Around 1910 the Germans all but gave up the intense naval construction race that they’d pushed against England’s dominant shipyards since the nineties. The Americans didn’t yet know that their own extremely costly Civil War had made them potentially Number One Nation, so England was, in 1910, clearly the world’s industrial powerhouse.
In four years the German challenge would take a new form in which of the Kaiser War, an average of 640,000 artillery rounds would be fired by the combatants to agitate the mud in 475 miles
