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Music Hello everyone and welcome to history of the Second World War members episode number four, the Treaty Cruisers.

While the naval limitation treaties, which would begin with the one signed in

Washington in 1922, would not be enforced throughout the entire interwar period, they would still have

a lasting impact on naval design well into the war years. Until the closing stages of the Pacific

War, the vast majority of naval ships in all of the

navies around the world were either ships that had been constructed before the treaty was in place,

ships that were built directly under the constraints of the treaty, or ships whose design was

greatly impacted by the years that every nation spent designing around treaty limitations.

In most cases, these constraints meant that ships had to be built smaller than what probably

would have happened otherwise. But there was one type of ship that instead of getting smaller,

due to the treaty, actually increased. They got larger, and this was a heavy cruiser. Trying to categorize and classify

cruisers is a bit confusing. Before the First World War, there were armored, protected, and light

cruisers, and after there would be light and heavy classifications of cruisers. And the only real

similarity between all cruisers is that they were

larger than destroyers, but smaller than battleships or battle cruisers. The reason for the wide

...