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Aircraft Carriers of World War Two

of the United States, United Kingdom, and Japan

Aircraft carriers of World War Two revolutionized naval warfare. Early on, with the surprising, and effective, Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor and Malaya, when they sank many battleships, it became clear that naval power was now naval aviation power. It was simply a matter of 'reach.' Sixteen-inch guns that could fire a shell over twenty miles could not match airplanes with a range of hundreds of miles.

As the navies of the world competed with each other in the decades before WW2, they were constrained by the Washington and London naval treaties. Thus, no carrier could exceed 33,000 tons. After specifying some exceptions for ships in current use and under construction, the treaty limited the total capital ship tonnage of each of the signatories. The tonnage was defined in the treaty to exclude fuel (and boiler water) because Britain argued that their global activities demanded higher fuel loads than other nations and they should not be penalized.

Aircraft carriers were addressed specifically: the total tonnage for carriers of the United States and the British Empire was limited to 135,000 tons; for France and Italy 60,000 tons; and for Japan 81,000 tons. Only two carriers per nation could exceed 27,000 tons, and those two were limited to 33,000 tons each. The number of large guns carried by an aircraft carrier was sharply limited - it was not legal to put a small aircraft on a battleship and call it an aircraft carrier.

For convenience, I include the smaller escort carriers in this section on aircraft carriers.

Using the pictures from the 1943-45 Naval Recognition Manual as a base, I plan to cover four major powers of the war: United States, United Kingdom, Japan, and Germany.  As the manual was designed specifically for recognition, it includes classes of warships, not individual ships. Thus, all the ships presented here are lead ships of their class.