Super-Battleships of World War I: The Lost Battleships of the Washington Treaty

48 pages

Mike Farquharson-Roberts PhD (Mar Hist)

The end of the First World War left the world’s navies with large fleets of battleships that were rapidly becoming obsolete. For the Royal Navy this was compounded by their ships, while comparatively young, were in many cases worn out after the demands of the war. The United States before the war’s end had embarked on a major naval building programme and the Japanese were anxious not to be left behind by the two western powers (although that terminology was not then used) who they saw as rivals and potential enemies. The British started designing and got as far as ordering four battlecruisers of nearly 50,000 tons armed with nine 16-inch guns and capable of 32 knots (the G3 design) to be followed by four 18-inch gunned battleships (this book suggests the N3 design would have been built, but more likely the M3). The Japanese had laid down similar sized Kaga-class battleships and Amagi battlecruisers carrying 16-inch guns while the Americans had ordered four Colorado-class battleships carrying twelve 16-inch guns, the first the Maryland had been laid down in 1917, to be followed by six similarly armed South Dakota’s laid down in 1920 and 1921 as well as six Lexington-class battlecruisers of 43,500 tons carrying eight 16-inch guns, and with five funnels! A naval arms race was in the making, which would be expensive, and for Britain, potentially unaffordable. The result was the Washington conference and subsequent treaty. This led to scrappings of partially built ships and many cancellations of orders. The three big navies took the opportunity to convert battlecruiser or battleship hulls to aircraft carriers, as the British did with Furious Glorious and Courageous. The US battlecruisers Saratoga and Lexington were altered from fast battlecruisers into fast aircraft carriers with an eight-inch gun armament that were to form the basis of the USN carrier fleet of World War Two, and for the Japanese, the Kaga likewise. The book also covers what became of some of the British designs; the G3 evolved into Nelson and Rodney. While the cancellation eviscerated the British warship building capability, economically, the Washington treaty was a salvation; certainly Britain could not afford another warship building race.

Osprey has created its own niche, for those who are interested in a particular area of the military, but not fascinated by it. This book is typical, a concise, extremely well illustrated book of 48 pages, describing the British, US and Japanese capital ship building programmes cut short by the Washington Treaty of 1921. For the anorak Warship (back when it was a quarterly journal) in the 1970s devoted 32 pages to the designs of just the British ships, culminating in the G3 battlecruiser, which were actually ordered but cancelled within months, and the 46,000 ton 18-inch gunned M3 battleship. The illustrations, as is customary with Osprey, are superb, although the illustrator possibly got carried away with the scuttles. Vertical side armour would have meant that the G3 battlecruiser (p9) would have extremely unlikely to have two full length rows of them, HMS Rodney on the same page, certainly didn’t. As for names of the British ships, while it was generally supposed that the four battlecruisers were to be named for the first four ‘I’ class battlecruisers, names were never officially allocated and the naming of the four battleships for the patron saints of the nations of the United Kingdom is speculation. Minor niggles apart, this book is excellent and recommended.