This was touched on in the Duke of York thread, and I've been looking for information on cruisers larger than the 6" type prior to the Washington conference. Of course the only such type which actually existed was the British Hawkins class, and they reverted to the standard type for their next design, the E class. Friedman's US Cruisers, Illustrated Design History, cites a May 1918 memorandum from the US naval staff in Britain which suggested cruisers with six 8" guns on the centerline to match the Hawkins. This was not followed up on; the same memo recommended that our new Lexington class battle cruisers be given 12" armor to match HMS Hood, which of course was not adopted either. By July 1920 plans had reverted to 6" gun ships; if necessary the Hawkinses sp? would be dealt with by our battle cruisers. Even that early in their careers the Hawkinses were being used for duties like flagships on the China station; apparently their builders considered them white elephants. I've also been trying to find some background on the Japanese Furutaka class which TiredOldSoldier mentioned on the DofY thread. These are usually referred to as the first treaty cruisers, but the first two were laid down in December 1922, about nine months after the conclusion of the treaty, which suggests that the design process was underway earlier. Warships of the Imperial Japanese Navy by Jentschura et. al. describes them as "First section of the heavy cruiser division of the 1922-29 Programme which replaced the 1920-28 Programe, abandoned in compliance with the terms of the Washington Treaty." Does anyone have any information about the 1920-28 program or what types of ships were being designed thereunder?
Watts puts Furutaka as a post treaty design and Yubari as a prototype for them, not very believable given the dates, I also thought of Admiral Lazarev/Krazny Kavkaz but thougth she originally was a WW1 Svetlana class her redesign for 180mm guns is apparently post treaty. The Argentinian Almirante Brown and Veintecinco de Mayo had 190mm guns but were also post treaty and AFAIK the design was roughly based on the Italian condottieri lights not a scaled down heavy. So the only early direct answer to the Hawkins I can think of are the Furutaka. But the small British British C, D and E classes were outmatched by may designs, the Dutch Java and Sumatra while armed with 6" guns were more than a match the same goes for US Omaha class, without the treaty it's possibler a 7-9000t 6" design would have become the standard not the 5-6000t ships the British would have liked. There is a curious incident on the Furutaka reported by Marder, when in 1926 the Japanese appllied for the traditional admission of a few students to the at Royal Naval College at Greenwitch they were asked for technical drawings of the ships, on refusal the Naval Attaché was told "No Furutaka no courses", another step in the deterioration of Anglo-Japanese naval relationships initiated by the treaty.
Not followed up on??? The US had several preliminary designs of 8-inch gunned cruisers by 1920-21, as the General Board had taken a strong liking to the 8-inch gun, while the Bureau of Ordinance strongly opposed the 8-inch gun. By 1921, the General Board had pretty much decided that the next new cruisers would be armed with 8-inch guns. You might want to start re-reading Friedman somewhere around page 112... I don't have that Watts book, but M. J. Whitley and Lacroix & Wells both have the Furutaka as a pre-Treaty cruiser. With the general design of the class having been agreed upon some six months before the signing of the Washington Naval Treaty and two years before said Treaty's ratification. The concept of the Furutaka can be traced back to the 8,000 ton Scout Cruiser designs for the 8-8 Fleet Program. While the cruiser was to be armed with 14cm guns, an alternative design utilizing the 20cm guns, then under development at the Kure Navy Yard was commissioned. While the Japanese were working on these designs, they learned of that the US Navy was increasing the number of 6-inch guns on it's Omaha class cruisers and the newly completed British cruiser HMS Hawkins greatly impressed the Japanese naval authorities. These Western cruisers greatly out-classed the new Japanese cruiser Kuma, and the many 5,500 tonners that were to follow. In December, 1920, Captain Hiraga Yuzuru became head of the Basic Design Subsection of the Shipbuilding Section of the Navy Technical Department, and in the summer of 1921 proposed a new scout cruiser that would be out-class the British and American cruisers. After much debate, in August, 1921, the Naval General Staff formally switched from the 8,000 ton cruiser to Hiraga's 7,500 ton cruiser. In October, 1921, construction of the cruiser Yubari was approved, and it was this ship that would serve as "proof of concept" for several of Hiraga's new innovations. Also, IIRC, the Argentinian cruisers were supposed to be based on the Italian Trento class heavy cruisers. FYI, the Veinticinco de Mayo was laid down on the same slipway as the Trento.
