Fletcher Class Destroyer - Design

Design

The Fletcher-class destroyer was the first generation of destroyers to be designed after the series of Naval Treaties, that had limited ship designs heretofore. The growth in the design was in part answer to the question that always dogged U.S. Navy designs, that being the ranges required by the Pacific Ocean. They were also to carry no less than five 5 in (127 mm) guns and ten deck-mounted torpedo tubes on the centerline, allowing them to meet any foreign design on equal terms. Compared to earlier designs, the Fletchers were large, allowing them to absorb the addition of two 40mm Bofors quadruple mount AA guns as well as six 20mm Oerlikon dual AA gun positions. This addition to the AA suite required the deletion of the forward quintuple torpedo mount, a change was under the 4 April 1945 anti-kamikaze program.

They also were much less top heavy than the previous classes, allowing them to take on additional equipment and weapons without major redesign. They had the fortune of catching American production at the right moment becoming "the" destroyer design, and only Fletcher-class derivatives, the Sumner and Gearing classes, would follow it. The first design inputs were in the fall of 1939 from questionnaires distributed around design bureaus and the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations. The design parameters were in the form of the armaments desired of the next destroyer. As such the questions of how many guns, torpedoes, and depth charges were seen as desirable and further asked at what point would the design grow large enough to become a torpedo target instead of a torpedo delivery system. The answer that came back was five 5 in (127 mm) dual purpose guns, twelve torpedoes, and twenty eight depth charges would be ideal, while the idea of returning to the 1500 ton designs of the past was seen as undesirable. Speed requirements varied from 35 to 38 kn (40 to 44 mph; 65 to 70 km/h), and shortcomings in the earlier Sims class, which were top heavy and needed lead ballast to correct it, caused the Fletcher design to be widened by 18 in (46 cm) in the beam. No design can be perfect and the Fletchers were no exception. As with other previous U.S. flush deck destroyer designs, seagoing performance suffered to a degree. This was mitigated somewhat due to deployment in the Pacific. The class featured enclosed air-case boilers and 80 kW of power available by emergency diesel generators.