Comments by "" (@RedXlV) on "The Drydock - Episode 194" video.

  1. Regarding heavy cruisers with bigger than 8" guns during the interwar period, why didn't any of the nations not subject to the the naval treaties use larger guns? One would think that smaller navies would've been keen to exploit the treaty limits and make their limited numbers of ships individually superior. The treaty powers were of course prohibited from building non-compliant ships for export (everyone else was no doubt looking directly at the British negotiators when insisting on that stipulation), but there were also a few non-treaty powers capable of building their own cruiser-sized warships (or in theory, building ships for export). Spain, for example, could've armed the Canarias-class with 3x2 9.2" guns instead of making them a near copy of the British Counties. For that matter, Spain's shipyards could've been used as a backdoor for Britain's private shipbuilders to build treaty-busting warships for export during the 1920s, since SECN was co-owned by Vickers, Armstrong, and John Brown.
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  2. Germany wasn't subject to the Washington and London Naval Treaties. Those treaties applied only to the British Empire, United States, Japan, France, and Italy. And anybody who was having their ships built by one of those five; one of the stipulations was that ships built for export were still subject to the limits. So the only rule Germany was actually breaking was lying about the tonnage and claiming they met the 10,000 ton Versailles limit. It was only in 1935 with the Anglo-German Naval Agreement that Germany was subjected to the London limits (and proceeded to still cheat). In theory, any other nation was still allowed to build cruisers bigger than 10,000 tons, and to use guns of any caliber they felt like on them. In practice, very few other nations had the shipbuilding capacity to make their own warships at all, let alone super-heavy cruisers. As far as I'm aware, the only other nations that built cruisers at all in their own shipyards were the USSR, the Netherlands, Spain, and Sweden. Sweden never built any warships larger than around 7,500 tons, but the Netherlands and Spain both each built a pair of10,000 cruisers. In their cases it wasn't a question of whether they could build a super-heavy cruiser, but whether they could afford it. In the Dutch case, they opted to put their money instead into full-on battlecruisers (Design 1047, which would've been essentially a lighter and faster Scharnhorst with thinner armor), but a German invasion rudely interrupted those plans. Some of earlier concepts considered during the design process had been for 16,000 ton super-heavy cruisers with either 3x2 or 3x3 240mm guns. Spain designed a 19,000 ton cruiser in 1939 that would've been armed with 3x2 305mm guns (using the coastal battery guns previously salvaged from the battleships España and Jaime I) or 2x3 283mm (of the same type as Scharnhorst, which would've been imported from Germany), but nothing came of it. Likewise with the 17,500 version of the design that was simply a big heavy cruiser with 4x3 203mm. Probably because Spain in the aftermath of the civil war didn't have the money. Franco had big naval ambitions, up to and including buying Littorio-class battleships from Italy (and I vaguely recall that he offered to buy Gneisenau from Germany when Hitler had given up on his surface fleet), but not enough money to actually do it.
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  3. Yeah, I've read about the design process leading to the Design 1047 battlecruiser including concepts for super-heavy cruisers with 3x2 or 3x3 24cm turrets, before they settled on 28,000 ton full-on battlecruisers with 3x3 28cm. The Netherlands not being subject to naval treaties and (unlike most non-treaty nations) having their own shipyards meant they could basically build whatever they could afford. But I wasn't aware that they actually intended on doing both.
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  4.  @riverraven7359  The Dutch actually planned on three of those battlecruisers.
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