Destroyer Battles by Robert C. Stern

Author:Robert C. Stern
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Seaforth
Published: 2008-03-01T16:00:00+00:00

Notes

1

This belief on the part of the Japanese was part astute analysis and part pure wishful thinking. In fact, it was the intent of President Roosevelt and his diplomatic and military advisors, with the sole exception of Admiral Ernest King, to defeat Hitler first. It was for this reason that finding resources to fight in the South Pacific in 1942 was so difficult. Most of America’s still small, but rapidly enlarging, military might was reserved for the landings planned in North Africa for November 1942. But the fact that the Americans were willing to treat the Pacific as the less important theatre did not mean they would ever have been willing to accept a peace with Japan short of total victory, even if Hitler’s threat to Great Britain had continued to grow. Pearl Harbor had seen to that.

2

More than 270 of the flush–deck ‘four–piper’ destroyers were built, most being launched well after the end of World War I. The last was laid down in September 1920. At the time, this was by far the largest number of warships of a single basic type ever built, but it would be dwarfed by the American construction programme of World War II that produced more than 440 destroyers in four distinct classes.

3

There were multiple reasons for the decision to build smaller destroyers. One was a desire to comply with the Treaty for the Limitation and Reduction of Naval Armament signed at London in 1930, which limited destroyer displacement to 1500 tons standard displacement, except that 16 per cent of the allowable total tonnage of destroyers could be as big as 1850 tons.

4

In fact, the first two Farraguts, as built, had no ASW weapons. Specifically, they lacked depth–charge racks or throwers, but they were fitted with sonar and, thus, clearly an anti–submarine role was envisaged. Starting with the third ship of the class, depth–charge racks were fitted during construction and were later retrofitted to the first two.

5

This refers to the 4000–5000–ton light cruisers of the World War I era, not the 10,000–ton light cruisers, such as the Brooklyn class or Southampton class, built to the London Treaty limits.

6

A ninth VT–10 Avenger was delayed in launching by a mechanical problem and left Enterprise almost an hour after the rest of the squadron. The detailed information about VT–10 activities on 26 October 1942 mostly comes from Buzz, pp. 27–37.

7

The Allies gave Japanese aircraft types codenames, as the official designations were either unknown or considered to be too lengthy or arcane for common usage. The Mitsubishi A6M Type o Carrier Fighter was officially codenamed Zeke, but was more popularly known as the ‘Zero’. Ironically, Zuiho had already been seriously damaged and driven from the fight at the time her fighter Chutai was attacking the Enterprise strike.

8

This was the same destroyer made famous in photographs of the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor. Shaw was in a floating dry dock, YFD 3, on 7 December 1941 when the Japanese attacked. Hit by three bombs, her forward magazines went up in a spectacular explosion, photographed from several different angles.

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