they're often meant to be nautical miles, in which case you'll remember that 1 nautical mile = 1.15 statute: add ⅙ to my conversion. The book itself gives no indications.

A number of odd spellings, curious turns of phrase, etc. have been marked <!‑‑ sic  in the sourcecode, just to confirm that they were checked. They are also very few.

Any over­looked mistakes, please drop me a line, of course: especially if you have a copy of the printed book in front of you.

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The icon I use to indicate this subsite is my tinted version of one of the book's illustrations, the PV‑1 Ventura patrol bomber from the "Plane Types" section of the second signature of photographs.

Images with borders lead to more information. The thicker the border, the more information. (Details here.)
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