I find that many people are surprised that I had my headquarters in London. The historic conception of the commander-in-chief of a naval force located on the quarterdeck of his flagship still holds the popular imagination. But controlling the operations of extensive and widely dispersed forces in a campaign of this kind is quite a different proceeding from that of directing the naval campaigns of Nelson's time, just as making war on land has changed somewhat from the method in vogue with Napoleon. The opinion generally prevails that my principal task was to command in person certain naval forces afloat. The fact is that this was really no part of my job during the war. The game in which several great nations were engaged for four years was a game involving organized direction and co-operation. It is improbable that any one nation could have won the naval war; that was a task which demanded not only that we should all exert our fullest energies, but that, so far as it was humanly possible, we should exert them as a unit. It was the duty of the United States above all nations to manifest this spirit. We had entered the war late; we had entered it in a condition of unpreparedness; our naval forces, when compared to those which had been assembled by the Allies, were small; we had not been engaged for three years combating an enemy using new weapons and methods of naval warfare. It was not unlikely that we could make some original contributions to the Allied effort; indeed, we early did so; yet it was natural to suppose that the navies which had been combating the submarines so long understood that game better than did we, and it was our duty to assist them in this work, rather than to operate independently. Moreover, this question as to whether any particular one of our methods might be better or might be worse than Great Britain's was not the most important one. The point was that the British navy had developed its own methods of working and that it was a great "going concern." The crisis was so pressing that we simply did not have the time to create a separate force of our own; the most cursory examination of conditions convinced me that we could hope to accomplish something worth while only by playing the game as it was then being played, and that any attempt to lay down new rules would inevitably decrease the effectiveness of our co-operation, and perhaps result in losing the war. We can even admit, for the sake of the argument, that the Americans might have created a better organization than the British; but the question of improving on their methods, or of not improving on them, was a point that was not worth considering; long before we could have developed an efficient independent machine the war would have come to an end. It was thus our duty to take things as they were, to plunge immediately into the conflict, and to make every ship and every man tell in the most effective way and in the shortest possible time.