The decision of the U.S. Navy to develop battleships and reject battlecruisers during the interwar period has been the subject of continuing debate among military historians and naval experts. According to some, such a decision found unprepared the U.S. unprepared for the fast-paced naval conflict with Japan during World War II.
The Lexington-class battlecruiser that was designed but then altered into an aircraft carrier under the Washington Naval Treaty might have provided the speed and agility needed to support the fast carrier groups in the Pacific. “Critics can only note that a battlecruiser Navy might have been better prepared to fight against Japan in the early war period; this is left to speculation.
The following might have been, according to Dr. Robert Farley: “Had the U.S. Navy made different, better choices at the end of World War I, it might have begun World War II with battlecruisers that could have supported its fast carrier groups.” The U.S. had plans for a battlecruiser class, the Lexington class, but the intervention of World War I led to delays in the plans for the Lexington, and under the Washington Naval Treaty, the Lexington battlecruiser was re-designed as an aircraft carrier.
By the time Imperial Japan knocked the Pacific Fleet off kilter at Pearl Harbor, in this sense, the U.S. Navy had lost already the speed or agility to conduct island-to-island blitzes across the Pacific in support of fast carrier groups. The U.S. entered into World War II relatively flat-footed without the battlecruisers necessary to provide anti-aircraft and anti-surface protection for the carrier fleet from day one.
During the early twentieth century, warship design trends favored size and power. The Dreadnought Revolution inspired world powers to build big ships with big guns. Britain, America, Germany, and Japan followed suit with the construction of ever larger, more heavily armed battleships capable of barrage against enemy shorelines. Most navies supplemented their battleships with faster and less heavily armed battlecruisers. However, the U.S. didn’t pay much attention to battlecruiser development and was mainly focused on its battleships.
The U.S. did take a crack at the battlecruiser with the Lexington design, which earned serious consideration. However, the Lexington efforts were “sketchy, resulting in huge, fast, poorly protected ships with bizarre configurations,” Farley noted. The 1916 design specified a displacement of thirty-five thousand tons, a speed of thirty-five knots, and a main armament of ten fourteen-inch guns in four turrets. Yet, the quirky design was never produced.
Circumstances would indeed have been different, offering better opportunities to strike at the Japanese, if the U.S. had battlecruisers on day one of the Second World War. Instead, the capabilities that a battlecruiser provided would not be available until mid-war. What the U.S. Navy did have were its battleships. “The USN prioritized slow, well-armored battleships that could operate together in a line of battle,” Farley wrote. “Had the Navy paid more attention to European trends in shipbuilding, it might have gone ahead with the Lexington-class battlecruisers, which would have offered U.S. commanders in the Pacific better tools for fighting the war.”
Of course, all this is just speculation. The Japanese had their battle cruisers, the Kongos, which certainly did not make victory possible. The Kongos did poorly, and two of the four vessels sank in the Guadalcanal campaign. Maybe a Lexington battlecruiser would have fared similarly, considering how much in demand such versatile vessels would be.