The mighty guns of the behemoth dreadnoughts that Britain had invested so many billions in building, and their tens of thousands of sailors, were useless against the real naval threat from Germany, which turned out to be a weapon that neither side had previously paid much attention to, the submarine. (Various pre-1914 British admirals had grumbled that submarines were “un-English,” or “the weapon of cowards who refused to fight like men on the surface,” or “an underhanded method of attack”; one had called for captured submarine crews to be hanged as pirates.) Germany’s small but
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