I do remember reading the Argentinian ships werre based on the early condottieri, but can't find the source, all net sources refer to Trento and looking at her there is a lot more Trento than Barbiano. Both Trento and Veinticinco de Mayo were built by Orlando Livorno, construction of Veinticinco de Mayo is reported as started in 1927 and finished in 1931. Trento notoriously failed to launch on 4/9/1927 (she was at a later construction stage than Trieste as respective displacements "at launch" were 7.894t and 5.505t) and was actually lanched on 4/10/1927 so the Argentinian ship was must have been started very late in the year. Aosta was also built by OTO Livorno (Odero Terni Orlando) and her dates are (10/1932-35) so she probably followed the Argentinian ship. I agree Furutaka was probably mostly a pre treaty design, the two following cruisers Aoba and Kinugasa were similar and were not "build to the limit" but rather well balanced ships, the following Myoko is a different story. AFAIK the 200mm (7.9")guns of Furutaka, Aoba and Myoko (and possibly Kaga and Akagi) were a new modern design, not the 203/45 weapon Ibiki and Kurama had as secondaries, so why was a was new 203 (8") introduced with Atago?. It looks like Japan was seriously thinking of 8" ships around 1922, but also building small 5.5" ships, the US was thinking of them but building large 6" (Omaha), France was building modern 6" ships (Duguay Trouin), the British were already unhappy with the Hawkins and probably with their latest 6" Emerald and Enterprise as well (BTW the E look closer to Java and Omaha than to a C) as the class had only two ships a very small number for the RN. AFAIK Italy had nothing building.
Carronade, I think the genesis of the 8" cruiser could probably be considered the continuing increase in size & armament of the lastest development WWI armoured cruisers, before the "Battlecruiser" type split off and became as capital ships. The 1905 "Warrior" 13,500 tons and has 6 x 9.2" guns, + 4 x 7.5" guns - 23 knots. The 1908 "SMS Blücher" 15,800 tons and 12 x 8.3" guns - 25.5 knots The Washington treaty just put a limit on the tonnage and restricted to 8". IMO, the Blicher could be considered the prototype 8" cruiser, with post treaty being cut down to 8 guns instead of 12, with the lesser tonnage
IMO the armoured cruiser of before ww1 was a very different beast from the treaty cruiser, IIRC with the exception of Blucher and Sharnhorst/Geisenau the armoured cruioser didn't make the transition to monocaliber, most had a main armament of 2 or 4 10" or 9.2" guns so they were really scaled down fast pre-dreadnoughts. AFAIK the type was abbandoned in favour of the battlecruiser, a pretty logical decision as the difference between Blucher and Goeben in capabilities is much greater than the difference in cost. As battlecruisers rapidly grew in size to over 25.000t there was a huge gap between them and contemporary light cruisers, and very few builds in that area until the treaty, the 10.000 tonners were a new (and rather artificial) type, obviously more than a match for contemporary 5.5" or 6" ships but clearly didn't belong in the battleline (with the possible exception of the Italian Zara that for a while were the Regia Marina's battleline). IMO the only armoured cruisers built after WW1 were the Deutchland class and they were a lot more balanced than the treaty ships, had they had the 128mm DP secondaries the Germans never managed to deploy they would be unmatched until the much later and larger Salem and Alaska classes.
