Washington Naval Conference

The world's popular mood was peace and disarmament throughout the 1920s. Women had just won the right to vote in many countries, and they helped convince politicians that money could be saved, votes won, and future wars avoided by stopping the arms race.[4] Across the world, leaders of the women's suffrage movement formed international organizations such as the International Council of Women and the International Woman Suffrage Alliance. Historian Martin Pugh writes that they achieved the greatest influence in the 1920s, "when they helped to promote women's contribution to the anti-war movement throughout the Western world."[5] In the United States, practically all the major Protestant denominations and highly-visible Protestant spokesmen were strong supporters of international peace efforts. They collaborated to work to educate their local congregations on the need for peace and disarmament.[6]

At the end of World War I, the British still had the largest navy afloat, but its big ships were becoming obsolete, and the Americans and the Japanese were rapidly building expensive new warships. Britain and Japan were allies in a treaty that was due to expire in 1922. Although there were no immediate dangers, observers increasingly pointed to the American-Japanese rivalry for control of the Pacific Ocean as a long-term threat to world peace. By then, the British decided that it was better for them to cast their lot with Washington than Tokyo. To stop a needless, expensive, and possibly dangerous arms race, the major countries signed a series of naval disarmament agreements.[7]

The American delegation, led by Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, included Elihu Root, Henry Cabot Lodge and Oscar Underwood,[1][2] the last being the Democratic minority leader in the Senate. The conference's primary objective was to restrain Japanese naval expansion in the waters of the West Pacific, especially with regard to fortifications on strategically-valuable islands. Its secondary objectives were intended to obtain an ultimate limit Japanese to expansion and also an alleviation of concerns over possible antagonism with the British. They were to eliminate Anglo-American tension by abrogating the Anglo-Japanese alliance, to agree upon a favorable naval ratio vis-à-vis Japan, and to have the Japanese officially accept a continuation of the Open Door Policy in China.

The British, however, took a more cautious and tempered approach. Indeed, the British officials brought certain general desires to the conference: to achieve peace and stability in the West Pacific; avoid a naval arms race with the United States; thwart Japanese encroachment into areas under their influence; and preserve the security of Singapore, Hong Kong, and Dominion countries, but they did not enter the conference with a specific laundry list of demands. Rather, they brought with them a vague vision of what the West Pacific should look like after an agreement.

Japanese officials were more focused on specifics than the British, and they approached the conference with two primary goals: to sign a naval treaty with Britain and the United States and to obtain official recognition of Japan's special interests in Manchuria and Mongolia. Japanese officials also brought other issues to the conference: a strong demand to remain in control of Yap, Siberia, and Tsingtao as well as more general concerns about the growing presence of American fleets in the Pacific.

The American hand was strengthened by the interception and decryption of secret instructions from the Japanese government to its delegation. The message revealed the lowest naval ratio that would be acceptable to Tokyo; US negotiators used that knowledge to push the Japanese. This success, one of the first in the US government's budding eavesdropping and cryptology efforts, led eventually to the growth of such agencies.[3]

The head of the Japanese delegation to the Washington Naval Conference was Prince Iyesato Tokugawa, who during the first four decades of the twentieth century led a political movement in Japan that promoted democracy and international goodwill with the U.S., Europe and Asia. His influence was significant in the negotiations and ratification of the Washington Naval Treaty.[8] [9]

US President Warren Harding called the Washington Conference a deal that all countries thought best for themselves.[10] To resolve technical disputes about the quality of warships, the conferees adopted a standard based on the tonnage displacement, a simple measure of the size of a ship. A ten-year agreement fixed the ratio of battleships at 5:5:3: 525,000 tons for the US, 525,000 tons for Britain, and 315,000 tons for Japan. Smaller limits with a ratio of 1.67 applied to France and Italy.[11] Battleships, the dominant weapons systems of the era, could be no larger than 35,000 tons. The major powers allowed themselves 135,000:135,000:81,000 tons for the newly-developed aircraft carriers.

The Washington Conference exactly captured the worldwide popular demand for peace and disarmament. Without it, the US, Britain and Japan would have engaged in an expensive buildup, with each fearing the other two getting too powerful. However, even with the restrictions, the agreement solidified Japan's position as a great power; it got parity in the Pacific with the two leading global navies, was allowed to maintain a larger naval force than France and Italy and was treated as a colonial power with equal diplomatic interests, a first for a non-Western nation.[12] The agreements forced the US to scrap 15 old battleships and 2 new ones, along with 13 ships under construction.

