Prewar exercises encouraged pilots to chase prestigious capital ships because simulated attackers did not pay the real cost of pressing home an attack. Wartime aircrews instead often targeted exposed destroyers on a task group's edge, revealing that the Tribal's low-angle 4.7-inch battery rested on a false positive. A German carrier with dive bombers could therefore push Britain toward a 4.5-inch dual-purpose mount or an earlier replacement of the X mount with twin 4-inch guns. The wartime Legion arrangement - four twin 4-inch mounts - shows that a full anti-aircraft destroyer was technically plausible. Although each 4-inch shell had less surface-hit power, the weapon's higher rate of fire could compensate while greatly improving air defence.
Notable Point · 52:42-55:50
Exercise assumptions hid the Tribal's air-defence weakness
A visible German dive-bomber force exposes the exercise bias behind the Tribal's low-angle guns and supports an earlier dual-purpose or anti-aircraft variant.