Interesting discussion. Could the answer be, what TOS alluded to: It was natural evolution. A gap developed, between the 6" light cruiser and the Battlecruiser/Fast BB and some ship type was needed to fill the gap? An 8" gunned ship was the answer but, the treaty limited it's displacement. The follow on classes, the Baltimore's, Oregon City's and Des Moines are where the ships would have evolved naturally. These were very capable ships in the 14,500-17,000 ton range, true cruisers not like the Alaska class that was IMHO an artificial type designed to imagined capabilities/needs. I think the Brooklyn/Cleveland classes where the epitome of where the 6" cruiser line would evolve. great firepower, good armor, very capable ships in the 11,800 ton range in their final incarnation.
I think the armored cruisers were more analogous to the battle cruisers which replaced them, most notably in being comparable in size to the battleships of their respective eras (although armored cruisers did not generally match the caliber of battleship main armament). Light cruisers were common to the pre-dreadnought and dreadnought eras, but they did not grow or evolve as profoundly as capital ships. The size and power required for light cruiser missions did not change drastically from the late 1890s to WWI; rather, there was a gradual increase in tonnage, speed, and armament. Even the Hawkins class were described as "improved Birminghams"; the design was similar to the Town class with a step up in size and gun caliber. Their builders seem to have started thinking of them as white elephants almost as soon as they entered service; in time they might have come to be considered aberrations on a par with the Courageous class "light battle cruisers" which no navy seems to have felt a need to match. It occurs to me that the framers of the 10,000-ton, 8-inch-gun limits may not have been seeking to define cruisers so much as to craft a definition of capital ship which would not cause the Hawkins to count against the RN's limit; 36,000 tons of them could "cost" the British a battleship. Side note, the pre-dreadnought era also featured the protected cruiser. While these were often the smaller ships, tempting us to think in terms of a "light-heavy" relationship, they could be comparable in size, appearance, and armament to armored cruisers; for example the Powerful and Drake classes. That is to say otherwise comparable ships were differentiated by their armor scheme. In contrast the London Treaty of 1930 established differention by gun caliber, so ships as similar as Brooklyn and Wichita could be CL and CA, and in some cases "light" cruisers could be larger or more heavily armored than "heavies".
There were really many sorts of "armoured cuisers" as the designers attempted to cover all the roles of the sail frigates. Some were fast heavy scouting ships, others were optized for commerce protection and some were really small battleships but most "first class cruisers" were above the 10.000t mark. HMS Powerful was a monstruositry, at 14.000t and 500ft she was bigger, if less robust, than a contemporary battleship. By the time of the Washington treaty a cruiser needed to be able act in the following roles: (a) Protect convoys against armed merchant raiders, for this the Arethusa was the right design, there was no need to build anything larger (b) Scouting for or screening the battleline, this is where the fast ships shine. (c) "cruiser killer" (the big 8" ships). (e) "destroyer killer" (IMO the 6" ships perform better in this role than the 8" ones) So for most roles the 10.000t 8" cruiser was not the right fit, 8" is probably the right gun for a "cruiser killer" but to make an effective one you need 14.000t. Furutaka is the exception as she outclassed the contemporary British C and D classes but as average cruiser size jumped from 5.000t to 10.000t she was in turn outclassed. Note that as long as nobody built "cruiser killers" an Arethusa could probably fulfill most roles.
