List of battlecruisers During the first half of the 20th century , many navies constructed or planned to build battlecruiser s : large capital ship s with greater speed but less armor than dreadnought battleship s . The first battlecruisers , the , were championed by the British First Sea Lord John Fisher and appeared in 1908 , two years after the revolutionary battleship . In the same year , Germany responded with its own battlecruiser , . Over the next decade , Britain and Germany built an additional twelve and six battlecruisers , respectively . Other nations joined them : entered service for the Royal Australian Navy in 1913 , Japan constructed four ships of the from 1911 through 1915 , and in late 1912 Russia laid down the four s , though they were never completed . Two countries considered acquiring battlecruisers in this time , but chose not to : France looked at several battlecruiser design studies in 1913 and 1914 , and the United States ordered six s in 1916 that were never built . The British and German battlecruisers were used extensively during World War I between 1914 and 1918 , including in the Battles of Heligoland Bight and Dogger Bank , and most famously in the Battle of Jutland on 31 May and 1 June 1916 , where one German and three British battlecruisers were sunk . The Japanese battlecruisers did not see action during the war , as the German naval presence in the Pacific was destroyed by the British in the early months of the war . Britain and Germany attempted to build additional battlecruisers during the war — the for the former , and the and es for the latter — but changing priorities in favor of smaller warships prevented their completion . At the end of the war , the German High Seas Fleet was interned and subsequently scuttled in Scapa Flow . In the immediate aftermath of World War I , Britain , Japan , and the United States all considered new battlecruiser construction , including the British G3 class , the Japanese , and a revised version of the American " Lexington " s . In the interest of avoiding another crippling naval arms race , the three countries , along with France and Italy , signed the Washington Naval Treaty in 1922 , which included a moratorium on new capital ship construction . A clause in the treaty , however , gave the British , Japanese , and Americans a chance to convert several of their battlecruisers into aircraft carrier s . Only a handful of battlecruisers survived the arms limitation regime . In the 1930s , several navies considered new " cruiser killer " battlecruisers , including Germany ' s , the Dutch Design 1047 , and the Soviet . The outbreak of World War II in September 1939 put a halt to all these plans . During the war , the surviving battlecruisers saw extensive action , and many were sunk . The four Japanese " Kongō " - class ships had been rebuilt as fast battleship s in the 1930s , but all were sunk during the conflict . Of the three British battlecruisers still in service , and were sunk , but survived the war . The only other battlecruiser in existence at the end of the Second World War was the ex - German , which had been transferred to Turkey during the First World War and served as " Yavuz Sultan Selim " . Several new wartime classes were proposed , including the American and the Japanese Design B - 65 class . The " Alaska " s were officially classified as " large cruisers " , but many naval historians refer to them as battlecruisers . Only two of the American ships were built before the end of the war . In the postwar drawdown of forces , " Renown " and the two " Alaska " s were withdrawn from service and eventually scrapped ; " Yavuz Sultan Selim " , the last surviving battlecruiser in the world , lingered on until the early 1970s , when she too was sent to the shipbreakers . Only one country , the Soviet Union , considered building battlecruisers after the war . The three ships , championed by Joseph Stalin , were laid down in the early 1950s , but were cancelled after his death in 1953 . Key . The list of battlecruiser classes includes all battlecruiser s listed in chronological order by commission . Classes which did not enter service are listed by the date of cancellation or last work on the project . Footnotes . Notes Citations