“ Nothing can stop an enemy from picking wireless messages out of the free air - and nothing did. ”
[Blinker] Hall, operating on the quaint theory that the Navy might be needed for battle and that whatever increased the ship's efficiency was a criterion for change, had continued trampling on the toes of orthodoxy.
~ Barbara Tuchman
The fleet sailed to its war base in the North Sea, headed not so much for some rendezvous with glory as for rendezvous with discretion.
No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision.