Thereupon Admiral von Tirpitz remarked that this would also apply to the English fleet itself as soon as the other nations had followed Fisher's example; that England had robbed her enormous pre-dreadnaught force, upon which her great superiority lasted, of its fighting value, which would necessitate her building an entirely new fleet of big fighting ships, in competition with the entire world, which would do likewise; that this would be exceedingly costly; that England, in order to maintain her notorious "two-Power standard," would have to exert herself to such an extent that she would look with more disfavor than ever on new warships built by other nations, toward whom she was unfriendly, and begin to make objections; then this would be especially true if we started building, but would be in vain, since, with the existing types of ships in our fleet, we could not expect to fight against big battleships, but were forced, "nolens volens," to follow England along this road. The war fully confirmed Admiral Tirpitz's opinion. Every one of our ships not in the big fighting-ship class had to be retired from service. When the first German big fighting ship was placed in service there was a loud outcry in the land of the British. The conviction gradually dawned that Fisher and his shipbuilders had counted absolutely on the belief that Germany would not be able to build any big fighting ships. Therefore the disappointment was all the greater. Why such an assumption was made is beyond comprehension, since, even at that time, German shipbuilders had already built the great ocean greyhounds, far surpassing our warships of the line in tonnage, which had occasioned painfully noticeable competition to the English steamship lines. Our big fighting ships, despite their small number, showed themselves, at the Skager-Rak (Jutland) battle, not only equal to their English opponents, but superior to them both in seaworthiness and in standing up under gunfire. IMPATIENT FOR U-BOATS The building of U-boats, unfortunately, could not be pushed forward before the war to an extent commensurate with my desires. On the one hand, it was necessary not to overburden the naval budget during the carrying out of the Naval law; moreover, most important of all, it was necessary to collect further data from experiments. Tirpitz believed that the types with which other nations were experimenting were too small and fit only for coast defense; that Germany must build "seagoing" submarines capable of navigating in the open sea; that this necessitated a larger type--which, however, must first be systematically developed. This took a long time and required careful experiments with models. The result was that, at first, in 1914, there were only a small number of seaworthy submarines in readiness. Even then more pressure might have been brought to bear upon England with the available submarines had not the Chancellor been so concerned lest England be provoked thereby.