During the 1920s, the navies of Britain, the United States and Japan built a series of rapidly improved aircraft carriers. At the same time, however, development of the warplanes they carried was limited by the essential requirement to alight from and subsequently land on a heaving flight deck at sea. Consequently, carrier aircraft were almost invariably biplanes with the added weight of tail hooks and other modifications required for deck landings. Given those factors, the naval powers resigned themselves to fielding carrier planes that were inferior to their land-based counterparts.
During the 1930s, however, the availability
