Combat Carriers

In 1939, Sam Sommers was an eighteen-year-old freshman at Harvard University, trying m make the adjustment from small-town life in Selma, Alabama, to the social hierarchy of the Ivy League. But on September 1 of that same year, Hitler began his blitzkrieg into Poland, and Sam Sommers's life would take an even more drastic turn. Combat Carriers: And My Brushes with History is Sommers's personal account of making his way through the Second World War, first as a member of Harvard's ROTC program and then as a deck and gunnery ensign aboard the USS Cowpens and USS Ticonderoga. Not specifically a history of the Pacific War, Combat Carriers provides a glimpse behind the events--what the war looked like as seen by a young man in the midst of it. While reams have been written about the Second World War from tactical and political perspectives, Sommers takes his reader through the excitement and fear of three years at sea on an aircraft carrier, up against one of the most dominant and terrifying naval powers in history. Not only do we get firsthand accounts of what it was like to face Japan's fabled kamikaze fighter pilots in battle, we experience the mixed feelings of seeing the human faces of Japanese prisoners-of-war. And we learn what it was like to live with the constant foreboding, almost expectation, that one day his luck would run out before he got back home. But we also see that returning home from war can be a lonely and disillusioning experience. For home was now a place where few had seen what he had seen, and where day-to-day concerns were of a far more mundane variety than what he had become accustomed to in battle. Ultimately, Combat Carriers is the story of the indefatigablespirit of man to live and adapt, as, inevitably, each chapter of history opens another.