The Kaiser's
lying letter to Lord Tweedmouth in 1908 was the last straw that broke
King George's little patience with the German plotters headed by Grand
Admiral von Tirpitz. "What," he exclaimed, "would the Kaiser say, if
the King wrote a letter like that to Tirpitz?"
The chief kinds of fighting craft in the Grand Fleet can be told off on
the fingers of one hand. First, the Battleships and Battle Cruisers.
These are to our own fleets what ships-of-the-line-of-battle were to
Nelson's, that is, they are the biggest and strongest, with the biggest
and strongest guns and the thickest armour. The battle cruiser is
faster than the battleship, and therefore not so strong; because to be
faster you must thin your heavy armour to let you put in bigger
engines. All the ships of this first kind were either Dreadnoughts or
super-Dreadnoughts; that is, they were classed according to whether
they had been built during the five years after the _Dreadnought_
(1905-10), or during the five years just before the war (1910-14).
Each year there had been great improvements, till ships like the _Queen
Elizabeth_ had eight gigantic guns throwing shells that weighed nearly
a ton each and that could be dropped on an enemy twenty miles away.
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