British Naval Weapons of World War Two, Volume I: Destroyer Weapons

By Norman Friedman

“For anyone wishing to super-detail any British destroyer of this era, this book looks to be a real must-have.” —Nautical Research Guild's Model Ship World 
 
John Lambert was a renowned naval draftsman, whose plans were highly valued for their accuracy and detail by modelmakers and enthusiasts. By the time of his death in 2016 he’d produced over 850 sheets of drawings, many of which have never been published—until now.
 
Lambert’s interest was always focused on smaller warships and his weapons drawings tend to be of open mountings—the kind that present a real challenge to modelmakers—rather than enclosed turret guns, but he also produced drawings of torpedo tubes, underwater weapons, fire-control directors, and even some specific armament-related deck fittings. This first volume in a series covers all such weapons carried by British destroyers of this era, with additional appendices devoted to earlier guns still in service, and destroyer-caliber weapons only mounted in larger ships. The drawings are backed by introductory essays by Norman Friedman, an acknowledged authority on naval ordnance, while a selection of photographs add to the value of the book as visual reference.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781526747686

Norman Friedman

NORMAN FRIEDMAN is arguably America’s most prominent naval analyst, and the author of more than thirty books covering a range of naval subjects, including Naval Anti-Aircraft Guns & Gunnery and Naval Weapons of World War One.

Book preview

Introduction

Background: World War I

The weapons shown in this book armed British destroyers built between the period before World War I and 1945. The Royal Navy’s choice of weapons can be understood in terms of what its destroyers were expected to do. We often think of them as fleet escorts, but for most of this time they were anything but. Initially there was no thought of including destroyers in a British battle fleet. The threat of torpedo attack by enemy destroyers was so serious that it was assumed that battleships and cruisers would fire at any destroyer they saw, without taking too much time to be sure of its identity. The idea that destroyers should be integrated with the battle fleet arose in the Royal Navy only after it appeared that the Germans intended to take their own destroyers to sea with their battle fleet. In 1910 the Royal Navy conducted exercises to decide whether and how destroyers should work with the fleet. The answer was that massed destroyer attacks might be effective against an enemy battle line, because as a whole it was so large a target that hits were bound to be made. At the time, however, British destroyers had only two or four torpedo tubes each, partly because British torpedo tubes were relatively heavy. Only in 1913 was a destroyer designed specifically as a fleet torpedo attacker (with five torpedo tubes and lighter guns), and the outbreak of World War I precluded building it. During the war, it was discovered that a triple tube could be built on about the weight of the previous twin, and eventually it armed the ‘V&W’ class destroyers and their leaders.

The ships were called ‘torpedo boat destroyers’ because the first British destroyers were intended to operate in the approaches to French torpedo boat bases, intercepting torpedo boats as they emerged. That particularly applied to the Channel, and to French ideas of raiding British shipping there. Speed was essential if the destroyer was to stay with the torpedo boat long enough to neutralise or sink her. The destroyers had alternative armaments for this role and as what amounted to ocean-going torpedo boats. In the latter role they would hunt enemy warships. Nearly up to the outbreak of World War I the Royal Navy retained the ideas of blockading enemy ocean-going torpedo craft and also of hunting enemy heavy ships in packs. British destroyers exercised simulated blockades of the German naval bases. That idea died off as it turned out that a continuous blockade would have required far more destroyers than the Royal Navy wanted to buy or operate. As for hunting, the 1913 manoeuvres showed that, however narrow the North Sea might look on a map, actually finding an enemy fleet or squadron in it would be extremely difficult. Asked for examples of successful hunting, the exercise commanders had to admit that there had been none: the hunting destroyers had found nothing at all at night.

The triple torpedo tube was adopted in the ‘V&W’ class; in effect, it was the earlier twin mounting with a third tube added above. Some ships had an additional barrel-shaped fitting atop the upper tube. The two post-war prototypes Amazon and Ambuscade had similar torpedo tubes, but all later British torpedo tubes had their barrels on the same level. (John Lambert Collection)

This was the background against which destroyers were incorporated into the Grand Fleet formed in 1914. They were conceived as a torpedo attack force, which at the least could help break up an enemy formation and make it vulnerable to gun attack. It seemed inevitable that a line of closely-packed enemy capital ships would suffer numerous hits from such a ‘browning’ attack. The phrase came from the army term for firing ‘into the brown’ of massed enemy troops. If attacks could be mounted during a gun action (an idea the Germans exercised), the enemy might have to evade, and that in turn would ruin his gunnery – contemporary British fire control generally required the shooter to steer a steady course.

The hunting idea lived on in the formation of Force T at Harwich under Commodore Tyrwhitt. It would normally operate independently in the southern part of the North Sea and could be assigned to rendezvous with the Grand Fleet to enlarge its destroyer force. In fact, it proved nearly impossible to arrange the desired rendezvous, and to its great disappointment Force T did not participate in the Battle of Jutland.

The great problem of operating destroyers integral with the fleet was their limited endurance. Fortunately, by 1914 all modern British destroyers burned oil rather than coal. British battleships generally burned oil as well as coal (only the Queen Elizabeths and later ships were all-oil). For a time it was thought that destroyers at shore bases could be ordered to meet the fleet at sea once action was imminent; the Harwich Force of destroyers exemplified this idea. That proved impractical. The Grand Fleet learned that it could extend destroyer endurance by fuelling at sea, typically by towing a destroyer while passing an oil hose over the battleship’s stern. For the Royal Navy, then, oil fuel turned destroyers into an integral component of the Grand Fleet. It eliminated the considerable problem of setting a rendezvous, when the timing of the battle was not at all certain. Even at Jutland, when the British knew the Germans were coming out and knew roughly what they were doing, the actual time and position of the collision between the two fleets could not have been predicted. The Germans, who burned coal and could not refuel their destroyers at sea, seem to have accepted that the effective endurance of their fleet was set by the endurance of their destroyers.

Commanding the Grand Fleet, Admiral Sir John Jellicoe saw things somewhat differently. He was aware that his light cruisers were supposed to be his primary anti-destroyer weapon. Compared to destroyers, they were much better gun platforms and also had more powerful batteries. Jellicoe believed that the Germans would emphasise torpedo attack. After all, the creator of their battle fleet, Admiral von Tirpitz, had begun his career as a torpedo specialist. The Germans certainly talked about integrating their destroyers with their capital ships, and in pre-war exercises they often practised a splashy manoeuvre in which destroyers slipped between battleships in line ahead formation, steaming out between the two engaged fleets to attack enemy battleships and disrupt their line. Although the British 1910 exercises showed that any such manoeuvres would be rather dangerous, they had the potential to wreck British gunnery. The British Iron Duke and later classes of capital ships were given protected 6in secondary guns specifically to deal with this threat. Previous classes had had unprotected secondary (anti-torpedo boat) batteries because it seemed obvious that destroyer torpedo attacks would come only before or after the gun

Reviews for British Naval Weapons of World War Two, Volume I

[Richard kaczmarek · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Although it contains much details and relatively good
quality photos, this reference book does not belong
in digital format.

After page 150, there is a series of very detailed diagrams
of various "guns" and other naval equipment which
CANNOT be magnified enough to be read. Half
of the book is useless.

P.S. I found that if you press the enlarge button, the
picture gets smaller; conversely, if you press the
decrease button the image gets larger ( but not
enough to be readable)