Kennedy G. Imperial Defence. The Old World Order, 1856-1956

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M. Epkenhansand G.P. Gross (eds), Das Militär und der Aufbruch in die Moderne

1860 bis 1890 (München, 2003).

43 N. d’Ombrain, War Machinery and High Policy: Defence Administration in Peacetime

Britain: 1902–1914 (Oxford, 1973).

44 A. Offer, The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation (Oxford, 1989).

45 Ibid., 404.

46 A.D. Lambert, ‘Winning without Fighting: British Grand Strategy and Its

Application to the US, 1815–1865’ in B.A. Lee and K.F. Walling (eds), Stra-

tegic Logic and Political Rationality: Essays in Honor of Michael Handel (London,

2003), 164–193.

47 A.D. Lambert, ‘Great Britain and the Baltic, 1809–1890’ in Rystad et al. (eds)

In Quest of Trade and Security: The Baltic in Great Power Politics. Part One

1500–1900, 297–334.

48 A.D. Lambert, The Crimean War: British Grand Strategy against Russia, 1853–1856

(Manchester, 1990).

49 J. Beeler (ed.), Letters and Papers of Admiral Sir A. Milne. Vol. I (Aldershot,

2004).

50 S.W. Roskill, Hankey – Man of Secrets. Volume I 1877–1916 (London, 1970).

51 G.S. Clarke, Fortiﬁcation (London, 1890 and 1907); G.S. Clarke, Imperial Defence

(London, 1897), G.S. Clarke, The Navy and the Nation (with James Thursﬁeld)

(London, 1897); G.S. Clarke, My Working Life (London, 1927); G.S. Clarke,

Studies of an Imperialist (London, 1927).

52 B. Gough, Gunboat Frontier: British Maritime Ascendancy and Northwest Coast

Indians, 1846–1890 (Vancouver, 1984). See also D.L. Smith (ed.), A Tour of

Duty in the Paciﬁc Northwest: E A Porcher and HMS Sparrowhawk, 1865–1868 (Fair-

banks, Alaska, 2000).

53 J. Samson, Imperial Benevolence: Making British Authority in the Paciﬁc Islands

(Hawaii,1998).

54 R.E. Dumett (ed.), Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Imperialism: The New Debate

on Empire (London, 1999), 68–81.

55 A. Day, The Admiralty Hydrographic Service: 1795–1919 (London, 1967), 266–269,

326 for the Baltic issues.

56 A.D. Lambert, ‘ “This is all we want”. Great Britain and the Baltic Approaches

1815–1914’, in J. Sevaldsen (ed.), Britain and Denmark: Political, Economic and

Cultural Relations in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Copenhagen, 2003), 147–169.

57 A. David, The Voyage of HMS Herald 1852–1861 (Melbourne, 1995).

58 See Lambert 1990 for Captains Sulivan and Spratt.

59 Sir J. Herschel (ed.), Admiralty Manual (London, 1849), iv. There were several

later editions.

60 M. Deacon, Scientists and the Sea 1650–1900: A study of Marine Science (London,

1971), 290–292.

61 G.E. Weir, An Ocean in Common: American Naval Ofﬁcers, Scientists and the Ocean

Environment (Texas, 2001).

62 A.D. Lambert, ‘Wirtschaﬂiche macht, technologischer Vorsprung und Imperi-

ale Stärke: Grossbritannien als einzigartige globale macht 1860 bis 1890’,

243–268.

63 P. Halpern, A Naval History of the World War One (Annapolis, 1994); H. Stra-

chan, The First World War: Volume 1 To Arms (Oxford, 2001).

132 A. Lambert

7 The Royal Navy and imperial

defence, 1919–1956

Greg Kennedy

Following the end of the First World War, the Royal Navy (RN) was the

world’s most powerful naval force. It led in most areas of important

technological innovation and modern ship numbers; its combat

experience in the new environments of air and underwater warfare was

unsurpassed; problems of manning and manpower management had

been handled with efﬁciency during the unprecedented expansion of the

force during the war. A web of naval bases and shore installations, sup-

ported by the world’s most advanced communications network, created an

unsurpassed global supply, repair and replenishment system able to

sustain RN operations anywhere at anytime. The intelligence system,

which directed the positioning of both ﬂeets and individual units, was one

of the most advanced in the world, gleaning information from human,

cable and radio sources; and, ﬁnally, doctrinal and training methods,

while not always recognized as such, were the most advanced in the

world.

