Rapid wartime expansion erodes institutional memory

The later Channel Dash illustrates the Royal Navy's institutional-memory problem. Prewar exercises had produced relevant interception ideas, but wartime promotion and worldwide deployment dispersed the people who understood them. Rapid expansion also created new staffs faster than experience could be transferred into them. Knowledge that was not clearly documented and widely circulated could therefore vanish from the organizations that needed it, leaving veterans and senior ratings to reconstruct it later. After the war, the Navy spent roughly eighteen months to two years finding people who still held this knowledge, sometimes delaying their retirement so it could be recovered.