Thank you to Amberley Publishing and the hardworking duo of John Noack and Dave Morrisette for providing this book to enjoy and review!

Martin Bowman has earned an excellent reputation as an aviation historian. Combat Carriers continues this legacy with a wonderful series of chapters detailing important events related to carrier aviation since the start of World War II.

The table of contents is paraphrased below:

Once upon a time there was a guy named Rob Ferreira and he was a TreadHead. Unfortunately, unlike most TreadHeads, Rob just didn’t enjoy building a military vehicle and weathering it. Nope that was too easy. What Rob liked to do was take a military vehicle to it’s final resting place. Be it as a monument on display in the open, an old forgotten wreck sitting in some wooded area all but forgotten about, a vehicle destroyed by some catastrophe, or a vehicle sitting in a vehicle track park in Afghanistan.

This last scenario is what actually got the engine compartment started. Rob wanted to create more than one vehicle with this empty engine bay. He chummed up to his friend Steve Reid of Celticwerks and after much back door shenanigans and blacks ops dealings there was some magical agreement that got Rob to do the masters and Steve to create the molds for the rest of us lowly TreadHeads to benefit from this teaming.

The line of Supermarine racers, designed to attack and eventually acquire the Schneider Trophy for Seaplanes, actually began with the S.4, a mid-wing cantilever monoplane with amazing aerodynamic form for its time, 1925. This floatplane racer was sent to the United States for the eighth Schneider Cup races at Baltimore, where it suffered a number of mishaps before it finally was wrecked when the pilot lost control, fortunately with no injuries. The race was won by Lt. Jimmy Doolittle, with the backup Gloster III placing second.