I would like to preface by saying I was thinking of Hood for the 'No Dry-Dock,' but Warspite was also severely damaged during Anti-Air operations off of Crete, during the German invasion, to the point she had to be sailed to Bremerton Naval Yard for repairs, like CD's Hood, kind of.
Hood's loss was due to no fault of contemporary design but rather because no-one ever thought to transfer the flagship position to another vessel just once to complete her modernization, which would have removed her torpedo tubes and prevented them from detonating and setting off the chain reaction which sunk the ship.
Hood-ipedia said:
A huge jet of flame burst out of
Hood from the vicinity of the mainmast,
[Note 1] followed by a devastating magazine explosion that destroyed the aft part of the ship. This explosion broke the back of
Hood, and the last sight of the ship, which sank in only three minutes, was her bow, nearly vertical in the water.
[66]
We've known that it was a Mag Det since 2001.
Factories building civilian goods don't contribute to a country's war potential, active military factories an active forces and equipment in service are what make up a nation's war potential.
The point I was making was that before war production really got moving, the rate of construction for a US warships was months to a year, for smaller craft. By the middle of the war, that rate has increased to several hulls a month, all combat ready. Think of it like a physics lesson. Potential energy, versus kinetic energy.
While the actual strategic import of Britain's SEA positions can certainly not be called into question, the fact remains that the Admiralty did not consider the theater important enough to send significant reinforcements until 1944. As for the IJN, they were far from the "Juggernaut" that some claim it to be. The only impressive part of the Japanese navy was their early pioneering of the Carrier fleet doctrine, and their early development into naval fighters which gave them a comfortable lead in that department until around 1943. That said, the Zero's superiority was not necessarily something that could always be counted on, as despite outclassing the Wildcat fighters the US used up until 1943 when they were replaced in service by the Hellcat, the US Navy still decisively won the Battle of Midway in 1942 by sinking all present Japanese carriers, which is part of why I say that had the war not been raging in Europe, though Force Z of course would likely still have been lost, the Royal Navy with a significant force would have been able to prevent themselves being forced out of the theater entirely.
Battle of the Java Sea - Wikipedia
And, the USN merely damaged the carriers. All four, Akagi, Kaga, Hiryu, and Soryu, were all scuttled after the fact. Besides, it wasn't just fighter craft that won the day.
The only success of Taranto was that it showed that an attack by air *was* a viable option, which is part of what led the Japanese to go through with Pearl Harbor. And like Pearl Harbor, the attack was ultimately inconsequential - only one of the RMs ships was actually sunk, the rest were only damaged, and the attack utterly failed to stop Axis convoys moving to North Africa, and did nothing to stop the RM from sortieing out its capital ships.
Pearl Harbor losses said:
4 battleships sunk
4 battleships damaged
2 other ships sunk
[nb 2]
3 cruisers damaged
[nb 3]
3 destroyers damaged
3 other ships damaged
188 aircraft destroyed
159
[3] aircraft damaged
2,403 killed
1,178 wounded
Doesn't seem inconsequential to me.
Italian casualties at Taranto said:
59 killed
600 wounded
1 battleship lost
2 battleships heavily damaged
1 heavy cruiser slightly damaged
2 destroyers slightly damaged
2 aircraft destroyed on the ground
And that was with only one carrier.
The B-25 Mitchell raid on Tokyo was also a
strategic failure. Sure, the RM rebounded quickly, but these losses were ones that Inigo Campioni, and Mussolini, could ill afford. But. most of all, it was something considered
impossible. Consider how that felt for the average British citizen, hiding in Underground tunnels because the German Air Force is busy knocking down your neighborhood. If they can do the impossible
there, then maybe the RAF here has a chance.
