Japan refuses to send battlecruisers

On 15 November 1917 the government of Japan replied to London that it could not grant the request for two Japanese battlecruisers with Japanese crews to join the British Grand Fleet in the North Sea for the duration of the war. It was the second refusal in this matter. A few weeks earlier Tokyo had declined to sell these ships to Britain.

British fears

The request came from the First Sea Lord, Admiral John Jellicoe. On 21 July 1917 he wrote to the new First Lord of the Admiralty, Eric Geddes, that by the end of the year the balance of British and German battlecruisers would become “serious”. At the Battle of Jutland the British had lost three such ships, while the Germans were bringing new ones into service, such as the Hindenburg. The Admiralty also feared further raids by fast German ships on the English coast. Jellicoe wrote that there was only one way out: to use Japanese battlecruisers, because apart from Germany and Britain only Japan had ships of this class.

The ships in question were the four of the Kongō class: Kongō, Hiei, Haruna and Kirishima. They were then among the most powerful battlecruisers in the world, armed with eight 356 mm guns. The first of them, Kongō, had been built in Britain, at the Vickers yard in Barrow. Jellicoe did not believe, however, that the Japanese would agree to send them to Europe, and proposed simply buying them. The American historian Timothy Saxon also quotes his remark that even if they came with Japanese crews, it was “doubtful whether they would be a match for the German battlecruisers”.

Two refusals

The British War Cabinet agreed with Jellicoe, and the ambassador in Tokyo, Sir Conyngham Greene, sounded out the Japanese government about the sale of two ships. According to the British historian Ian Nish, the Japanese replied in October that their navy had only four battlecruisers and could not meet the British wish. London therefore softened the request: the ships would remain Japanese and sail with Japanese crews, only serving with the Grand Fleet for the duration of the war. On 15 November Tokyo refused for the second time.

Japan was already helping its allies at sea. Since the spring its destroyers had been escorting transports in the Mediterranean, and in May the government of Prime Minister Masatake Terauchi had agreed to send another four destroyers and the cruiser Izumo there. But it did not want to give up its heavy ships. Nish points out that in Tokyo the United States, which was just then expanding its fleet, was regarded as the future adversary, and there was no wish to weaken Japan’s own forces in the Pacific. Japanese diplomacy was in any case absorbed at the time by relations with Washington, with which the Lansing–Ishii Agreement had been concluded on 2 November. Saxon adds that the repeated British attempts to buy Japanese ships irritated the government in Tokyo and wounded Japanese pride.

The refusal changed little in the North Sea. In December a squadron of American battleships joined the Grand Fleet, and to the end of the war the German battlecruisers posed no serious threat to British superiority.