Japanese aircraft carrier Ryūjō
Ryūjō ( "Prancing Dragon") was a light aircraft carrier built for the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) during the early 1930s. Small and lightly built in an attempt to exploit a loophole in the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, she proved to be top-heavy and only marginally stable and was back in the shipyard for modifications to address those issues within a year of completion. With her stability improved, Ryūjō returned to service and was employed in operations during the Second Sino-Japanese War. During World War II, she provided air support for operations in the Philippines, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies, where her aircraft participated in the Second Battle of the Java Sea. During the Indian Ocean raid in April 1942, the carrier attacked British merchant shipping with her guns and aircraft. Ryūjō next participated in the Battle of Dutch Harbor, the opening battle of the Aleutian Islands campaign, in June 1942. She was sunk by American carrier aircraft in the Battle of the Eastern Solomons on 24 August 1942. Design Ryūjō was planned as a light carrier of around standard displacement to exploit a loophole in the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 that carriers under standard displacement were not regarded as "aircraft carriers". While Ryūjō was under construction, Article Three of the London Naval Treaty of 1930 closed the above-mentioned loophole; consequently, Ryūjō was the only light aircraft carrier of her type to be completed by Japan. Ryūjō had a length of overall. with a beam of and a draft of . She displaced at standard load and at normal load. Her crew consisted of 600 officers and enlisted men. To keep Ryūjōs weight to 8,000 metric tons, the hull was lightly built with no armor; some protective plating was added abreast the machinery spaces and magazines. She was also designed with only a single hangar, which would have left an extremely low profile (there being just of freeboard amidships and aft). Between the time the carrier was laid down in 1929 and launched in 1931, the Navy doubled her aircraft stowage requirement to 48 in order to give her a more capable air group. This necessitated the addition of a second hangar atop the first, raising freeboard to . Coupled with the ship's narrow beam, the consequent top-heaviness made her minimally stable in rough seas, despite the fitting of Sperry active stabilizers. This was a common flaw amongst many treaty-circumventing Japanese warships of her generation. The Tomozuru Incident of 12 March 1934, in which a top-heavy torpedo boat capsized in heavy weather, caused the IJN to investigate the stability of all their ships, resulting in design changes to improve stability and increase hull strength. Ryūjō, already known to be only marginally stable, was promptly docked at the Kure Naval Arsenal for modifications that strengthened her keel and added ballast and shallow torpedo bulges to improve her stability. Her funnels were moved higher up the side of her hull and curved downward to keep the deck clear of smoke.