Having given us splendid craft to fight on and under the sea, I wish you would take up the provision of an air fleet. There is going to be a great development of air navigation in the future and all nations will be at it. With our resources and wealth we can take and keep the lead if we like. As a modest programme to start with we might aim at 100 air battleships and 400 air cruisers: all on the “lighter than air” principle. I met a young fellow who had been in the Jutland action and asked him how the 15-inch guns did. “Splendidly,” he said--“They did nearly all the real execution.” I hear the Germans have got 17-inch guns which is what I anticipated, but they won’t get ahead of us in that time tho’ we can’t yet snuff out their Zepps, thanks to you know who. Yours sincerely, (Signed) S. EARDLEY WILMOT. _Note._--More than a year before I got this letter I had got a 20-inch gun ready to be built for a new type of Battle Cruiser! [Illustration: AGED 19. LIEUTENANT. In temporary command of “Coromandel” in China.] THE SUBMARINE MINE As quite a young Lieutenant, with extraordinary impudence I told the then First Sea Lord of the Admiralty that the Hertz German Submarine Mine, which I had seen a few days before in Kiel Harbour, would so far revolutionise sea warfare as possibly to prevent one fleet pursuing another, by the Fleet that was flying dropping submarine mines in its wake; and certainly that sudden sea operations of the old Nelsonic type would seriously be interfered with. He very good humouredly sent me away as a young desperado, as he remembered that I had been a lunatic in prophesying the doom of masts and sails, which were still then magnificently supreme, and the despised engineer yet hiding his diminished head had to keep the smell of oily oakum away from the noses of the Lords of the ship. That same Hertz mine in all its essentials remains still “The King of Mines,” and if only in those years immediately preceding the war we had manufactured none else, instead of trying to improve on it, we should have bagged no end of big game. But as it was, our mines were squibs; the enemy’s ship always steamed away and got into harbour, while ours always went down plump. The Policy of the Submarine Mine favoured us, but our authorities couldn’t see it. I printed in three kinds of type: (1) Huge capitals; (2) Italics; (3) big Roman block letters the following words, submitted to the authorities very early in the war-- “Sow the North Sea with Mines on such a huge scale that Naval Operations in it become utterly impossible.” _So you nip into the Baltic with the British Fleet._