Tin Cans and Greyhounds

The Destroyers that Won Two World Wars

Clint Johnson

• Publisher: Regnery History
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781621576471
• eBook ISBN: 9781621577676
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

For men on destroyer-class warships during World War I and World War II, battles were waged "against overwhelming odds from which survival could not be expected." Those were the words Lieutenant Commander Robert Copeland calmly told his crew as their tiny, unarmored destroyer escort rushed toward giant, armored Japanese battleships at the Battle off Samar on October 25, 1944. This action-packed narrative history of destroyer-class ships brings readers inside the half-inch-thick hulls to meet the men who fired the ships' guns, torpedoes, hedgehogs, and depth charges. Nicknamed "tin cans" or "greyhounds, " destroyers were fast escort and attack ships that proved indispensable toAmerica's military victories. Beginning with destroyers' first incarnation as torpedo boats in 1874 and ending with World War II, author Clint Johnson shares the riveting stories of the Destroyer Men who fought from inside a "tin can"—riskingdeath by cannons, bombs, torpedoes, fire, and drowning. The British invented destroyers, the Japanese improved them, and the Germans failed miserably with them. It was the Americans who perfected destroyers as the best fighting ship in two world wars. Tin Cans & Greyhounds compares the designs of these countries with focus on the old, modified World War I destroyers, and the new and numerous World War II destroyers of the United States. Tin Cans & Greyhounds details how destroyers fought submarines, escorted convoys, rescued sailors and airmen, downed aircraft, shelled beaches, and attacked armored battleships and cruisers with nothing more than a half-inch of steel separating their crews from the dark waves.

CHAPTER

1

The Early Years

“Weather today fine, but high waves.”

The graceful but deadly Greyhound of the Seas, the destroyer, was designed in response to a crude weapon originally controlled by a man holding ropes on the water’s edge.

The idea for a shore-controlled weapon evolved from an attack during the American Civil War.

On the night of October 27, 1864, United States Navy Lieutenant William B. Cushing successfully sank the CSS Albemarle, a 158-foot-long Confederate ironclad, by lowering a wooden spar with a keg of gunpowder dangling from its end under the Albemarle’s keel. Cushing’s attacking craft was a simple 45-foot-long wooden launch powered by an exposed steam engine.

The concept of a small boat sinking a capital ship by something other than cannon fire was intriguing, but the practicality of reaching an alert enemy ship with a keg of explosives was doubtful. Cushing’s successful attack was daring, but also lucky. The Albemarle was tied up at a wharf on the narrow Roanoke River in Plymouth, North Carolina, guarded by sleepy pickets who did not alert the Albemarle’s crew that an unidentified launch was approaching.

Still, the Albemarle’s sinking sparked imaginations.

Just two years after the Albemarle’s sinking, the self-powered torpedo was introduced by British-born engineer Robert Whitehead. Whitehead’s original prototype in 1866 was based on an Austrian naval officer’s concept of a warhead-tipped cylinder powered by wound springs turning a propeller and guided by ropes held by handlers onshore.

Whitehead’s torpedo improvements included making it self-guided and powered by compressed air. His earliest practical prototype had a speed of 7 knots carrying a warhead weighing up to sixty pounds, but its range was only 200 yards. That was point-blank range for defending cannon fire, so initially it was not very practical. Before naval customers would be interested, Whitehead had to increase the range of the torpedo to keep its launching craft out of the reach of enemy cannons. He also had to improve its ability to stay on target through wind and wave action.

By 1870, the Whitehead torpedo had a range of more than 700 yards.

The new weapon promised to change naval warfare. For centuries, ships had fired on each other with cannons to put holes in enemy hulls or to knock down rigging before boarding and settling the battle with cutlasses. The torpedo theoretically gave navies the new combat option of staying out of cannon range, and virtually eliminated the need for hand-to-hand combat.

As countries all over the world started buying or developing their own torpedoes, Navy planners began designing small boats to carry them. The chosen name for the new craft was simple—the torpedo boat.

In 1873, the British launched the HMS Vesuvius, a 90-foot-long boat capable of 9.7 knots armed with a single torpedo tube. She was followed by HMS Lightning four years later. Neither proved to be very seaworthy in the open ocean, so replacement designs were started almost immediately.

As the world’s navies moved into the new decade of the 1880s—theoretically armed with weapons capable of killing ships with one strike and no longer needing to land multiple gun hits—naval strategists realized the torpedo’s rapid technological advances had created a new problem. All the navies now had small boats capable of delivering a potentially devastating torpedo attack against larger ships, and there was as yet no good defense against those same boats.

