Books - History, Post-WWII

Clashes: Air Combat Over North Vietnam 1965-1972. Michel, Marshall L. Annapolis MD USA: Naval Institute Press, 1997. Strengths and weaknesses of hardware and software, training successes and failures, and lots of statistics on US and North Vietnamese strategic and tactical air operations and defenses, but also personalized by narrations of engagements from the aviators who flew the missions. Plenty of detail on the aircraft, and also the missiles and guns used by both sides both in the air and from the ground, as well as the various radar and infrared systems on which they depended. An excellent blend of the technical and personal.
Rings Of Supersonic Steel: Air Defenses Of The United States Army 1950-1979. Morgan, Mark L. and Berhow, Mark A. Bodega Bay CA USA: Fort McArthur Military Press, 2002. With the advent of the cold war, the United States replaced its ground-based antiaircraft artillery gun shield with the new technology of surface-to-air intercept missiles. This book is a technical overview of the missiles - primarily the Nike family - and emplacements of this generation of defenses, that encircled the nation's important government, military and industrial locations. It includes a detailed catalog of all of the missile sites - razed, deteriorating, and preserved.
Rolling Thunder: Jet Combat From World War II To The Gulf War. Rendall, Ivan, New York: Dell, 1997. Rendall provides the background on the aerial combat that developed during WWI and the men and machines that carried it out according to the new thories that embraced it, and follows the advances and refinements in fighting aircraft through the interwar years. One development turing that hiatus from world war was, of course, the pioneering work in Europe and the US of practical jet turbine propulsion and its adaptation to aviation. By the end of WWII, Germany, Britain and the US had still fairly experimental jet combat aircraft (the Germans having had the most combat experience with theirs), and within a few years much progress would be made, with the first jet-on-jet fighter combat coming in the Korean conflict of the early 1950s. The author follows that first decade of the jet warbirds, and gives the reader a glimpse of some of the experimental rocket planes that, along with improvements in the military jets, enabled speeds to exceed that of sound – eventually by multiples of it. He devotes a great deal of attention to the advances not only in propulsion and airframe design, but two further developments: the eventual dominance of air-to-air missiles over guns and the tremendous progress of computing power that led to the electronic three-dimensional battlefields that, beginning in Vietnam and being honed in the Middle East conflicts of the 1970s, became the norm by the end of the 20th century.
US Strategic and Defensive Missile Systems 1950-2004. Berhow, Mark A. New York: Osprey Publishing, 2005. "The United States and the Soviet Union developed missile systems capable of delivering conventional and nuclear explosives against enemy massed bomber formations in the air, and of delivering retaliatory nuclear payloads against ground targets located on distant continents. The missile systems played both a defensive role, and a potential offensive role, which was parlayed to the public as deterrence against attack by the rival bloc. This title provides a detailed overview of the fixed-launch-site strategic missile systems of the United States."

Book Categories

Home

Odds...