Battlecruisers were effective when concentrating their fire on an enemy fleet's leading ships, as the Japanese armored cruisers had done to the Russians at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905.

None were completed before the arms-limiting Washington Naval Treaty was ratified in 1922; four were broken up on the slipway and two were converted into the aircraft carriers Lexington (CV-2) and Saratoga (CV-3).

A number of countries experimented with "cruiser-killer" ships in the late 1930s that were designed to destroy the post-London Naval Treaty heavy cruisers.

The US Navy's main impetus for the Alaska class was the threat posed by Japanese cruisers raiding its lines of communication in the event of war.

[5][6] The design of the Lexington-class battlecruisers was approved on 30 June 1916 and six were planned as part of the massive 1916 building program, but their construction was repeatedly postponed in favor of escort ships and anti-submarine vessels.

The General Board then re-evaluated the design and greatly increased the armor protection, at the cost of reducing the maximum speed to 33 knots (61 km/h; 38 mph).

Though she was torpedoed twice, Saratoga survived the war, and was destroyed as a target ship during Operation Crossroads, a series of atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll in mid-1946.