Within a decade of the development of the torpedo boat came designs for the torpedo boat destroyer, commonly called “TBDs.”

The British remained the preeminent designers, launching the HMS Rattlesnake, now designated a torpedo gunboat, in 1886. She was among the first of the dual-purpose boats—one that could both attack torpedo boats and fire torpedoes herself. She carried a 4-inch gun, six 3-pounder cannons, and four 14-inch (in diameter) torpedoes. She could make nearly 20 knots. As deadly as she seemed to be on paper, within ten years, other designs had made her obsolete.

Speed to reach targets became the principal goal of the designers. Nations competed to see which country could design a TBD that could reach enemy fleets fastest with the most torpedoes. But attaining such speed came with a price: lightly built boats that did not perform well in the ocean.

In April 1892, the British Admiralty, fearing French-built torpedo boats crossing the English Channel, put out a bid notice asking shipbuilders to design “large sea-going torpedo boats.”¹ The Admiralty specified boats around 200 tons with speeds of 27 knots. They were to be armed with a single twelve-pounder cannon, one six-pounder cannon, and an 18-inch bow torpedo tube. Built in 1893, the first two, HMS Daring and HMS Decoy, displaced 260 tons.

The United States started fifteen years behind every other country in designing torpedo boats. It spent nearly two years building the aptly-named USS Cushing, which was commissioned in 1890. The Cushing was a 116-ton, 138-foot long, steel-hulled boat armed with three six-pounder cannons and three 18-inch torpedo tubes. Designated TB-1, she could make 22 knots, at least 5 knots slower than the top capacity of the leading British torpedo boats.

The United States studied the Cushing’s performance for over two years, then waited another two years before commissioning its second torpedo boat in 1894, the USS Ericsson (TB-2). The Ericsson was named after John Ericsson, the designer of the USS Monitor, the United States Navy’s first ironclad. Curiously, instead of building her in any number of oceanside shipyards, the Ericsson was built in the nation’s heartland, Dubuque, Iowa, a Mississippi River town. The Ericsson weighed 4 more tons than the Cushing, but its draft was similar at just under 5 feet. It was armed with four 1-pounder cannons compared to the Cushing’s three 6-pounders, and two 18-inch torpedoes.

Just one year after launching the Cushing, the first warship sunk by a torpedo was recorded, not in a conflict between world naval powers, but during the Chilean Civil War of 1891. It had taken seventeen years for the theoretical deployment of torpedo boats to be practically applied.

On April 18, 1891, two British-built torpedo boats, the Almirante Lynch and the Almirante Condell, were delivered to the Chilean government to fight rebels. They each carried five torpedo tubes and three 3-inch guns. The government, eager to use its investment, did not spend much time training their crews. On April 23, the two boats attacked a rebel-crewed armored ship, the Blanco Encalada. She was a 3,500-ton frigate built in England in 1875, just four years after the British bought the rights to manufacture the Whitehead torpedo.

The first torpedo attack in the world was not dramatic.

The government torpedo boats launched five torpedoes from a range of less than one hundred yards, but only one found the Blanco Encalada. It sank within two minutes, taking 182 sailors with her. The other four torpedoes probably missed due to the crews’ lack of training since one was launched from a range of just fifty yards at a ship more than 210 feet long—the naval equivalent of trying to hit the broad side of a barn.

Still, one small vessel had sunk a much larger ship using a single torpedo. The seventeen-year potential for a new type of naval warfare had finally been realized.

The Spanish-American War of 1898 gave the world’s naval planners a chance to watch the performance of torpedo boats under real battle conditions with both sides firing at each other.

Just as had been seen in Chile, the value of the torpedo boat was still underwhelming.

The first significant action took place on May 11, 1898, when the USS Winslow (TB-5) entered the harbor of Cardenas, Cuba, to investigate a Spanish gunboat tied up at the docks. A third-generation torpedo boat, the Winslow, was 161 feet long, displaced 142 tons, and was armed with three 1-pounder cannons and three 18-inch torpedoes. She could make 25 knots.

USS Winslow (TB-5) was severely damaged in her first and only engagement in 1898. Naval Historical Heritage Command (NHHC) photo.

As the Winslow came within 1,500 yards of the Cuban gunboat, she came under accurate fire. One early shell disabled her steering gear. Now out of control, she swung broadside to the enemy ship. She was struck again and her port engine was knocked out. As the torpedo boat was being towed out of the action, yet another Spanish shell hit her, mortally wounding five men, including Ensign Worth Bagley. Bagley was the only naval officer to lose his life during the short war. Three enlisted men aboard the Winslow were awarded Medals of Honor for saving the boat from the heavy Spanish fire.

