| abstract
| - The United States Navy began building a series of battlecruisers in the 1920s, more than a decade after their slower and less heavily armed armored cruisers had been rendered obsolete by the Royal Navy's Invincible-class battlecruisers. Construction of these ships was abandoned under the terms of an armaments limitation treaty, though two were completed as aircraft carriers. The US Navy subsequently ordered six "large cruisers"—which are often considered battlecruisers by historians—in 1940, of which only two entered service. At first unconvinced of the importance of the superior speed of the British battlecruisers, the US Navy changed its position after evaluating the new type of ship in fleet exercises and Naval War College wargames, and after the Japanese acquisition of four Kongō-class battlecruisers in the early 1910s. The Secretary of the Navy initially refused the General Board's suggested procurement of several battlecruisers, but fleet exercises revealed that the Navy lacked forces that could effectively find and track an enemy fleet in any weather, and a consensus gradually emerged that battlecruisers would be ideal for this role. Battlecruisers were effective when concentrating their fire on an enemy fleet's leading ships, as the Japanese armored cruisers had done to the Russians at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905. Another role envisioned was tracking down and destroying enemy commerce raiders. British experience during the Battle of the Falkland Islands in late 1914 and the Battle of Dogger Bank the following year, where British battlecruisers caught and destroyed German armored cruisers, confirmed all these capabilities. So when Congress authorized a large naval building program in 1916, six Lexington-class battlecruisers were included. None were completed before the arms-limiting Washington Naval Treaty was ratified in 1922; four were broken up on the slipway and two were converted into aircraft carriers. The treaty forestalled any further development of battlecruisers for the next decade and a half, but a number of countries experimented with "cruiser-killer" ships in the late 1930s that were designed to destroy the post-London Naval Treaty heavy cruisers. These designs were formally designated as battlecruisers by the Dutch and Soviets and as large cruisers by the Japanese and Americans, but all were roughly equivalent and all were commonly called battlecruisers. The US Navy's main impetus for the Alaska class was the threat posed by Japanese cruisers raiding its lines of communication in the event of war. Heavy cruisers were also the most likely surface threat to aircraft carriers making independent raids, so a cruiser-killer was also an ideal carrier escort. Reports of a Japanese equivalent reinforced the Navy's desire for these ships. Two were commissioned in time to serve during the last year of World War II, but were decommissioned two years after the war.
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