Why do discussions of ships such as HMS Hood overlook that most of their service occurred in peace rather than war?
Short answerPopular and scholarly narratives concentrate on wars, often compressing the two interwar decades despite their importance to ship operations and naval aviation development.
NotesHood spent roughly nineteen of her twenty-one years in peace, yet discussion gravitates toward her short wartime career. Naval-aviation histories can devote only a fraction of a chapter to the 1920s and 1930s. Institutional development, experimentation, diplomacy, and routine deployments can vanish when history is organized around battles.