Dorsetshire and Cornwall were caught operating alone during the Indian Ocean raid, a predicament compared with that of Prince of Wales and Repulse. Independent operation was sometimes unavoidable, but the Counties had not been designed around this kind of threat. Their original design assumptions had become outdated. The discussion also separates prophetic interwar claims about air power from the specific carrier-aircraft threat that operational experience later made concrete. Those theorists more often imagined massed bombers destroying cities with chemical or biological payloads, the kind of effect nuclear weapons later offered, than carrier aircraft finding isolated cruisers at sea.
Chapter · 36:34-39:27
Dorsetshire and Cornwall in the Indian Ocean raid
The loss of Dorsetshire and Cornwall showed how ships conceived for an earlier war were exposed when caught alone by modern air power.