There is a suprising agreement amongst many historians, that the British Eastern Fleet was very lucky not to meet the Japanese raiders. The general consensus, is that the superior air power of the five aircraft carrier and four battlecruiser Japanese fleet would give it an immeasurable advantage over the British, who only had two modern aircraft carriers (the third little anti-submarine carrier Hermes hardly counting), and five slower battleships. There is particular concern about the four old Revenga class battleships, which were slow and had a relatively light anti-aircraft armament. Again, this is possibly an oversimplification of the source material.
The Japanese, and Americans, at this stage in the war needed to launch large numbers of aircraft to even find their targets, let alone to get successful attacks. Anybody who studies the Coral Sea or Midway battles, cannot help but be struck by how many aircraft on both sides got lost, attacked the wrong target, or ran out of fuel and crashed. On several occasions, Japanese and American fleets patrolled within a few hundred miles of each other, but failed to connect. By contrast, the British had three years of combat experience with radar, and radar equipped aircraft. The Albacore torpedo bombers on their carriers - which were still biplane models - were strong sturdy reliable aircraft, but not ones suitable to use against enemy fighter opposition in daytime. But they were perfect night strike aircraft, particularly when directed by radar. (Their Swordfish predecessors had achieved spectacular results when only a couple of dozen of them attacked the main Italian fleet base at Taranto night and during wartime. Contrast this with the relatively unsophisticated total effects achieved by a much larger numbers of Japanese planes operating at Pearl Harbor in the day time, when attacking a nation still at peace! The Japs may have sunk twice as many battleships, but the British took out the vital oil tanks and the seaplane base as well.)
Admiral Somerville, whose command of the Ark Royal and other carriers in Force H for the preceding two years made him by far the most experienced fast carrier task force commander at this stage of the war, planned to manoeuvre his fleet to strike the Japanese at night, and to be out of range during the day. His successful experiences using his radar equipped forces in the narrow Mediterranean made him fairly confident that this tactic could be used even more successfully in the vast spaces of the Indian Ocean. Excellent intelligence - as at Midway – meant that his incomplete fleet was waiting in ambush for the Japanese on April 1, 1942. Unfortunately, after a few days manoeuvring, they returned to base, assuming their intelligence had been incorrect. The Japanese arrived on April 5.
The two fleets manoeuvred over the next several days, both trying to achieve their preferred advantage. Neither got within range. Again, the implication by many historians is that even if Somerville had managed a night airstrike that damaged or destroyed some Japanese ships, he would then have been within range for a Japanese airstrike the next day. This assumes of course that Japanese damage control would be considerably better than at Midway. Or that the Japanese would be able to direct their attacks more efficiently than at Coral Sea or Midway. That they would be more efficient at taking on a concentrated fleet’s massed anti-aircraft firepower, than the Luftwaffe was in the Mediterranean. It assumes that the limited numbers of British fighters available would not have been able to be just as effective at breaking up attacks as they had been in the Mediterranean. (Note that the British carriers were using Sea Hurricane and Martlett – the US called them Wildcat - fighters, instead of the appalling Buffalo fighters that had been used at Pearl Harbour and Singapore and would still be used in numbers at Midway.) It assumes that the British practice of radar vectoring fighters out of the sun to attack from the best possible angle would be no more efficient than the American and Japanese approach of attacking the head on. (In 1945 off Japan the British would still need far smaller numbers of combat air patrol to achieve the same results as the Americans.) It assumed that the heavilly armoured British Carriers that survived every hit by both Luftwaffe and Kamikaze during the entire war, would sink as easily as Japanese or American carriers did in the Pacific. For some writers, it is even suggested that be lightly armoured Japanese Kongo class battle cruisers would have an advantage in attack over the slower British battle line on the defence (though there is no recorded example anywhere at anytime of a battlecruiser surviving a stand-up fight against a battleship).
In effect, it is assumed that everything the far more experienced and battle hardened British had done right in the Mediterranean previously would go wrong here, and everything that went wrong for the still learning Japanese in the Pacific over the next two years would go right here. Dubious.