So Sarge, what exactly is a destroyer?

U.S. Navy Destroyers, Sample Size Comparisons

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Warships are expensive, especially the big ones. Many nations with a coastline can't afford large navies. This has always been true and continues today. Now what if a small country can afford a smaller warship which can pack a very large punch? More bang for the buck, so to speak.

This was all rather problematic prior to the invention of the Whitehead torpedo. While "torpedoes" did exist during the War of the Rebellion (1861-1865), they were not self-propelled and were known as "spar torpedoes". Essentially a bomb attached to a spar, an extension projecting out from the bow of the ship. So the smaller (cheaper) ship attacking the larger (more expensive) ship had to pretty much go right alongside its target. With deleterious results for the target ship and the attacking vessel.

The Confederate States Ship H.L. Hunley managed to sink the USS Housatonic using a spar torpedo, she also sank herself with the loss of all crew.

The Whitehead torpedo, which could be launched at a distance, revolutionized naval warfare. Now a small, rather inexpensive boat could carry a weapon which could sink a much larger (expensive) warship. (I'm sure the Royal Navy pronounced this as barbaric and unsporting.)

Capital ships* began to get even more expensive with the advent of covering them with armor plate and providing larger and larger guns in rotating turrets. So torpedo boats (as they were called), small, fast boats carrying two or more Whitehead-type torpedoes posed a huge threat to the modern, armored battleship.

HMS Lightning, an early torpedo boat (1876).
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How does one fight a torpedo boat? The existing warships were too heavy and slow to maneuver to avoid the torpedoes being sent their way by these small, fast (and hard to hit) torpedo boats. If those torpedo boats were in close enough, the big ships couldn't even depress their big guns low enough to hit them! (Not to mention not being able to swivel fast enough to track them.)

What to do, what to do?

This fellow had a pretty good idea -

Capitán de Navio Fernando Villaamil Fernández-Cueto
Spanish Navy

Create another type of small combatant to fight the torpedo boats, it would be as fast and maneuverable as the torpedo boat, but would be armed with cannons as well as torpedoes. Their sole mission would be to protect the capital ships from the torpedo boats. Thus was born the torpedo boat destroyer. (You see where this is going, don't you?)

Spanish Navy torpedo gunboat Contratorpedero Destructor, designed and built in the UK by Thomson and delivered to the Spanish Navy in 1887.

Destructor's Armament

• 1 × 90 mm gun
• 4 × 57 mm guns
• 2 × 37 mm guns
• 2 × 360 mm torpedo tubes

Sadly, Capitán de Navio Fernando Villaamil Fernández-Cueto was killed in action during the Spanish-American War at the Battle of Santiago de Cuba. Perhaps fittingly, he died aboard the Spanish destroyer Furor.

Francisco Arderius, one of Furor's officers, reported Fernando Villaamil's end:

After several gunshots that caused tremendous damage and many casualties, Capitán de Navio Villaamil went up to the prow gun platform; when I was about to follow him, a grenade exploded there [...]. I could only see a flood of blood coming down. [...] Shortly after we went overboard, the ship, already on fire, sunk with the lifeless body of Don Fernando Villaamil. (Source)

Over time, the size of the torpedo boat destroyers grew - while the name got smaller. Eventually they were simply called destroyers.

With the advent of the guided missile, both anti-ship (including submarines) and anti-air, the destroyer became a major surface combatant in it's own right. Prior to that, destroyers were used in their original role of performing screening for the capital ships. In World War I their opponents were generally other destroyers. Though with larger torpedoes, they posed a large threat to capital ships. Ship captains did not like to see torpedo tracks in the water, heading their way.

In both world wars destroyers were used to escort convoys of merchant ships, protecting them from another new weapon, the submarine. That role became very large in World War II against the German and Japanese submarine fleets. The Japanese also used their destroyers very effectively against U.S. Navy submarines. While the Germans and Italian did have destroyers, many of the German destroyers were destroyed in the Norway campaign of 1940. The Italians were operating under the threat of air attacks throughout the Mediterranean. The European Axis destroyers played a smaller role than their British, American, and Japanese counterparts.

In the opening graphic, you can see the steady growth in size of the American destroyer. Those aren't all of the various American destroyer classes over time, just a representative sample from World War I (Clemson-class) to the present day. While the Spruance-class is larger than the Arleigh Burke-class, this is something of an anomaly, the same hull was used for the Ticonderoga-class (sometimes called Aegis-class) cruisers. Typically cruisers are larger than destroyers. Two ships, same hull, different missions.

The Zumwalt-class is the size of a World War II cruiser, she's a very large ship for a destroyer, one could argue that in reality, she isn't a destroyer at all. Designed primarily for land attack, with the dropping of the Advanced Gun System, she's just a big missile carrier.

Modern destroyers have vastly more capable sensors but are somewhat less well-armed than their predecessors. All those missiles are very capable but there are only so many. An anti-aircraft missile isn't very useful against a surface or submerged target. The same goes for the other missiles. Before deploying, a missile armed destroyer needs to choose its missile load-out carefully.

At least the Arleigh Burke-class still has a gun (though small) and can fire torpedoes. It has a lot of missile as well.

Destroyers are the workhorses of the fleet. Important ships for an uncertain world, there are never enough of them.




Sources and other reading:

• Torpedo Boats
• Fernando Villaamil
• Destroyers

* A capital ship is typically the largest, most effective ship in a fleet. Up until early World War II the capital ship was the armored battleship. In modern times it is the aircraft carrier, some might argue it's the nuclear powered submarine. I count both of those types as capital ships.