The Price of Prestige

60 chapter three

Despite the proven wartime effectiveness of small ships, by the end of

the war we do not find a “different definition of naval power — one based

on these light craft,” but rather a reaffirmation of the role of big ships as

the sole bearers of naval prestige (Halpern 1987 , 10 ). Large ships were

again the focus for great- power competition, culminating in the Washing-

ton Conference on the Limitation of Armament ( 1921 – 22 ), which institu-

tionalized the symbolic role of the battleship as a status test by officially

defining naval hierarchy in terms of the relative number of battleships

that each navy was allowed to procure. Thus, despite their demonstrated

uselessness in the First World War, large naval vessels retained their role

as symbols of power and carriers of prestige. While it is often said that

generals prepare to fight the last war, in the years leading to the Second

World War the admirals were taking their lessons from a war that never

took place — a war of glorious naval battles in which the battleship plays a

decisive role. The lessons of the naval record of World War I were largely

ignored. Instead, faced with a rapid reconstruction of German military

force in the midthirties, Britain signed an Anglo- German naval agreement

( 1935 ) that again solely focused on the relative balance of large surface

ships. This unpopular and diplomatically costly agreement, which set the

balance of battleships between the two countries at a ratio of 100 British to

35 German, allowed Germany to reach parity in the number of submarines

(Watt 1956 ). Thus, even after the pivotal role played by submarines during

World War I, Britain was still primarily obsessed with maintaining its rela-

tive supremacy in battleship procurement and was willing to sacrifice less

conspicuous, though potentially more effective, aspects of naval power in

order to protect it.

Interestingly, many professional officers within the British and Ger-

man navies understood the limitations of the big battleship. Watt ( 1956 )

argues that during the Anglo- German naval negotiations of 1935 , Brit-

ish officers pressed the government to opt for an agreement that limited

vessel size rather than focus on limitations on the number of vessels. The

admiralty feared that in the absence of such an agreement, the dynamics

of an arms race would again dictate an increase in the size of units as well

as in their numbers regardless of professional assessments of operational

effectiveness. They understood that such large and expensive ships would

be practically useless in the face of an air attack (Watt 1956 , 171 ). Thus,

even when professional officers were explicitly aware of the strategic limi-

tations imposed by conspicuously large naval vessels, they recognized that

they could not escape the political pressure to acquire them and to partici-

pate in a race of increasing size and reduced utility.