It's not really very fair to say the the Japanese were cheating
when the built the 6" gunned cruisers that were later converted
to 8" gunned ones because the British & the US did the same thing.
The reason was that the treaties set a limit of 10,000t standard
displacement for cruisers & then set another total tonnage limit
for heavy cruisers which were defined as ships with 8" guns. There
was no total limit on other (light) cruisers other than the 10,000t
displacement limit. It didn't take long for someone to realize that
15-6" guns in 5 turrets could put out more weight in shells (the
guns fired faster, BTW) than the 9-8" guns most US heavies carried
& about the same as the 10-8" that the Japanese carried. For the
record the US built 9 of these large "light" cruisers, after we
had built our treaty limit of 8" cruisers, while the Japanese only
built 4. These so-called light cruisers were every bit as large
as the real heavies & armored comparably. The Japanese did con-
vert theirs to 8" guns, of course, but only after the treaties had
expired. The British, on the other hand, built theirs smaller than
their 8" cruisers, to save money, & never really intended them to
be equal. Another interesting point is that both the US, Japan &
Britain used the hulls of capital ships to construct their earlt
a/c carriers. The Japanese, however, made provisions to convert
them back to battleships in case of war. As it turned out, by the
time the treaties had expired & war came, the option was never even
considered.
Phil Pugliese
[email removed]