However, during the war it had become evident that, although allied to Britain, the Japanese sought to eject all foreign powers – led by Britain – from the Far East. The British position there extended beyond the formal Empire to vital investments in China and elsewhere. The Royal Navy now saw the likeliest future war as defence against a Japanese attack on the Far Eastern Empire.5 The sheer distance the fleet would have to traverse to get to the Far East presented major problems. A supposed US threat was deployed in negotiations between the Admiralty and its Government because the Admiralty knew that British politicians desperate to cut spending would try to pare the Royal Navy down to the size of the Japanese navy – far below what would be needed in a distant war. The US Navy (also focussed on Japan) seems to have had much the same view of the supposed British threat.
Japan was a much more maritime enemy than pre-1914 Germany. Because she imported nearly everything she used, she was far more dependent on the sea than Germany, hence was far more vulnerable to a blockade. To make blockade possible, the British would have to destroy the Japanese battle fleet. The US Navy came to much the same conclusion in its own war plans focussed on Japan. The British chose to base their fleet at Singapore much as they had chosen Scapa Flow before 1914: it was far enough from Japan to seem immune to early attack. To make the strategy viable, Singapore had to be built up at enormous expense. No fleet could be based there in peacetime because it lacked infrastructure as well as satisfactory facilities for the fleet’s personnel and their families. The infrastructure problem precluded transfer of the three battlecruisers to the China Fleet in 1929. Much thought was devoted to the problems raised by the movement of the fleet to the East – and of how to prevent the Japanese from overrunning the Far East before it got there.
The naval situation changed in another way. During the First World War the Royal Navy enjoyed crushing numerical superiority over the Germans, the legacy of the pre-war 60 per cent standard. After 1921 the British accepted a 5:5:3 naval standard: parity with the United States and a 67 per cent advantage over Japan (in tonnage rather than numerical terms). The British could achieve a 60 per cent edge in the Far East only at the expense of any coverage in European waters. They needed other equalisers, which included a new ability to fight at night and the ability to mount co-ordinated mass destroyer torpedo attacks. Superior command and control (and situational awareness) could be exploited to co-ordinate submarines with the battle line. The British continued to be interested in battleship torpedoes well after other navies abandoned them.
In the 1920s the Royal Navy led the world, due both to the overhang of First World War efforts and to successive governments’ willingness to continue to fund research and shipbuilding. The British Government’s ‘Ten Year Rule’ (defence spending should be based on the assumption that there would be no major war for a decade) drastically cut investment in consumables such as ammunition, stores and even quartz for sonar (Asdic), but it did not much affect research or new construction (in many cases ships were fitted for rather than with new equipment).
British rearmament began when the Japanese demonstrated when occupying Shanghai in 1932 that they were determined to eject Western powers from the Far East. The committee formed to frame a British position at the next League of Nations Disarmament Conference became the Defence Requirements Committee, charged with identifying and eliminating defence deficiencies. First Sea Lord remarked that the tone of European diplomacy seemed more like that during the run-up to the First World War. Even before the rise of Hitler, German delegates to the League of Nations conference were demanding parity with the other powers – the end of the restrictions forced on Germany at Versailles and a precondition for future aggression. In 1934 Sir Robert Vansittart at the Foreign Office proposed a substitute for the Ten Year Rule: a five-year run-up to ‘The Year of Maximum Danger’, when the balance between growing hostile (German) power and reviving British power might be at its worst.
The Germans threatened the European balance of power and possibly Britain itself. The Japanese threatened an important part of the economic underpinning of the Empire, the loss of which might also destroy the United Kingdom. In 1934, for example, First Sea Lord argued that the German threat was still a matter of extrapolation, whereas the Japanese threat was immediate. The British Government of the 1930s armed while trying to stave off this dual threat by appeasing the Germans. When the British tried to accelerate capital ship construction, they found themselves badly constrained by the lack of armour-making and gun mounting capacity, which could be traced back to the Washington Treaty.
The crisis over the Italian attack on Abyssinia was sobering. British planners had assumed that any war would be preceded by a warning period of deteriorating relations, during which deficiencies could be made good. The Mediterranean crisis appeared to show that British membership of the League of Nations (under whose aegis resistance to Italy was organised) might lead to a sudden outbreak. It did not help that about the same time the Germans announced that they were no longer bound by the Versailles Treaty.
HMS Queen Elizabeth lies behind the boom defence at Alexandria, probably in 1941. That she had not yet been refitted in the United States is evident in her lack of a Type 273 surface-search radar. The guns atop ‘B’ turret are the quadruple 0.5in fitted when she was modernised, not Oerlikons. The significance of the frame atop ‘A’ turret is unknown. This anti-torpedo boom did not help when she and Valiant were attacked by Italian manned torpedoes on the night of 19 December 1941. She was temporarily repaired at Alexandria (December 1941–June 1942), leaving via Suez for a full repair in the United States (at Norfolk) on 27 June 1942. (US Naval Institute)
The capital ship programme, particularly new construction ordered as the international situation darkened, was affected by the existence of the Royal Air Force as an independent service with an institutional view that it could and should be built up to deter a rising Germany. Through the inter-war period, advocates of independent air power advertised it as a far less expensive alternative to a powerful fleet, particularly as a cheaper alternative to battleships. In 1936, when the British were about to lay down their first new battleships, this pressure went so far as to force the Government of the day to convene hearings before the Committee of Imperial Defence – which ultimately decided in favour of battleships. Of the two threats the British faced in the 1930s, that of Japan was primarily naval. That of Germany was seen much more in terms of a possible air attack, which might be deterred by British strategic airpower. Despite claims that airpower was cheap, massed heavy bombers were not. Once the Germans began building a new fleet, the British Government also had to reckon with a European naval war. The Mediterranean was no longer merely a good place to station their ‘swing’ fleet. It had to be defended as the essential trade route to the most economically vital part of the Empire, India and the East.
The newly-threatening strategic situation played out against a general belief that the First World War had demonstrated that any new war, particularly in Europe, was unthinkable. Those who shaped British inter-war policy had either experienced the hell of the previous war at first hand or were closely related to those who had, or both. The British (and American) publics and many Europeans considered the First World War a demonstration of just how horrible war had become. In this atmosphere, public opinion in the democracies not only accepted the virtues of arms control but resisted growing evidence in the 1930s that Germany and Japan were on the march and were arming as rapidly as they could. Governments found it difficult to reverse course even as the international situation shifted uncomfortably. That is evident in the way in which the 1936 London Naval Treaty evolved.
The Admiralty’s preferred solution to the strategic dilemma was to fight one war at a time. By about 1939 it envisaged holding off hostile European fleets, with the help of the French, while defeating the Japanese. The fleet could then swing back to Europe with crushing strength. Unfortunately it was the Japanese who held back