Quote Originally Posted by English assassin
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Ah yes. Sorry for going OT but I couldn't resist laying that out. Presumably Pannonnian had in mind (when Cunningham was being urged to call off the evalucation in light of the number of ships being attacked from the air):

" It takes the Navy three years to build a new ship. It would take three hundred years to build a new tradition."

Cunningham gets my vote as Most Nelsonian Admiral of WW11 anyway.
That's what I had in mind, and also when Churchill was told that the Hood was lost, he commented that there was no point in having a navy if one wasn't prepared to use them and lose them. That was the mistake of the German and Italian navies, who kept their ships safe and hence useless in harbour.