Therefore, from a purely naval point of view, the strategic situation

regarding the RN’s utility as a tool of empire seemed to rival that of the

glory days of the years immediately following 1815: global supremacy.

However, the shifting sands upon which international relations were

based after 1919 had a decisive impact on the utility of naval power as a

tool for British strategic planning on an imperial scale.

The creation of

such uncertainty about the use of force and the place of the British Empire

within this New World Order created many questions then as to the size

and capabilities, as well as areas of operations, for the RN in its traditional

defence of the realm role in the interwar.

World ﬁnancial crises

call for

collective security measures for the maintenance of world peace,

and a

deeply ingrained desire for peace at almost any price in the British public

and political sectors (were many fervently wished to believe that there

would never be another World War) added to the political pitfalls

surrounding the fate of the RN in that period.

Finally, in the aftermath of

the First World War, the dominion partners within the Imperial system

were enthused with a new sense of nationhood and independence, as well

as obligation. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa all main-

tained a certain degree of belief in the idea that Great Britain now owed

them something for their role in the war and that something was a greater

autonomy in defence and foreign affairs matters, as well as a greater role in

imperial decisions on such matters. The reality of the interwar period for

the RN was that it was still as important a political and strategic element in

the game of international relations than it ever had been, but there were

some questions as to its viability as an operational deterrent or threat in its

role as guardian of the status of the British Empire and its integrity.

The commencement of a second major European war in 1939 seriously

undermined the utility of the political and diplomatic system of coercion

and deterrence that Britain had used, predominantly in concert with

naval, economic, and industrial power, to maintain an imperial status quo.

After September 1939, if the empire were to survive, the RN would have to

be rebuilt to the scale of a global, two-ocean navy once more, and power-

ful naval allies would have to be wooed into a security cooperation system

that had maritime power as its basis.

The escalation of the war from a

general European war to a global conﬂict in December 1941 made the

achievement of both of those outcomes less dependent on British

resources and will alone. The Japanese attack on America ensured that

the Anglo-American naval alliance, seen by many throughout the interwar

as the only guarantor of world peace, was made a reality. The role for the

RN throughout the rest of the war was then simpliﬁed, as far as imperial

defence was concerned: to be operationally effective in non-European

waters and to act on a signiﬁcant scale in the necessary regions of the

world that ensured both friend and foe alike and recognized the strategic

rights of the British Empire in the post-war world.

In the post–Second World War world, the RN once more found itself

working in a changed international system: the Cold War. Questions of

the utility naval power in the atomic age, as well as the uncertainty of just

what the British Empire was to be after 1945, created much uncertainty

for the Royal Navy: where was it to operate; what missions would it

perform; and what were the objectives in imperial defence to be achieved

through the use of maritime power?

By 1956, with the loss of India, the

British withdrawal from the Middle East underway, and British imperial

interests in the Far East in dispute, the RN had come to the end of its time

as the protector of formal empire.

In 1919, the technical supremacy of the RN was seen as a key compo-

nent of its ability to defend the British Empire. Submarines and aircraft

were the two new technologies that poised the greatest future threat to

imperial lines of communications. However, no obvious enemy was present

in 1919 with any substantial naval order of battle that possessed enough of

those two weapons in ample supply to threaten RN dominance. And, while

professional naval ofﬁcers within the RN speculated on what their service’s

future threats might be, the environment for long-term acquisition and

building programmes of any sort of vessel was bleak. Public opinion, fed a

steady diet of sensationalist reporting, viewed the battleship as one of the

134 G. Kennedy

causes of the First World War. Calls for the limitation of naval arms, in an

attempt to pre-empt any future arms race that might lead once more to

catastrophe, put severe pressure on politicians and budgeters in Britain

and the Empire, to say nothing of the costs of having to pay for the First

World War itself. The concept of freezing all spending on new battleship

building was viewed by the Admiralty as a possible solution to maintaining

technological superiority in battleships, given that the RN held the tech-

nical and numerical superiority over all other navies in that class.

