Tribal-class destroyers approaching a ship armed with 15-inch guns illustrate how close and aggressive some Second World War surface encounters could become. A destroyer was radically outgunned in that comparison, yet the geometry of a close action could still create the theoretical possibility of boarding. The passage carefully separates that possibility from an event that actually occurred. Older forms of close combat remained imaginable in twentieth-century surface warfare even though this opportunity never became an action.
Notable Point · 40:11-40:34
The unrealised possibility of Second World War boarding actions
A brief aside notes that destroyers sometimes closed with much heavier ships closely enough to make boarding imaginable, even though such opportunities did not become actual actions.