Why 100 Martlets would have mattered

The discussion rejects the idea that British naval aircraft were uniformly poor in isolation. It identifies a missing intermediate generation caused by the timing of the war and decisions made in 1939. That gap forces comparisons between older British types and newer foreign fighters rather than like-for-like designs. An early supply of one hundred Martlets would therefore have been disproportionately valuable, giving the Fleet Air Arm a modern single-seat fighter while later British aircraft matured. The number of Fulmar aces also shows that British carrier pilots extracted considerable combat value from the aircraft they actually had.