It was an inauspicious beginning to the U.S. Navy’s torpedo boat war record. No torpedoes were launched at the enemy and no hits were recorded on the Spanish gunboat by the Winslow. She would be repaired and serve out the rest of her career as a training vessel before being sold for scrap in 1911.

Less than two months later came the more decisive Battle of Santiago de Cuba on July 3, 1898. This was primarily a battle between capital ships—American battleships against Spanish cruisers—but the British-built Furor, a 370-ton, 220-foot-long torpedo boat destroyer employed by the Spanish, gave the Americans pause. Built in 1896, she was armed with two 14-pounders, eight 6-pounders, two machine guns, and two 14-inch torpedo tubes. She could make 28 knots. The Winslow, the U.S. Navy’s state-of-the-art torpedo boat, had just been destroyed by a puny gunboat tied up at a dock. In theory, if the American-designed Winslow had gone head-to-head with the British-designed Furor, it would have been no match.

During the battle, however, the U.S. Navy’s battleships and cruisers hit the Furor several times while it was coming out of the harbor. The Furor was not able to utilize its weapons against any American ship and was finished off by an armed U.S. yacht, the USS Gloucester.

The Spanish squadron was completely destroyed as it tried to break the American blockade, with all of its ships sunk and only one American killed.

The only role an American torpedo boat played in the action was when the captain of the USS Ericsson (TB-2) swooped alongside the blazing Spanish cruiser, Vizcaya. At significant risk to his own boat, the captain towed lifeboats filled with one hundred Spanish officers and crew to safety as the cruiser’s own ammunition exploded from the intense heat. It would mark the first time in American history that the forerunner of the destroyer would rescue men from sinking ships—an act that would be repeated time and again in two upcoming world wars.

The U.S. Navy must have been discouraged by the relatively poor performance of the Winslow. The Furor, although it had ultimately been sunk, was twice as large and had heavier guns than any torpedo boat in U.S. service. The Furor also had crossed the ocean to Cuba, something no one in the U.S. Navy would attempt in any of its torpedo boats.

Convinced they had been thinking too small, U.S. Navy designers started work on the nation’s first true ocean-going destroyer, though the designation torpedo boat destroyer would remain.

Within a year after the Battle of Santiago, the USS Bainbridge (DD-1) was under construction by Neafie and Levy Ship and Engine Building Company in Philadelphia. She was 250 feet long—twice as long as the pioneering Cushing—with a beam of 23.7 feet and a draft of just over 9 feet when loaded. Weighing 420 tons, she was armed with two 3-inch guns, five 6-pounders, and two 18-inch torpedo tubes. Sixteen similar-sized destroyers would be authorized by Congress at the same time.

USS Bainbridge (DD-1), the United States’ first designated destroyer, spent most of its career in the Philippines. NHHC photo.

Commissioned in 1902, the Bainbridge set out for China in December, where she showed the flag proving to observant Far Eastern powers that the U.S. now had the will and means to keep warships smaller than battleships and cruisers in waters far from the United States. The Bainbridge kept a close eye on both the Japanese and the Russians, patrolling the Philippine Islands to make sure neither nation ventured into territory the Americans had won during the Spanish-American War. For the next fourteen years, the Bainbridge remained in Far Eastern waters, out of the view of Americans.

The American taxpayers never laid eyes on their Navy’s first destroyer, but it served as a constant reminder to the Japanese that the United States felt it belonged in Asian waters.

It would take more than thirty years after the invention of the powered torpedo and the fast boats to transport them before their value on the high seas would be proven. The successful torpedo attack against the Blanco Encalada in 1891 had been within a bay, proving nothing about the viability of the torpedo on the open ocean....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Preface
• Chapter 1: The Early Years
• Chapter 2: World War I in Europe
• Chapter 3: U.S. Enters the War
• Chapter 4: The 1920s
• Chapter 5: The 1930s
• Chapter 6: Atlantic Theater 1939-1941
• Chapter 7: Pacific Theater 1941
• Chapter 8: Atlantic Theater 1942
• Chapter 9: Pacific Theater 1942
• Chapter 10: Atlantic Theater 1943
• Chapter 11: Pacific Theater 1943
• Chapter 12: Atlantic Theater 1944
• Chapter 13: Pacific Theater 1944
• Chapter 14: Atlantic Theater 1945
• Chapter 15: Pacific Theater 1945
• Appendix
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Bibliography
• Notes
• Index
• Ships/Destroyers Index
• Copyright