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Further Reading

British Naval Policy - 1920-1939

At the end of the First World War Britain had the largest navy in the world. In 1919, Lloyd George's cabinet placed stringent limits on defence expenditure on the planning assumptions that a major war involving UK forces would not occur within ten years. As it required the greatest industrial infrastructure, the ten-year rule hit the Royal Navy particularly hard. With orders for warships at a low level it had an impact on a wide variety of industries - shipbuilding, steel and engineering, as well as specialised manufacturers of guns, ammunition and naval equipment. The political decision to pursue a policy of disarmament by international agreement only made the problems faced by the armed forces, and especially the Navy, even worse.

During the 1920s the limited funds for defence, coupled with the resentment felt by the Army and the Royal Navy in thinking the Royal Air Force had more than its fair share of funds, caused inter-service bureaucratic infighting. The Navy in particular took the loss of its own air service very badly and continually attempted to regain control of naval aviation. The deep cuts in defence spending and the resulting contraction of defence industries had a long-term effect on rearmament. The legacy of limited finance and concentration on the barest of essentials in material and defence thinking would reverberate through the 1930s and into the Second World War.

The goal of international disarmament was preserved in Woodrow Wilson's 14 points and implicit within the League of Nations framework. The first act of international disarmament was the Washington Naval Conference of 1921-1922. The Washington Conference of 1921-1922 set ratios for the number of capital ships of the major powers. For the first time it was agreed that the British Royal Navy and the US Navy have the same number of battleships and battle cruisers. The conference agreed parity between the British and American navies, setting a lower quota of battleships for the Japanese, French and Italian navies. The conference also agreed a ten-year building holiday for major warships and set down the maximum size of battleships, aircraft carriers and cruisers as well as the size of the gun armament. The conference was supposed to be the first of a series of treaties limiting not just navies, but land and air forces too. However, the subsequent conferences never took place so Britain, as the world's predominant naval power, suffered more than a land power such as France.

With no need to plan for a major global or European conflict for ten years, the armed forces concentrated on imperial policing roles. For the Royal Navy, cruisers were vital for this role, as well as for the defence of trade. In 1927 a further conference in Geneva failed, the difficulty being agreement on the number and size of cruisers needed by Britain for trade defence. Until the early 1930s Anglo-American naval tension continued to simmer. In 1930 the London Naval Conference extended the terms of the Washington conference to 1936 and Britain agreed to reduce the number of cruisers to 50 - against the wishes of the Admiralty. Finally, the British took the lead in the wide-ranging Geneva Disarmament Conference (1932-1934) that sought land, sea and air reductions. It too was a failure, and its collapse was a spur to Britain's rearmament.

Inter-service rivalry between the Royal Navy and the new Royal Air Force was also acute until the Royal Navy regained control of seaborne aircraft. Despite further major naval conferences in London (in 1930 and 1935-1936), it only became clear in 1936 that limiting naval power through caps on ship numbers, tonnage and weapon types was not achieving its aims.

Having dropped out of the 1935-1936 London negotiations, Japan, along with Germany and Italy, embarked on major increases in defence spending. In 1936 the British rearmament programme began in earnest with increases in budgets. The weapons and equipment developed were to form the backbone of British military capability during the first three years of the Second World War.

Naval rearmament was limited from the outset by the disarmament process. Expansion only got underway after 1936, once the limitations of the 1922 Washington Treaty and 1930 London Treaty expired on 31 December 1936. The Defence Requirements sub-Committee's standard fleet (their projection of what the Royal Navy would need to meet certain commitments) essentially brought the one-power standard (which stated that Britain's navy should be equal in size to the biggest naval power) up to date. This involved the modernisation of existing warships to compensate for the deterioration in qualitative superiority since 1922.

However, the Defence Requirements sub-Committee soon recognised that the one-power standard was out of date, and during 1936 a two-power standard (which stated that Britain's navy should equal the combined strengths of the two largest navies), based on the potential combined strengths of Japan and Germany, was developed. However, the Cabinet decided against committing to a two-power standard in favor of speeding up existing programs.

By 1937 shipbuilding was at full capacity following the acceleration of the Navy's programs. Any new standard of naval strength was of academic interest only, as it would not be achieved for some years. Even the gain of the Fleet Air arm from RAF control to the Navy was too late to ensure wholesale re-equipment with modern aircraft before the outbreak of war.