OD used air search to set up a night interception

Blue spread submarines toward Malta and ordered Courageous to search up to eighty miles while maintaining visual contact with the battlecruiser Revenge. Once the convoy was located, aircraft and submarines were to shadow it and help the faster force avoid a superior opponent in daylight. The intended solution was a night attack, drawing on the lesson of Jutland that darkness could help a weaker force escape or reverse a numerical disadvantage. The exercise produced complicated night encounters involving battlecruisers and destroyers between 00:30 and 02:20. Its conclusions called for continued heavy-ship night training and a reliable system of recognition signals, because tactical aggression was useless if formations could not identify one another after dark.