freebird, you mention a couple of intriguing ships. Warrior as I am sure you know was an improvement on the Black Prince class which had the same six single 9.2" but a secondary armament of ten 6". They had lower freeboard than earlier armored cruisers, a good feature overall, but it put the 6" casemates too close to the water (during WWI they were replaced by six guns in shielded mounts on the main deck). The Warrior class replaced them with four 7.5", a definite improvement, but I can't help wondering why, when the RN decided to replace the secondary armament with turreted guns, they didn't just make it two more 9.2s for a uniform battery of eight. This might also precluded the remarkably silly IMO layout of the subsequent Minotaur class. These had twin 9.2" turrets fore and aft and no fewer than ten single 7.5" turrets along the sides. If the Warriors had had eight 9.2s, the Minotaurs would probably have just stepped up to ten. General note, I'm also puzzled by the reluctance of the RN to use twin turrets for the main armament of armored cruisers as was done by most other navies. The only exception before the Minotaur was the Monmouth class which, it could be argued, had no main armament just a uniform battery of 6" guns, normally the secondary armament in such ships. Ironically a uniform battery of the standard armored cruiser guns - 9.2" - seems to have been what the Germans were expecting next class, the Invincibles, to mount; Blucher with twelve 8.3s would have been a fair match. A uniform battery - fourteen 7.6" - was also featured in the French Edgar Quinet class, with the remarkable twist of being carried in three different type mountings - two twin turrets, six single turrets, and four single guns in casemates. The "dreadnought" armored cruiser might have been a viable concept, and, to make this somewhat relevant to our current topic, would have changed the course of subsequent cruiser evolution; but it was done in in part by Fisher and in part by the first armored cruisers to mount literally battleship-caliber guns, the Japanese Tsukuba class with four 12-inchers. These ships duplicated the armament of contemporary pre-dreadnought battleships and stood in roughly the same relation to them as battle cruisers would to dreadnoughts. The Tsukubas and the followon Ibuki class were redesignated battle cruisers when the term came into use, but by then they were a generation behind.
The twin 6" turrets of the Monmouth were considered a failure,this may be the reason for the reluctance of using twin turrets on other designs. IIRC the twin 6" was reintroduced as an experiment on HMS Enterprise a post war E class. The E were 2700t larger than the previous D and four knots faster making then the fastest British cruisers at war start. Their high speed coupled with a large 16 tube torpedo armament may have influenced the Japanese designs. Tsukuba and Ibiki were probably due to the succcess Togo had with using armoured cruisers as part of his battleline, but using cruisers this way (including battlecrisers that were "cruiser killers" not fast battleships) proved fatal in WW1 and by WW2 cruisers were not expected to engage battleships in good visibility conditions though some navies toyed with the "torpedo cruiser" concept and the Regia Marina was thinking of using the Zara as battleline in the late 1930 as they was all that was available before Cesare and Cavour had completed their refit. Still it would be fascinating if we could come up with some of the "heavy cruiser" designgns of before the treaty limitations were agreed on, by then the battlecruiser designs were close to 40.000t (Hood, Akagi Lexington) and most recent cruisers were lights of 6000t or less, was nobody really thinking of something in between? The last Italian armoured cruiser had 4 x 10" and 8 x 8.5" and decent armour on a displacement cose to 10.000t but with a speed of only 23 knots, they were clearly "battleline" cruisers and that design concept would probably have evolved into something more like the pocket battleships or the heavily armored 29 knots Zara on a displacement of around 12.000t. IMO what greatly contributed to making the treaty cruisers "impossible to design" within the 10.000t limit was that, as there already were some 28 knots battlecruisers around, all navies, with the exception of the Kriegsmarine, asked for 30 knots or more in order to be outrun them.
Maybe for the British she would have been the perfect fit, but for the United States, she was too small and lacked the range necessary for operations in the Pacific Ocean. In fact, many of the US destroyers had a greater range than the Arethusa class. The British had a lot of territory to cover, so they needed a small "cheap" cruiser that could be built in quantity to protect their interests. The United States, with a lot less "lines of supply" that needed protecting, were more focused on fleet battles, hence they could afford to build reduced numbers of the larger, more expensive cruisers. Also, given their sizable territory, they had several bases from which to refuel from. The United States did not have the luxury of having numerous bases scattered around the globe, and would have to fight with what fuel they brought with them. Thus, greater range was far more important to the Americans than it was the British. In the early 1930's, the United States had looked at designs of a cruiser similar to Arethusa, but decided that it would be too small to meet their needs.
