When you think of the space race of the early 1960s you might recall images of astronauts having achieved amazing feats in space being plucked from the ocean by US Navy helicopters and landing on the decks of aircraft carriers in triumph. It is more than an average chance that those ships belonged to the Essex Class built in large numbers during World War Two, to take the war across the Pacific and right on into the Japanese home islands. Something I learnt from reading this book by respected naval historian and writer Leo Marriott, was that in the 1960s the Essex Class could possibly have played an even bigger and more significant role in the conquest off space, as mobile ship based launching sites for rockets. One proposal from 1961 called for an Essex-class aircraft carrier to be converted with the removal of the aft part of its flight deck and the erection of a launch gantry in its place to launch Atlas rockets into space. The logic of the suggestion was many fold, most of the best launch positions to achieve a stable orbit in space are not to be found on land and there were still plenty of unused Essex-class ships held in reserve around the United States in 1961. Sadly, this project never materialised.
It is fair to say that without aircraft carriers, and in particular the Essex Class, the United States Navy could not have won the Pacific War of 1941-1945. Their contribution to the fight was immense, as was their sacrifice. Their service, however, continued into the Korean and Vietnam conflicts and their contribution to the US Navy only ceased as recently as 1991 when the last of the class, USS Lexington, for nearly four decades in service as a training carrier, came to an end.

Leo Marriott has numerous naval books to his credit and this new one follows the tried and tested pattern for this series of books with a wealth of rare photographs culled from a variety of national archives and each given a full description. The author’s extensive knowledge of the subject is displayed in the text with full descriptions of the development, construction and deployment of the Essex-class vessels. Today dotted around the United States are four survivors of the class now serving as museum ships: USS Lexington at Corpus Christi in Texas, USS Hornet at Alameda in California, USS Intrepid in the heart of the bustling metropolis of New York and USS Yorktown in Charleston in South Carolina.

This is an excellent well produced book and one that despite the well-trod nature of the subject matter has something new to give to both new and older readers.