Force Z...RSRD

Before the destruction of Force Z no battleship had been sunk while under weigh by aircraft after well over two years of intensive combat. So it's not too unreasonable to assume that at the time, the risk of operating without fighter cover appeared acceptable.

Indeed, aircraft in the Med, the Atlantic and the North Sea (including the Barents and Norwegian Sea's) had been remarkably unsuccessful at sinking large warships that had freedom to maneuver. Even Bismarck was only winged and needed to be finished off with guns and surface launched torpedoes. This was the reality of air power as seen at the Admiralty and if they were ultimately wrong, they had some 27-months of combat experience that indicated otherwise.

With anything to do with Singapore or the Malaysian Campaign, take everything WCS wrote with a very large grain of salt, as PM he had a large number of cabinet and CIGS documents classified under the 100-year law in the interest of "national security" and many will not be available until 2043 or so. Winston was remarkably good at spinning the narrative so he would be blameless. A good single volume on Force Z is Battleship by Martin Middlebrook.

Poor coordination more than anything else prevented an air umbrella, what would soon be known as ground-based CAP; the destroyers were still picking survivors out of the water when a flight of Australian Buffalo's arrived over the scene of the disaster.