Britain in 1939 could recall experienced officers such as Kennedy and draw on naval reservists, merchant sailors, and a large merchant marine, resources that made rapid conversion viable at all. Rawalpindi had nevertheless been taken up in August and sent on patrol in September because the Royal Navy lacked enough cruisers for its obligations. The shortage is connected here to a treaty system intended to preserve peace and to the time required to restart large-scale warship construction once the system failed. The available C- and D-class cruisers might not have survived the same encounter either, although their torpedoes could have imposed greater risk on the German ships. Merchant conversions were a strained response to force shortages rather than a safe substitute for purpose-designed combatants.
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The limits of merchant conversion in a major war
Rawalpindi shows why merchant conversion depended on deep reserves of trained people and could not substitute for building enough purpose-designed warships.