The naval treaty was concluded on February 6, 1922. Ratifications of the treaty were exchanged in Washington on August 17, 1923, and it was registered in League of Nations Treaty Series on April 16, 1924.[13]

Japan agreed to revert Shandong to Chinese control by an agreement concluded on February 4, 1922. Ratifications of the agreement were exchanged in Beijing on June 2, 1922, and it was registered in League of Nations Treaty Series on July 7, 1922.[14][15]

The Washington Naval Treaty led to an effective end to building new battleship fleets, and the few ships that were built were limited in size and armament. Many existing capital ships were scrapped. Some ships under construction were turned into aircraft carriers instead.

Even with the treaty, the major navies remained suspicious of one another and briefly (1927–1930) engaged in a race to build heavy cruisers, which had been limited in size (10,000 tons) but not numbers.[16] That oversight was resolved on value of cruisers by the London Naval Treaty of 1930, which specified a 10:10:7 ratio for cruisers and destroyers. For the first time, submarines were also limited, with Japan given parity with the US and Britain, at 53,000 tons each. (Submarines typically displaced 1,000-2,000 tons each.) The US Navy maintained an active building program that replaced obsolescent warships with technically more sophisticated new models in part because its construction yards were important sources of political patronage and so were well protected by Congress. During the New Deal, relief funds were used to build more warships. "The naval program was wholly mine," President Franklin Roosevelt boasted.[17]

The pacts and the treaties that resulted from the Washington Naval Treaty remained in effect for fourteen years. Japan ended participation in 1936.[18]

• Buell, Raymond Leslie. The Washington Conference (D. Appleton, 1922) online
• Field, Andrew. Royal Navy Strategy in the Far East, 1919-1939 (2004)
• Dingman, Roger. Power in the Pacific: the origins of naval arms limitation, 1914-1922 (1976)
• Fanning, Richard W. Peace and disarmament: Naval rivalry & arms control, 1922-1933 (1995)
• Gibbs, Norman. "The Naval Conferences of the Interwar Years: A study in Anglo-American Relations" Naval War College Review 30#1 (Special issue Summer 1977), pp. 50-63 Online
• Goldman, Emily O. Sunken Treaties: Naval Arms Control between the Wars. Pennsylvania State U. Press, 1994. 352 pp.
• Goldstein, Erik, and John H. Maurer, eds. The Washington Conference, 1921-22: naval rivalry, East Asian stability and the road to Pearl Harbor (Psychology Press, 1994)
• Goldstein, Erik. The Washington Conference, 1921-22: Naval Rivalry, East Asian Stability and the Road to Pearl Harbor (1994)
• Jordan, John (2011). Warships after Washington: The Development of Five Major Fleets 1922–1930. Seaforth Publishing. ISBN 978-1-84832-117-5.
• Kaufman, Robert Gordon. Arms Control during the Prenuclear Era: The United States and Naval Limitation between the Two World Wars. Columbia U. Press, 1990. 289 pp.
• Kitching; Carolyn J. Britain and the Problem of International Disarmament, 1919-1934 Rutledge, 1999 online
• McKercher, B. J. C. "'A Certain Irritation': The White House, the State Department, and the Desire for a Naval Settlement with Great Britain, 1927–1930." Diplomatic History 31.5 (2007): 829-863.
• O'Brien; Phillips Payson. British and American Naval Power: Politics and Policy, 1900-1936 (Praeger Studies in Diplomacy and Strategic Thought) (1998)
• Schenkein, Joshua. "Japan, The Great Power: Industrialization Through The Lens Of Zaibatsu." 2014 ASIN: B00NRHRMW2
• Seymour, Charles (1922). "Washington Conference" . In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica (12th ed.). London & New York: The Encyclopædia Britannica Company.
• Willoughby, Westel Woodbury. China at the Conference: A Report. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1922.
• Papers Relating to Pacific and Far Eastern Affairs. U.S. Government Printing Office. 1922.

• Washington Naval Treaty
• London Naval Treaty (1930)
• Second London Naval Treaty
• Anglo-German Naval Agreement

• Media related to Washington Naval Treaty at Wikimedia Commons