Political

desires to reduce defence spending became manifest in the Ten Year Rule

put forward by the Cabinet to the Admiralty in 1920 in the belief that there

would be no major war in the next ten years, thus effectively freezing Admi-

ralty estimates. The US Navy (USN) was scheduled to produce a battleship

force equal to the RN’s, according to its 1916 naval construction program,

but there was no sign in 1920 of that potential threat achieving the reality

of parity. Japan was still an ally, according to the Anglo-Japanese Treaty,

and it possessed some new, modern battleships. The Italian ﬂeet was not a

threat nor was that nation likely to build a large battleﬂeet any time soon,

so long as it did not perceive any French construction program being a

serious threat to the balance of power in the Mediterranean. The German

ﬂeet was destroyed and the Russian ﬂeet ineffective and obsolete.

With

no serious naval threat present, British naval policy-makers were free to

consider a battleship-building holiday as a means of allowing future build-

ing programs to focus on cruisers, the true guardians of imperial lines of

communications. In 1921, the ﬁrst steps were taken to attempt to marry

naval policy and disarmament diplomacy as a method of ensuring imperial

security.

The 1921/1922 Washington Naval Conference demonstrated the imper-

ial imperatives governing the RN’s situation, particularly the importance of

the Far East in future imperial defence planning. Rear-Admiral Sir A.E.M.

Chatﬁeld, the Assistant Chief of Naval Staff and Admiralty representative to

the Washington Naval Conference, wrote to his friend Vice-Admiral Sir

Roger Keyes (who became Deputy Chief of Naval Staff in November 1921)

on 28 October 1921,

I am not enamoured of my task in this expedition. There is no doubt

that if the Political Horizon is cleared up by the Diplomatists, the

sailors will ﬁnd no difﬁculty in arriving at a basis for limitation and no

sailor wants to associate himself with a rigorous cutting down of the

Navy even if it is relative and proportionate, at any rate I don’t. We

stand also in an exceedingly difﬁcult position in regard to American

and Japanese Naval ofﬁcers. We stand to offend either by the amount

we associate with one or the other and the Japs at any rate will try and

claim us as their ally and friend. Sitting on the fence is uncomfortable

and we may be forced into an unpleasant position. However I expect

we shall manage alright!

The Royal Navy and imperial defence 135

The results of that conference saw British policy-makers accept the United

States’ right to a navy equal to the RN in size and quality, while the Japan-

ese, French, and Italians were forced to accept lesser limits: the infamous

5–5–3–1.75–1.75 ratio in battleships.

The discussions drifted apart on

issues concerning cruiser strength and capabilities, due in large part to

the RN’s need for this ﬂexible class of vessel for imperial defence roles.

Arguing its need to police vastly greater sea lines of communications, the

Admiralty was unwilling to consider dropping its cruiser strength below 70

vessels in that class. As well, the RN desired a large number of smaller

cruisers, of 6,000 tons or less with guns no bigger than six inch, as this

type of cruiser was seen as being the most useful for imperial defence mis-

sions. This was in opposition to American and Japanese desires for bigger

10,000 ton, eight-inch-gun cruisers, a type more suitable for powers with

fewer bases and a doctrine that utilized cruisers as part of a battle ﬂeet.

More important than the numerical or technical advantages that were

won at the conference, however, were the new international relationships

that existed for the RN after the Washington process was over.

Under advisement of the Foreign Ofﬁce, pressure from dominions

such as Canada, and because of the greater importance now placed on

the Anglo-American strategic relationship, the Washington Naval Confer-

ence brought to an end the long-standing maritime alliance which was

the Anglo-Japanese Treaty system. Under Article 19 of the Treaty, Britain

would not be allowed to develop any extensive system of bases in the Far

East, apart from Singapore. As well, as part of the Nine Power and Four

Power agreements which were a part of the Washington system, Britain

agreed to an established power-sharing arrangement in China, all

mechanisms aimed at ensuring a peaceful international situation govern-

ing the future development of that nation while protecting Japanese,

British, and American interests in the region, along with other lesser-

European naval powers. British naval supremacy, in combination, would

have to serve to protect British imperial interests in the post-war world.

The Washington Treaty and its associated elements gave the RN the

assured position of the world’s greatest naval power, a prerequisite for

effective imperial defence.

Throughout the rest of the 1920s, the Admiralty continued an ambi-

tious naval policy. British politicians acknowledged the need for a strong,

viable naval service in order to give authority to imperial policies in the

Middle East and Far East.

The addition of new aircraft carriers and cruis-

ers to the ﬂeet were in response to the need for the RN to be able to

project power in the far-ﬂung reaches of the empire. Showing the ﬂag and

maintaining the image of a nation willing to protect its empire through

the use of naval power and the newest weapons of naval warfare was a

prime concern of both politicians and the Admiralty alike.

