overview of life on a U.S. Navy aircraft Essex class carrier in the Pacific during World War II.
The aircraft carrier is the dramatic new naval vessel of this war. Its development has revolutionized the techniques of naval strategy. Equipped with aircraft carriers, two huge task forces—one American and one Japanese—have twice fought major sea battles in this war without a ship on either side ever firing a gun.

Lt. Com. Max Miller of the United States Naval Reserve, in peacetime a writer of considerable repute, has here set down the whole feel of life at sea on one of the great American aircraft carriers on task-force duty. The carrier is any carrier. The battle is any battle. Here is the way the men of the carrier think and feel, from the moment of leaving port, through the long days of zigzagging into enemy waters, the mounting tension as the moment of battle draws near, the furious hours of attack, the losses and the triumph, the return homeward. Here, on duty and at play, are the pilots and gunners, the plane-handlers and the ammunition passers, the flight officers and the chaplains—all the hundreds and hundreds of young Americans who work and fight the carrier, key weapon in modern ocean warfare.

The picture is authentic. Lt. Com. Miller spent many weeks at sea gathering this material, soaking up these impressions. He served in the navy in the last war and subsequently spent many years as a newspaperman in San Diego, California, covering the waterfront of this great naval base.