[Admiral Von Gerlach]

Indeed. It was a matter of Honour among the Navy of that time to restore the aging BB's even tho many realized the day of the big gun battleship was over.... they still served vital functions in the fleet, but were no longer the sole queens of the waves..the flat tops and the flat top based task force had replaced them. Still, I heard that there was no thought of not restoring the ships bombed and torpedoed at Pearl, and they all were except for the Arizona. It was an amazing shock to the Fleet to suffer the same fate of the Italian fleet at Taranto, even tho in the annual naval games many times the attack on "home base" fleets was seen, both in the table top battles at Annapolis and the Naval War College and the annual War Games or Fleet Problems at sea. I still can feel the deep shock that shook tne entire senior Naval establishment as i study or hear of those days, ...in some ways it broke open the deeply fossilized top command structure that was, in a way similar to the senior IJN fleet brass hats, still dominated in the early 40's by the Big Gun Big Fleet Naval ideal.

It was a rapid shift to a projection of force based on indiivudal pilots carrying relatively small weapons loads...but acting in concert and in sufficient numbers to sink any major fleet unit....and to the use of unrestricted submarine warfare that not even the IJN leaders would countenance until it was too late.