Despite the

challenges of air power to the RN’s traditional role as the prime enabler

of imperial defence, the Admiralty remained the dominant service for the

136 G. Kennedy

provision of that task. Admiral Keyes informed Rear-Admiral Chatﬁeld in

October 1921 that, “You will ﬁnd that we have at last started to ofﬁcially

attack the Air Ministry but only indirectly at present through the Geddes

Committee”.

By 1926, in the Review of Defence Policy, the RN’s continued centrality

to imperial defence was upheld. The Review called for a strong navy, built

to Washington Treaty standards and “air development should be continu-

ously watched with a view to ensuring that full opportunity should be

taken of utilizing air power towards the maintenance of sea passage”.

being key factors in any successful imperial defence strategy.

In October

1926, the First Sea Lord, Admiral David Earl Beatty, speaking at his last

Imperial Conference, declared that in an age of no speciﬁc maritime

threat, effective imperial defence would only be assured: if strategic

freedom of movement was delivered through the maintenance of sea com-

munications; if the Far East, the most vulnerable area of the empire, was

protected through the completion of a ﬁrst-rate naval base at Singapore;

and last, that all trade routes and ports that composed this global commu-

nication and transportation system were protected effectively from any

naval and air attack.

Naval treaties and building programmes were not the only way in which

the RN attempted to mould its forces for the defence of empire in the

1920s. In fact, throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the RN played a vital and

proactive role in putting forward a vision of empire based on

naval/martial power, as well as promoted the connection between the

dominion navies and the RN. In the interwar period, the RN supported,

both politically and physically, a number of high-level missions. These

took the form of important ships, such as the HOOD, parading British

technological superiority to ports around the world. Equally, important

personages, such as Admirals of the Fleet, Lord Jellicoe and Earl Beatty, or

the Secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence, Sir Maurice Hankey,

and countless minor ofﬁcials and politicians, could be found journeying

to the far-ﬂung corners of the empire to spread the word from the core

that the dominions were vital to the RN and indeed the Empire’s entire

defence scheme. Without the dominions and the squadrons of lighter

ships and support vessels, the trained crews, the naval facilities and the

willingness in time of war to once more contribute ﬁscally to an increase

in British naval power, the RN’s global capability and sustainability would

be badly impaired.

Books, art works, periodicals, speaking tours, and

cinema were all various forms of media that the RN used and supported in

the interwar period to try and get such messages of strength, empire, and

maritime power to the disparate corners of the empire. And while this

role as symbol of empire is often acknowledged, it seldom gets the serious

scholarly study it deserves.

Tied to this lack of any understanding of the post-World War, one RN’s

views of empire is the paucity of works on that generation of senior naval

The Royal Navy and imperial defence 137

ofﬁcer and their views of utility of the British Empire. There is as yet no

full-length monograph that analyses the writings, correspondence, and

policy statements of the senior naval ofﬁcers of this period to show just

how imperial they really were. What schools of empire existed in the RN?

Were they all of one band in this world view? How conscious and success-

ful were the various methods of propaganda in support of imperial naval

strength? Were these aimed primarily at friends and allies to encourage

cooperation or were they part of a deterrence strategy and thus primarily

aimed at potential and real enemies? And it is here, in the area of studies

of the RN’s inﬂuence on culture and ideas of empire that there is much

work still to do. Little is written about what senior RN ofﬁcers and civil ser-

vants thought empire was in this interwar period, or, what they thought

the outcomes of such exercises in propaganda were.

The RN’s participation in the naval disarmament conferences which

followed the Washington conference were primarily aimed at safeguard-

ing issues directly related to imperial defence. The aim of the Admiralty

during the 1927 Geneva Conference was to try and ensure an adequate

number of heavy and light cruisers were left in place for protecting the

far-ﬂung imperial lines of communication. The 1930 London Naval Con-

ference saw the RN attempt to craft a global limitation on capital ships

while at the same time limit such ship types as submarines, the greatest

threat then in existence to those sea lines of communication. Aircraft car-

riers, an emerging threat to the traditional cruisers used to police sea

lanes, were also seen as a threat that the Admiralty wished to restrict.

However, the advantage to be found in the Paciﬁc through the use of such

a weapon system in covering the vast expanses forced the RN to acknow-

ledge the need to allow a higher percentage of that type of vessel that had

earlier been appreciated. The resulting restrictions on aircraft carriers

and cruisers of both types were not seen at that time as being detrimental

to the RN’s mission with regard to safeguarding those imperial highways.

So long as a balance of power existed between Britain, its formal and

potential allies, and any possible aggressors, the British Empire’s ability to

mobilize resources in time of crisis was still intact. However, if the balance

of naval forces in European waters posed any added restrictions on the

RN’s ability to send major ﬂeet units to the Indian and Paciﬁc Oceans,

problems could occur. However, safeguarding British strategic interests at

that level was recognized as being primarily a role of British diplomacy. If

the international system changed to such an extent that Britain began to

acquire a greater number of naval powers as potential adversaries, then

British naval power would have to be increased. This was the core naval

aspect of discussions of the Defence Requirements Sub-Committee of the

Committee of Imperial Defence (CID) in the period 1932–1934.

By 1935, with the rise of both German and Italian seapower and the

continuing willingness of Japan to pursue its own expansionist policy in

the Far East, the RN was forced to sponsor a twin path in order to achieve

138 G. Kennedy

some level of imperial security. Both policies were an attempt by the RN,

along with other parts of the British strategic, foreign policy-making elite,

to buy time for the construction of a new, more powerful ﬂeet whose size

and capability would allow the RN to wage war on two fronts: the Far East

and Europe.

The ﬁrst policy path was to support certain aspects of

appeasement towards all the aggressor powers. Inﬂuenced by various fac-

tions such as the Dominions, the Treasury (who did not want to pay for

such a large increase in naval spending as was dictated by the need for a

modern imperial navy), and key political ﬁgures such as Neville Chamber-

lain, the RN was willing to concede various political issues in order to

ensure that (a) war did not occur before the RN was modernized and

expanded, and (b) that the RN did not ﬁnd itself having to conduct

operations on three fronts simultaneously.

In order to be able to balance

imperial defence requirements against the need to be ready to act

decisively in European waters, the RN was forced by circumstances to use

the political path as a means of providing the necessary time required to

prepare a truly global ﬂeet. As part of that preparation, bases were

expanded around the world, infrastructure in Britain, in terms of produc-

tion capability and ship construction facilities, were increased, and

requests for the dominions to increase their contributions to the greater

naval good were made.

The smaller squadrons, such as the West Indies

Squadron and the China Squadron, were not increased in any signiﬁcant

fashion, in order that the maximum effort and resources could be

brought to bear on preparing the main ﬂeet. Aircraft carriers, modern

heavy and light cruisers, with enhanced anti-aircraft batteries, were two of

the main areas of effort, as were the laying down of a new generation of

battleships. In all these matters of ship design and construction, the Japan-

ese navy was as great an inﬂuence as the German or Italian ﬂeets, if not

greater. Fears about Japanese super-battleships, superior naval aircraft,

and a signiﬁcant submarine threat were key elements in the Admiralty

planning-process for any future theatres of operations.

However, the

threat of a German or Italian action in European waters taking place

simultaneously with major naval operations in the Far East was not the

only nightmare scenario for the RN. The fear of having to ﬁght a major

naval war in the Paciﬁc was a nightmare for Admiralty planners in 1937,

given the distances involved, the logistics strain supplying those operations

would have on fuel oil, ammunition and man power levels, the lack of

ﬂeet units available, the age of many of those units available, and the

growing evidence that airpower was going to be a major factor in the Far

Eastern theatre as shown by the use of the weapon by Japan in its war with

China.

Some meager attempts were made in the 1920s and 1930s to get

regional players, such as China and India, to increase their naval cap-

abilities, but these were never seriously developed options (it is unfortu-

nate that the current literature is devoid of any modern scholarly study of

the British attempts to increase India and Chinese naval capability in the

The Royal Navy and imperial defence 139

interwar). This great fear of overstretch was, however, only a reality if the

RN had to stand alone against the feared triple threat. Even that dreaded

scenario was manageable if a reliable naval ally could be found.

