How the Royal Navy measured Taranto's success

British accounts differ over whether five or six battleships should be counted at Taranto. Andrea Doria was not fully commissioned, and the British quickly recognized that Giulio Cesare would be especially difficult to hit. Those points offer one explanation for Cunningham's later reference to five ships. Cunningham also wrote that twenty carrier aircraft in six and a half hours inflicted more damage than the German High Seas Fleet suffered at Jutland. His comparison shows how carrier aircraft had developed from a means of pressuring an enemy fleet into a weapon able to strike the battle line directly.