It was not to be expected that a multilateral treaty of such great import, and on such an unprecedented subject, as the Five Power Treaty of Naval Limitation signed at Washington in 1922 would enjoy a smooth life. It raised, firstly, the question, for both the British and the Americans, of how to defend their positions in the Pacific, since they were forbidden to add to their fortifications in the western Pacific and, in effect, they had ceded naval supremacy there to the ‘local’ great power Japan, which already possessed defended and developed bases in the area. The Americans, whose remote Pacific possessions had never prompted Congress to appropriate money for their defence, merely shrugged their shoulders and concentrated on building up Pearl Harbor, far distant from the threatened islands. The British embarked on the long saga of developing a naval base at Singapore, sufficient to house the ‘main fleet’ and near enough to the western Pacific to deter Japanese imperial ambitions [41, 58].

There was, secondly, an American programme, ultimately accomplished, to raise the elevation of their battleships’ main armament, which drew British objections, though it was a moot point as to whether it was prohibited by the treaty. British ships had a 20° elevation whereas the older American ships had a 15° elevation, raised to 30° after Washington; only a few British ships were raised to this elevation in 1935–37. The Americans happily adopted a ‘stand pat’ position on the treaty as regards capital ship gun calibres and displacement and evidently enjoyed substantial battleship building facilities, in contrast to the British [42, 56, 62].

Although the treaty had specified total tonnage amounts in submarines for each of the signatories and the Root Resolutions had endeavoured to pin submarines to the historic rules on cruiser warfare, the British were disappointed that no other nation had supported their heartfelt (but scarcely realistic) proposal for total abolition of a weapon which had brought Britain almost to her knees in the spring of 1917.