36, BERKELEY SQUARE, LONDON, _July 11th, 1917_. MY DEAR PRIME MINISTER, In putting before your urgent notice the following two propositions, I have consulted no one, and seen no experts. It is the emanation of my own brain. Owing to two years of departmental apathy and inconceivable strategical as well as tactical blunders, we are wrongly raided in the air, and being ruined under water. I remember a very famous speech of yours where you pointed out that we had been fourteen times “Too Late!” This letter is to persuade you against two more “Too lates”: (1) The Air: You want two ideas carried out: (_a_) A multitude of bombing aircraft made like Ford cars (so therefore very expeditiously obtained thereby). (_b_) The other type of aircraft constantly improving to get better fighting qualities. The Air is going to win the War owing to the sad and grievous other neglects. (2) The Water: Here we have a very simple proposition. Now that America has joined us, we have a simply overwhelming sea preponderance! Are you not going to do anything with this? Make the German Fleet fight, and you win the war! How can you make the German Fleet fight? By undertaking on a huge scale, with an immense Armada of special rapidly-built craft, an operation that threatens the German Fleet’s existence! That operation, on the basis in my mind, is one absolutely sure of success, because the force employed is so gigantic as to be negligible of fools. If you sweep away the German Fleet, you sweep away all else and end the War, as then you have the Baltic clear and a straight run of some 90 miles only from the Pomeranian Coast to Berlin, and it is the Russian Army we want to enter Berlin, not the English or French. Yours truly, (Signed) FISHER. _Lord Fisher to a Friend._ _February 28th, 1918._ MY DEAR FRIEND, ... Quite recently we lost a golden opportunity of wrecking the residue of the German Fleet and wrecking the Kiel Canal, when the main German Fleet went to Riga with the German army embarked in a huge fleet of transports and so requiring all the Destroyers and Submarines of Germany to protect it. Well, in reply to your question, this is what I would do now: