By Jay Jamison
The Washington Naval Treaty, signed in 1922, was one of the most successful agreements in the history of arms. The treaty was drawn up among the great naval powers of the early twentieth century: Great Britain, the United States, Japan, France and Italy. The sizes of the navies of these nations were agreed upon, and it was hoped the “battleship holiday,” which prohibited any power from designing and launching new battleships for the next ten years, would eliminate the sort of frantic dreadnaught building arms race that was a catalyst for World War I. The British and the Europeans, exhausted from the carnage of the Great War, were horrified to learn that the United States and Japan were both building a new series of battlecruisers. Thus, the call went out for a five-nation conference to be held in Washington, D.C., and the subsequent treaty was drawn up that would prohibit the construction of such ships for 10 years.
It all pretty much went as hoped. The United States halted construction of the enormous battlecruisers Lexington and Saratoga, the Japanese halted construction of the battlecruisers Akagi and Amagi. Many old battlewagons of the contending nations were scrapped. There was reason for optimism that this new agreement would tamp down naval rivalries that might emerge in the years following World War I.
As with any broad treaty among contending powers, there were some provisions of the draft document that potential signers wanted changed. The United States Navy’s battlecruiser program was well along. The hulls of the two future battlecruisers were nearly completed at tremendous cost. The Japanese also asked that their battlecruiser program be allowed to proceed. After much haggling, the delegates allowed for this exception, among others, to the new construction provisions, provided that the finished vessels were not battlecruisers. In the end, both the U.S. Navy and the Imperial Japanese Navy were allowed to complete construction of these ships as aircraft carriers. The signatories of the Washington Naval Treaty viewed aircraft carriers as vessels that might be used as auxiliaries, possibly in scouting roles. The mighty battleships of the navies were still perceived as the central offensive weapons of the fleets. I suspect there was a general sigh of relief among the delegates that a possible last minute glitch had been avoided. The treaty was declared a success, and no new battleships were built by the signatory powers until the mid-1930s.
The new American aircraft carriers, built on the hulls designed for battlecruisers, were enormous. Their Japanese counterparts were equally large. So, both navies set about deciding how to integrate their new flat tops into their fleets. Through the 1920s and into the 1930s, both navies debated within their ranks the possibility of using aircraft carriers as offensive weapons, replacing the great lumbering battleships as the central weapon of power at sea.
Eighty-two years ago, on Sunday, December 7, 1941, bombers, torpedo planes and fighters took off from the deck of the flagship of a Japanese task force of six aircraft carriers. An irony of the Pearl Harbor attack is that the name of the Japanese flagship was Akagi — one of the ships that the 1922 naval treaty allowed to be built, not as a feared battlecruiser, but as a seemingly less-threatening aircraft carrier.