The second option for the RN was to actively search for strong naval

allies, albeit not always in an obvious, open, or formal manner. Such an

open relationship, such as a naval pact or treaty, could have acted as the cat-

alyst to cause the expansionist powers (especially Japan) to use their naval

forces in a pre-emptive fashion. Three nations were available in the interwar

for the RN to forge a professional alliance with. One of them, the Soviet

Union posited multiple political and strategic problems for any possible

Anglo-Soviet naval understanding. Apart from a political aversion within

some parts of the British strategic, foreign policy-making elite to forming

such an alliance, the reality of geopolitics also threw up hurdles to any

Anglo-Soviet naval agreement. While an Anglo-Soviet naval partnership

would have made it possible to exert pressure not only on the resurgent

German naval threat but also on the more distant Japanese, the price for

such an alignment was too great a political toll to pay. Such political limita-

tions did not prevent the RN from helping the Soviet Navy in the late 1930s

from improving its operational capability and infrastructure. Plans for

various ship types, guns and mountings, administrative processes, engines,

as well as actual copies of some of the material were all aspects of RN

support. The main strategic consideration for such help was the Admiralty’s

belief that a stronger Soviet navy would keep Germany occupied in the

Baltic and thus limit the resources available to the Kriegsmarine to attempt

to sever the imperial life-lines of empire to the British Isles. Equally, a resur-

gent Soviet navy in the Paciﬁc would likewise provide a counterweight to the

Imperial Japanese Navy’s ideas regarding expansion.

However, the Soviet

equation in the RN’s appreciation of world events was uncertain to say the

least. Secure relations were much more likely to be found through an

association with the French ﬂeet and the USN.

The French Fleet was seen by the RN as a very valuable necessity for safe-

guarding that jugular of empire: the Mediterranean. In 1935, during the

preparation for the London Naval Conference of that year, the Admiralty,

along with the FO clariﬁed the British position towards French naval power.

It is fully realized that it is our policy to remain on good terms with

France, but the Naval Staff emphasise that the French naval strength

provides, and will provide, the measure for the strength of the

strongest European naval Power and that the present position of

France may be assumed by a Power whose interests are opposed to

ours. There are reasons why a long naval agreement is highly desirable

and so our foreign policy must envisage, from the point of view of

naval security, our relationships for a long time ahead .. . . If we are to

accept deﬁnitely that it is an impossible ﬁnancial task to build up a suf-

ﬁcient naval strength to face the strongest European Power when we

140 G. Kennedy

are already engaged with Japan, that is a “Two-Power Standard”, we

must also accept the fact that the Admiralty cannot guarantee thee

security of our vital sea communications in Home Waters against attack

by sea. It seems that we must either trust to a naval combination with

some other Power to give us security at sea against such aggression, or

we must keep the balance of our forces remaining in Europe sufﬁ-

ciently strong to prove an effective deterrent to any interference,

namely, a “One-Power Standard . . .”

The RN’s concerns about whether or not Italy was a serious threat astride

one of the most important sea lanes of communication for the provision

of imperial security were highlighted during the Spanish Civil War and

the years 1936–1937 in particular. By 1938, with Japan at war with China

and German actions threatening to plunge Europe into war again, the RN

was compelled to admit that if the Admiralty were going to have the forces

available to send to the Far East to provide “durable security” for the

entire British Empire, The French Marine would have to provide the

majority of heavy ﬂeet units in the Mediterranean.

The RN would

provide light units, basing facilities and intelligence-sharing to the French,

but the Mediterranean element of the British Empire would have to be

protected by French maritime power in any three-front war. As Sir Ernle

Chatﬁeld, First Sea Lord in 1938, explained to British politicians,

If we were faced with such a war [against Germany, Italy, and Japan],

it would be better to lose the eastern Empire by ﬁghting than by

default. In the ﬁrst case, it would be an honourable defeat; in the

second case, it would be a disgrace.

Chatﬁeld’s willingness to rely on The French Marine to protect British

imperial interests was not the only naval alliance that the RN hoped to

work to good beneﬁt in the event of a global war. By 1937, and with the

growth of Japanese expansion and aggression in China, the RN looked

more and more towards the USN to help with the deterrence, and, if it

came to war, in the defeat of the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN).

Throughout the period from 1933–1939, the RN became more and

more indirectly reliant on the growing American maritime power. This

reliance was not simply a need for ships and naval forces to be signed by

treaty or pact to act in the defence of British imperial interests in the Far

East. Instead, fearful of provoking the IJN into an even more hostile posi-

tion with regard to western powers maintaining substantial naval forces in

the Far East, the RN increased its informal ties to the USN. By creating

these informal ties, through shared intelligence, codes, technology, plans,

ship designs, and political information, the RN used its perceived close

relationship with the USN to attempt to deter the Japanese from using

naval power to change the balance of power in the Far East.

As tensions

The Royal Navy and imperial defence 141