Karel Doorman learned to fly and became one of the Royal Netherlands Navy's leading advocates for naval aviation before injury ended his own flying. The later escort carrier HNLMS Karel Doorman carried that connection into his institutional legacy. The prewar Dutch battlecruiser effort also opens a counterfactual about building an aircraft carrier for the East Indies instead. A battleship's armor, guns, and other systems required extensive foreign support, while a carrier hull may have been closer to Dutch shipbuilding capabilities. This is a procurement question rather than a claim that one carrier would have solved ABDA's operational problems.
Notable Point · 34:05-35:34
Doorman, Dutch naval aviation, and an East Indies carrier
Doorman's aviation advocacy opens a counterfactual about whether the Netherlands could have built a domestic carrier more readily than a battlecruiser.