Nagumo's leadership has been characterized by Andrew Boyd as rigid and unimaginative, and contributed to the escape of the British Eastern Fleet.

The fleet withdrew first to Java and, following the fall of Singapore, to Trincomalee, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). He realised faster than most that one needed air support for Naval maneuvers now, that his Air Force and especially Fleet Air Arm had no real answer to the Japanese modern Aircraft.The story of the British Eastern Fleet, which operated in the Indian Ocean against Japan, has rarely been told.

The book is quite broad in its coverage, including setting the scene as to why the British would find themselves ill equipped for modern carrier warfare in the Indian Ocean in 1942. To keep it supplied with arms and ammunition and transport strained the capacity of the Bangkok-Rangoon railway to its limits, and beyond. Force A, including its two aircraft carriers, Indomitable and Formidable, retired to Bombay, [3] and Somerville regularly deployed a fast carrier force to the central Indian Ocean over the next six months, during which he operated from or near Ceylon for nearly half that time. Although it was the largest fleet deployed by the Royal Navy prior to 1945 and played a vital part in the theatre it was sent to protect, it has no place in the popular consciousness of the naval history of the Second World War.The Darkest Hour Volume 2 includes extensive tables detailing the composition of the Japanese air attacks and is illustrated with photographs and with colour artworks of the ships and aircraft involved. The reserve aircraft park at Royal Naval Air Station Bankstown, HMS NABBERLEY at Sydney, New South Wales. For them, too, supply became the overriding military problem—without the corresponding capacity of their opponents to meet it. He was initially located at Basra, in Mandatory Iraq, then later at HMS Juffair in Bahrain from 1901 to 1972. Naval operations against the Japanese weakened defenses after Leyte were described by Admiral Cunningham's biographer as being "less about defeating Japan than preparing the Royal Navy for the future.

USN and RN submarines picked them off as they came, sometimes at the harbour gates where they had loaded. Late on 5 April, FECB decrypted a JN 25B message containing Nagumo's planned movement on 6 April, but this did not aid Somerville as the transmission to the fleet was garbled.This threat became a reality during the Indian Ocean raid when an overwhelming Japanese naval force operated in the eastern Indian Ocean, sinking an aircraft carrier and other warships, and disrupting freight traffic along the Indian east coast.