Let me tell you a story about World War 2. In 1940, before the entry of the U.S. and the USSR into the war, Britain was fighting alone against Germany and Italy. Despite being massively outnumbered and outgunned, the British managed to pull off a spectacular naval victory, using innovative new technology. They sent the HMS Illustrious, an aircraft carrier, to attack the Italian fleet in its harbor at Taranto.
The British aircraft disabled three Italian battleships and several other ships, without the Italian navy even seeing their opponents’ ships, much less having a chance to fight back.
But that’s just the prelude to my story, which is not about a British victory, but a British defeat. Just a little over a year after the Battle of Taranto, Winston Churchill sent the battleship HMS Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser HMS Repulse to deter Japan from attacking Singapore. Despite their own crushing victory at Taranto,
the British military leadership was skeptical that battleships moving under their own power at sea could be taken down by air attack alone. They placed their faith in the power of zigzag movement and anti-aircraft guns to deter attacking planes.
This was foolish. Japanese torpedo bombers found and sank the Prince of Wales and the Repulse quite easily. Here is an aerial photo of the British warships, taken from the cockpit of a Japanese plane, desperately trying to evade their doom:
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