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The future, as we British seem to see it, is an avenue of Dreadnoughts and Super-Dreadnoughts and Super-Super-Dreadnoughts, getting bigger and bigger in a kind of inverted perspective. But the ascendancy of fleets of great battleships in naval warfare, like the phase of huge conscript armies upon land, draws to its close.
Dreadnoughts and super-dreadnoughts are doomed, because they no longer can be safe at sea from the submarine nor find safety in harbors. "The introduction of vessels that swim under water," he said, "has in my opinion entirely done away with the utility of the ships that swim on top of the water.
Things were all very well for her before the days of wireless telegraphy, of aeroplanes and airships, of super-dreadnoughts, and cruisers with the speed of express trains. She was too far away to be concerned in European turmoils. To-day science is annihilating distance.
We had his pictures pasted all over our training quarters along with those of the other super-dreadnoughts from the colleges that break into literature, and I imagine that if he had suddenly appeared back in Jonesville we should have put our heads right down and kow-towed until he gave us permission to get up. And here we were, sitting in the same café with him.
The guns themselves are good enough, but the carriages allow them an elevation of only ten percent against a thirty percent elevation that is possible for guns of equal calibre on our battleships, which means that our twelve-inch guns outrange yours by a couple of miles simply because we can fire them at a higher angle." "You mean that one of your super-dreadnoughts " "Exactly.
I asked Admiral Allyn how the American fleet compared with the Germans in number of ships. He shook his head. "We are far behind them. Nine years ago, in 1912, we stood next to Great Britain in naval strength; but since then we have steadily fallen back. Germany has a dozen super-dreadnoughts, ships of over 30,000 tons, while we have six.
One of our super-dreadnoughts can lie off Rockaway Beach and drop shells from her twelve-inch guns into Union Square, and the twelve-inch guns of your harbour forts, handicapped by their stupid carriages, could never touch her."
There can be nothing better than an armed truce; and an armed truce, with super-dreadnoughts costing from four to eight times what they did before the war, is fatal to any programme of retrenchment and reform.
Von Spee and his men fought as bravely and as skilfully as Cradock and his; and the war for command of the sea went against the Germans because while the Germans were building pre-Dreadnoughts and casting 8-inch guns, we were building Dreadnoughts and casting 10 or 12-inch guns; and while they were constructing their Dreadnoughts, we were building super-Dreadnoughts with 13.5 and 15-inch guns.
We cannot contemplate throwing an army of a million British conscripts on to the North-West Frontier of India, and a fleet of Super-Dreadnoughts will be ineffective either in Thibet or the Baltic shallows. All our present stuff, indeed, will be on the scrap-heap then. What will not be on the scrap-heap will be such enterprise and special science and inventive power as we have got together.
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