Cheating the Washington Treaty by misdirection madness

[tigercat]

In another bout of insanity caused by lack of dried frog pills and too much naval history I thought of a Shell game involving a Battleship

This probably won't work  but say you took 1 large Battleship Emperor of India and arranged for it to be sunk as a target.

you then took 1 large merchantman disguised as an Iron Duke class Battleship and sunk it instead

for example similar to the SS Montezuma and substituted one for the other . Then sunk the substitute could you fool observers.  Say you sank it in a torpedo trial so as to disguise the reason for shells going through its "armour" like butter

obviously the idea is completely insane as it would involve insane amounts of operational security and a place where you could hide a battleship and the thought that you might need a spare battleship for a war you didn't know was going to happen

[sequoiaranger]

Yes, perhaps you licked the skin of Bufo alvanis one too many times!!

As you know, the Yamato, the largest battleship ever, was built out of sight of the public, but Japan at the time was a tightly-controlled society with rigid authority over who went where and saw what.

One would also think that if a battleship was going to be destroyed (as in a treaty obligation, etc.) that COMPETENT observers would oversee the procedure to eliminate any attempt at deception.

The whif-world, however is a TOTALLY different place, so you can configure your observers and observations to your liking...or licking!!  

[pyro-manic]

The other problem is crewing, and training said crew without anyone spotting the mystery battleship or wondering where their husband has gone. Or just keep the thing in mothballs (which is not cheap) and then refit, re-crew, re-train and work up again when the midden hits the windmill, hopefully before it's all over.

Iron Duke herself was around until after WW2, though as a training ship she lacked her armour belt and most of her armament. She could conceivably have been returned to service, though it would not have been cost-effective (and she would have been of questionable utility other than perhaps for shore-bombardment). Centurion was also around as well, used as a decoy (disguised as a new KGV class) and then sunk as a blockship for D-Day.

[royabulgaf]

The guy who did Furushita's Fleet toyed with the idea of of the Pacific powers beefing up the navies of their client states- Britain of course had India, Australia and New Zealand, the US had the Phillipines, and Japan Thailand and Manchuko

[tigercat]

If you could have had the Dominions allocated there own tonnage seperate from the Royal Navy you could have transferred ships across to the India , Canada , New Zealand and Australia

But which ones from a political point of view you had a HMS Australia and a HMS New Zealand and HMS Emperor of India. HMS Canada would have gone back to the Chileans but would they have been the right ships to retain.

I suppose HMS Tiger might have been one of the best bets for retention

Now if the

The Canadian Naval Aid Bill of 1913 had passed and we ended up with 3 more Queen Elizabeth types then that would have been very different.

[rickshaw]

If you could have had the Dominions allocated there own tonnage seperate from the Royal Navy you could have transferred ships across to the India , Canada , New Zealand and Australia

You could in Whiff-world but in Real-world the dominion Navies were really just squadrons of the Royal Navy.  They were very tightly integrated into the RN's planning.  Their commanders came from the RN and in the case of the RAN, it could be claimed they listened to London first and Canberra second.   It took the shock of the loss of Force Z and then Singapore to force Canberra to start thinking seriously about its own needs over that of Empire.  Something Mr. Churchill had to have forcibly brought to his attention.