Capital Ships, D-Day and Naval Strategy

The research project on which this paper is based was driven by two motivations. The first was to answer the single question that I have most often been asked on staff rides to the Normandy beaches, namely, if carriers are so important to Naval and Joint operations, why were they absent on D-Day? The second, related, reason was to challenge a widespread misunderstanding of the role of capital ships and how they fit into naval and national strategy. Too often there has been a tendency to dismiss them as out-dated, expensive, excessively sophisticated – even ‘exquisite’ – and a diversion from th…