Clear the Deck! showcases many never-before-published amazing and dramatic World War II-era, U.S. Navy battle damage, accident, and flight operations photographs gathered from the National Archives, National Museum of Naval Aviation, the Seattle’s Museum of Flight, and numerous other collections.

Aircraft carrier operations were a dangerous business, especially in wartime. When air operations are confined to a flight deck of 50,000 square feet (escort carrier size), it was one of the most hectic and hazardous places on earth.

Accidents were bound to happen. In wartime, the stakes were even higher as heavily loaded and armed combat planes went about their missions in unprecedented numbers. Commonly, there was no alternate airfield, no time to lose, and absolutely no room for error.

Clear the Deck! features U.S. Naval aircraft in action from Eugene Ely to the Brewster Buffalo, to the ultimate fighters of World War II – Corsairs, Hellcats, Tigercats, and Bearcats – many coming to grief on pitching, rolling carrier decks. The action begins in the 1920s, heats up during the carrier battles of 1942-44, and concludes in the waters off the Japanese home islands as damaged fighters and torpedo bombers come back aboard ship – often times with disastrous consequences.

The United States Air Force was late in developing a jet fighter, definitely behind Germany and the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, a small number of Lockheed P-80 Shooting Stars did make it to the European and Mediterranean theaters of operations before VE Day, although they did not see combat. After the war, the sheer size of the U.S. aviation industry guaranteed that American fighters would soon dominate the skies.

However, the state of the art was advancing so fast that many development efforts never resulted in production aircraft; concepts that had seemed reasonable, even ideal, at the time were quickly overcome by newer and better technology. In the United States alone, several dozen different fighter designs made it to the prototype stage during the 1950s and 1960s.

In this book, Dennis R. Jenkins and Tony R. Landis look at the variety of different jet-fighter concepts developed by the U.S. Air Force after World War II. These pages cover all experimental and prototype jet fighters that made it to the hardware stage – design studies and “paper airplanes” are not discussed since other current books are dedicated to those subjects. The rationale for developing each aircraft is covered, along with a discussion of the technology needed to build it, its flight-test program, and the reasons it was cancelled or ordered into production. The text is derived mostly from official Air Force documents, and all of the aircraft are well covered photographically, usually with seldom-seen images showing them as they appeared during their flight-test program.