What If: The Washington Naval Treaty Talks Collapsed?

What Actually Happened: After World War I, the US was in a position to quickly displace the British Royal Navy as the strongest naval power in the world.  The US had enough powerful modern battleships and battlecruisers in the :pipeline that by 1924 the US navy would surpass the British.  Given the lead time for building new capital ships, the British could not avoid being surpassed, even with a massive national effort.  The British would still have more capital ships, but most of them would be older and far less powerful than the ones in the US fleet.

In spite of that seemingly powerful position, the US had a problem.  In the aftermath of World War I, isolationism was growing and it was looking increasingly likely that many of those new ships would be scrapped rather than being completed.  The US basically bluffed on a weak hand.  Great Britain and Japan knew that the US could outbuild them if it chose to do so.  The US offered to give up its potentially dominating position in favor of parity with Britain and near-parity with Japan—a 5-5-3 ratio in capital ships.  That meant that the US would scrap most of the powerful new battleships and battle cruisers it was building.  In return, the British would scrap enough older ships to get to tonnage equality with the US.  The Japanese would scrap several ships they were building and agree to overall inferiority to the US and Britain in capital ships.  The US proposed a ‘battleship holiday”—essentially no more building of battleships for 10 years.  That didn’t quite happen, but it came close.  In addition the treaty limited the tonnage of battleships and aircraft carriers the powers could build.  It limited the size and armament of the cruisers the powers could build, so that cruisers didn’t become battleships in everything but name.  A treaty cruiser had 8 inch guns and theoretically weighed 10,000 tons.  Many of the naval powers cheated a little on the limits.  The Japanese cheated quite a bit, and ended up with more effective cruisers because of the cheating.

The Washington naval treaty shaped the US, British and Japanese fleets of the early part of World War II.  It finally broke up when the Japanese refused to renew it in the mid-1930s, but most of the ships of the early part of World War II were either allowed to remain in service due to the Washington naval treaty or were built within treaty limitations.

The treaty also forbade the US and Britain from building new fortifications and certain other types of facilities in the Far East.  That left the Philippines less fortified than the US wanted them to be, and left Guam essentially defenseless.

What might have happened:  Japan calls the US bluff.  They demand equality with the US and the British and walk out when they don’t get it, counting on the growing isolationism of the US to scupper US building plans.  With Japan not on board, the US is faced with Japanese naval plans to build 8 capital ships every three years.  If they do that and the British and US don’t respond, the Japanese will end up with a larger and more modern navy than either of their potential opponents within a fairly short time.  On the other hand, Britain is not financially able to keep up that kind of pace after the financial drain of World War I, and the US congress does not want to pay for the program that would give the US dominance.

Given the Japanese refusal to reach an agreement, the US stretches out, but does not scrap its building program.  US anti-Japanese sentiment is such that the US is not willing to allow the Japanese to build up a fleet that could dominate the Pacific.  US and British officials quietly agree not to build at a rate faster than is necessary to maintain a 5-5-3 ratio in relationship to the Japanese.

The Tokyo earthquake of September 1923 puts this incipient arms race on hold for a while.  The Amagi, one of the battlecruisers Japan was building, is destroyed beyond repair, and the widespread damage that killed over a 100,000 people from the earthquake and subsequent fires and Tsunamis and left over a million homeless also left the Japanese government with less resources to pursue an arms race.  Also, the US humanitarian response to the earthquake impresses the Japanese and temporarily defuses tensions between the two countries.  The Japanese quietly cut back on their buildup, though they don’t entirely stop it, partly due to interservice rivalries with the Japanese army.  Through the rest of the 1920s, the three major naval powers tacitly adhere to approximately the 5-5-3 ratio, though the Japanese don’t acknowledge that they have accepted that ratio.

Navies are somewhat larger and more expensive in the 1920s than they were historically, and the US maintains a somewhat larger army due to the perception of a potential Japanese threat.  In the booming 1920s, the stain of building and manning the extra battleships and battlecruisers is minimal for the US, but serious for the British.  However, the British are unwilling to give up their centuries-old naval dominance to the US or Japan, so they maintain a building program that they really can’t afford.

The British try to economize by upgrading older ships and keeping them in se4rvice longer, but the new US and Japanese battleships with 16 inch guns and sophisticated designs that incorporate the lesson of Jutland are much more powerful than pre-World War I British designs.  British capital ships are considerably old than US or Japanese equivalents, so the amount of building or rebuilding necessary to maintain parity is much larger for the British than it is for the US or Japan.  By 1929, the British ‘equivalence’ to the US has become an increasingly threadbare pretence, with numbers filled out by older, less powerful ships partially rebuilt but unable to really compete with US and Japanese ships.

The US tries again for a naval arms limitation treaty in 1927, but it falls apart because of British insistence on having enough cruisers to protect its long sea lanes, and Japanese reluctance to formally accept a position of inferiority.  The 1920s are an era of relative restraint on the part of the major naval powers, but no formal restrictions.

The emphasis in the 1920s remains battleships, though each of the three navies does build some aircraft carriers, and they do modernize their battleships to make them less vulnerable to aircraft.  As they did historically, Lexington and Saratoga become aircraft carriers rather than battlecruisers.  Both the British and the Japanese create similar conversions.

The US stock market crash that signaled the start of the Great Depression comes a little earlier than it did historically, but within a couple of months of the historic time.  However, it deepens more rapidly in Europe because the British are not able to hold back the cascade of bank failures in eastern and central Europe as long as it did historically.  In Europe the depression is even deeper than it was historically.

International trade falls apart in the face of protectionist pressures, just as it did historically.  The European powers and the US are hurt by that collapse, but they can be somewhat self-sufficient due to their control of large areas with most of the natural resources their economies require.  Cash-strapped governments are forced to cut back operations and maintenance on their oversized fleets, but while economies shrink, the  larger ones do have internal markets or colonies capable of sustaining them to some extent.

However, the Japanese find themselves locked out of global markets they have depended on, just as they were historically in the Great Depression.  They aren’t self-sufficient, and their small empire is not capable of sustaining even a smaller modern economy.  They react the same way they did historically: by an increased militancy aimed at carving their own empire out of China.

So where does this go from here?  Does it lead to a World War II approximately on schedule?  If so, how is that war different from the historic one?  Who wins?  Do we end up with more cool battleship versus battleship naval battles?   .