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Ever since I read "The Caine Mutiny" I've been off and on obsessed with the US 1,000 ton/4-piper/flush-deck destroyers.
Those are Caldwell, Clemson and Wickes classes.
I used to watch a lot of World of Warship videos and noticed that destroyers and torpedoes could be devastating.
In the game, the tubes reload and you can try over and over.
In the real world, even if you had spares in the hold, there's no means to reload them.
So a flush-deck gets 12 torpedo shots then it's a gunboat.
Then it needs to get to a dock or a destroyer tender to get reloaded.
This might not be true of every destroyer class, but it's common.
Honestly, it surprised me.
Yep, very few destroyers carried reloads for their torpedos. IIRC, the Japanese did so most commonly, but the Americans never did.
ReplyDeleteThe USN also willingly gave up torpedoes in exchange for AA by 1944. The Fletcher and Sumner/Gearing classes frequently landed one of their quintuple torpedo tubes in exchange for more 40mm AA guns. The Japanese were the exception with a bigger torpedo and power operated reloading gear as part of each mount. Even the torpedo mad Japanese were willing to sacrifice tubes for AA, the last Special Type destroyers were the AA focused Akizukl class which traded one torpedo mount for a fourth main battery mount.
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