Why did Britain rarely mass its carriers early in the war?

Why did the Royal Navy not operate carriers in groups large enough to mass more than one hundred aircraft?

It planned multi-carrier operations, but wartime losses and global commitments scattered a limited carrier force across too many tasks.

The Royal Navy entered the war with a developed doctrine for multiple carriers supporting one another. The gap lay in available hulls, not in an inability to understand concentrated naval air power. Losses and worldwide commitments repeatedly pulled individual carriers to the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and other theaters. Ships prepared to operate in groups therefore spent much of the early war carrying out isolated tasks.