Treaty battleship

The Treaty limited the number of capital ships possessed by each signatory, and also the total tonnage of each navy's battleships.

During the 1930s, however, the effectiveness of these agreements broke down, as some signatory powers (in particular Japan) withdrew from the treaty arrangements and others only paid lip service to them.

The strict limits on displacement forced the designers of battleships to make compromises which they might have wished to avoid given the choice.

According to historian Larry Addington it was "the greatest effort to that time to control armaments and to discourage war through treaty".

[8] The Naval Appropriations Act of 1917 authorized the construction of a further three battleships,[9] to the point that it was projected the United States would be comparable to the Royal Navy in strength by 1923 or 1924.

Britain was eager to engage in naval limitation talks, fearing the danger America's aggressive ship building posed to their empire.

In December 1919, former British Foreign Secretary Lord Grey of Fallodon and Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Lord Robert Cecil met Edward M. House, the adviser of Woodrow Wilson, in Washington, D.C. At the meeting, the United States temporarily agreed to slow battleship building in exchange for the British withdrawing their opposition to inclusion of the Monroe Doctrine in the League of Nations Covenant.

[19] The First Geneva Naval Conference was a meeting of the United States, Great Britain and Japan (France and Italy declined to engage in further negotiations) called together by Calvin Coolidge in 1927.

Designs like the projected British N3-class battleship, the first American South Dakota class, and the Japanese Kii class—all of which continued the trend to larger ships with bigger guns and thicker armor—never finished construction.

Upon the signing of the Washington Naval Treaty, Amagi and Tosa were abandoned and Kaga and Akagi were converted to 30,000-ton aircraft carriers.

Reduced naval spending by the Republican Party led to the navy remaining well below the maximum size specified in the treaty.

Construction on several others was stopped, and the hull of the abandoned USS Washington was used for testing resistance to bombs, torpedoes and gunfire.

The USS Lexington and Saratoga were originally designed as battlecruisers with 33,000 ton displacement, but were converted into aircraft carriers while under construction following passage of the treaty.

[29] The United States decommissioned a total of sixteen existing battleships, and stopped construction on the six ships of the first South Dakota class.

[31] The ships of the Nevada class had their gun elevations increased although the British argued it was a violation of the terms of the Washington Naval Treaty.

[32] The Royal Navy scrapped or stopped construction on sixteen ships as a result of the Washington Naval Treaty.

[31] France and Italy did not embark on large naval expansion programs, though the French battleship Béarn was converted to an aircraft carrier.