All sorts of wars: British naval thinking and technology in the Second world war

It is a truism that nations rarely, if ever, go to war in quite the way in which they have contemplated fighting it. The German Navy in 1939, for instance, fell a long way short, in hulls alone, of that needed – and indeed promised – by the national leadership for a conflict against the British Empire. But neither was the latter ready in all respects for any conflict, far less the one that ensued.