Comments by "Vikki McDonough" (@vikkimcdonough6153) on "USS Phoenix / ARA General Belgrano - Pearl Harbor Spectator to South Atlantic Predator" video.

  1. The naval treaties of the 1920s and 1930s had several special exemptions written in to allow the retention of specific ships (for instance, the Washington Treaty exempting Erebus and Terror and the First London Treaty exempting Surcouf). However, there're a few odd cases of ships not getting exempted despite it making a lot of sense: - Australia and New Zealand at Washington. Australia really wanted to keep their battlecruiser around (ending up with considerable feelings of betrayal when the mother country they'd relied on to represent them at the conference let it fall on the scrap heap), and New Zealand was both quite proud of the ship they'd bought for the Royal Navy and would've likely wanted it to formally be theirs before too long; also, to put it bluntly, two slightly-improved Indefatigables (even if their fore and aft armor was a bit thicker than on Indefatigable herself) would've posed exactly zero threat to any other capital ship being retained by any of the parties to the treaty (probably the only capital ships to survive the scrappage waves of Washington and Versailles that the Antipodean sisters would actually've had much chance of beating, even if the pair teamed up, were the predreadnoughts the Germans'd been allowed to keep [and even then the predreads'd've still probably had the advantage if all of them stuck together] and the ship formerly known as Goeben, and neither Germany nor the Ottoman Empire/Turkey had a say at Washington), so letting them hang around wouldn't've posed significant problems for anyone. - K26 at First London. I mean, c'mon, they gave Surcouf an exemption; surely it would've made even more sense to exempt K26, given that she was a preexisting ship that could be grandfathered in, she was a one-of-a-kind (for the Royal Navy) ship that the RN had no plans to make more of, she didn't have any weird-for-submarines features like large-caliber guns, and she was only slightly above the submarine-displacement limit anyway. - Ryujō at First London. The IJN wasn't going to scrap her no matter what everyone else thought, and her construction had been legal when it began, so it'd've made sense to formalize this situation with a specific exemption in the treaty to further underline the point of "OK, Japan, we'll let you get away with it this once, but don't do it again."
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