In that year, however, the naval staff had issued a rather disquieting report; and, in the three years that followed, very considerable strides were made in the direction of strengthening the Fleet. Always admirable in _personnel_, and with a considerable maritime population upon which to draw, fresh attention was paid to her reserves, which, on her entrance into the war, were organized in four classes; and, in the strictly offensive sense, it was at sea that her help as a combatant was the soonest felt. Weakest in cruisers, and entirely lacking in high-speed, heavy-gunned {256} battle-cruisers, she possessed fourteen battleships of the dreadnought type with another score of the second and third classes. Of her dreadnoughts six--the _Pennsylvania_, _Arizona_, _Oklahoma_, _Nevada_, _New York_, and _Texas_--mounted 14-inch guns, the first two carrying twelve of these, with a secondary armament of twenty-two 5-inch guns, and the last four carrying ten, with a secondary armament of twenty-one 5-inch guns respectively. Five other battleships were still in course of construction on her entrance into the war. She had also nearly a hundred destroyers and torpedo-boats, and something over sixty submarines, and was soon to be producing fast sub-chasers, as she called them, in very large numbers. Manned, as all these were, by a _personnel_ not only eager and intelligent, but combining a nationally typical self-confidence with the modesty and discipline of true seamen, the American navy was thus a timely reinforcement of the most valuable kind; and it was made doubly so by the prompt generosity with which it lent itself to the existing commands. Nothing else, indeed, was to have been expected, since the relations between the British and American navies had always been a little in advance, perhaps as regarded cordiality, of those prevailing between their respective countries. Even when they were opponents in the war that should never have been they had sincerely and consistently respected each other; and, for the last hundred years, whenever they had foregathered, it had been with a more than formal friendliness. "It has been a rule," wrote the doyen of American admirals, the late Admiral Dewey, in {257} 1913, "that wherever a British and an American ship meet, their officers and their crews fraternize. The two services speak the same language, they have a common inheritance of naval discipline and customs. Exchanges of visits, which are ceremonial where other nations are concerned, become friendly calls in a congenial atmosphere."