Fletcher-class Destroyer

Every American destroyer of the 1930s was designed around a number in a document. The naval treaties capped destroyer tonnage, and the result was a decade of ships in which something always had to be sacrificed: guns or torpedoes, endurance or anti-aircraft, stability or armament. Designers were building compromises and knew it.

The Fletcher was the first US destroyer drawn after those limits collapsed. At about 2,100 tons standard — considerably larger than her predecessors — and with a flush deck for hull strength, she finally had the size to carry everything at once: a full gun battery, a full torpedo outfit, depth charges, a growing anti-aircraft armament and the electronics. 175 were commissioned between 1942 and 1944, more than any other destroyer class in US Navy history.

The Fletchers were the first American destroyers fitted with radar as designed rather than as an afterthought, and the timing could not have been more pointed. Through 1942 the US Navy was losing night surface actions around Guadalcanal to a Japanese navy trained obsessively for exactly that kind of fighting, with superb optics and the Long Lance torpedo.

Radar reversed the arithmetic. A ship that can see in the dark does not need better night vision than its enemy; it needs the enemy not to see it. By 1943 American destroyer squadrons were using radar to detect Japanese formations, work out the geometry and fire torpedoes before being seen at all — and the Solomons night battles, which the Imperial Navy had been winning, stopped going that way. The textbook case came at Cape St. George on 25 November 1943, where Arleigh Burke’s Destroyer Squadron 23 — Fletchers — detected a Japanese destroyer force on radar, fired torpedoes from beyond visual range, and then ran down the survivors. Three Japanese destroyers were sunk; not one American ship was damaged. It was studied afterwards as a near-perfect surface action, and none of it would have been possible without seeing first.

The main battery was five 5-inch/38 guns in single mounts — the finest dual-purpose naval gun of the war, accurate, fast-firing, and equally usable against ships, aircraft and shore targets. Paired later with the proximity fuze, it became the most effective anti-aircraft weapon afloat.

For surface work the class carried ten 21-inch torpedo tubes in two quintuple mounts amidships, plus depth charges and, as the war went on, an anti-aircraft outfit that grew relentlessly with Bofors and Oerlikons as the kamikaze threat developed. That combination is the point of the design: a Fletcher could screen a carrier, hunt a submarine, shell a beach and fight a night torpedo action, and it did not have to give up any of those to do the others.

The class’s most famous hour belongs to one ship. On 25 October 1944 off Samar, USS Johnston — a Fletcher — turned with the rest of Taffy 3’s screen and charged a Japanese battle force built around the Yamato, laying smoke, firing torpedoes and drawing fire away from the escort carriers until she was destroyed.

It is an extreme case and it is also a fair illustration of the type. A destroyer’s job includes putting itself between the enemy and something more valuable, and a ship with ten torpedo tubes and thirty-six knots can make even a battleship manoeuvre. The Japanese commander withdrew convinced he faced a far heavier force than he did, and the destroyers had a great deal to do with that.

The hardest duty came at Okinawa in 1945. To give the fleet warning of incoming kamikaze, destroyers were stationed alone on radar picket stations, tens of kilometres outside the main formation — which meant they were the first ships any attacker saw, and the ones with no other target nearby to divert the attack.

The picket stations took losses out of all proportion to their numbers, and the Fletchers and their successors absorbed them. Of the 19 Fletchers lost during the war, a large share went in the Okinawa campaign. It was the least glamorous duty of the campaign and one of the most costly: ships stationed alone to be attacked first, so that the carriers behind them gained a few minutes’ warning. The design took the punishment better than anyone had a right to expect: ships came back with bows blown off, engine rooms flooded and superstructures burned out, and were repaired and sent back. The flush deck and the size that the treaties would never have allowed turned out to matter most at exactly the moment the class was being hit hardest.

The Fletcher is usually described as the best destroyer of the war, and the claim is defensible on the merits: no other design of the period balanced gunnery, torpedoes, anti-submarine work, anti-aircraft defence and electronics as completely, and none was built in anything like the numbers. Nineteen were lost; a hundred and fifty-six were not.

Their afterlife makes the same argument. Fletchers served in the US Navy through Korea, and were transferred to a dozen other navies where some remained in service into the 1970s — thirty years after they were designed. A hull of ~2,100 tons standard — the first American destroyer not sized by a treaty — turned out to have enough margin left in it to absorb three decades of new weapons and electronics.

• Roger Chesneau (ed.), Conway’s All the World’s Fighting Ships 1922–1946 (Conway Maritime Press).
• Norman Friedman, U.S. Destroyers: An Illustrated Design History (Naval Institute Press).
• James D. Hornfischer, The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors (Bantam Books).