Mediterranean sailing craft still carried supplies during the Second World War, complicating neat divisions between the age of sail and modern naval warfare. Clarke recounts a Tribal-class destroyer's encounter with an engineless sailing vessel presented as a German hospital ship and suspected of another use. Its officers had to work out how to board without fouling the rig or damaging a vessel whose hospital status made damage especially troublesome. Their problem required adapting older seamanship to a destroyer with a different layout. He uses the Altmark incident as a separate example of operational and diplomatic risk, distinguishing its location inside a Norwegian fjord as internal waters.
Notable Point · 1:45:23-1:48:15
Sailing ships created modern wartime boarding problems
Second World War destroyer crews still encountered sailing supply and hospital ships, forcing them to improvise boarding methods across supposedly separate technological eras.