USS Fletcher - Guide 121

[Music] [Music] the fletcher-class was the single largest class of destroyers ever built a thanks mostly to the Wix and Clemson classes being similar but divided into two separate entities the Fletcher's achieved a status that is near mythical in military procurement circles being the right equipment evented at exactly the right time with plenty of room for expansion and built in vast numbers this tends to happen very rarely and the machines that hit this mark such as the Spitfire the f4 phantom 2 as it's possibly starting to look possibly even the type 26 frigate tend to become very well known the fletcher joined this select group in part due to sheer luck the London Naval Treaty in 1930 had limited destroyers to eighteen hundred and fifty tons and guns not exceeding five point one inches and preceding us destroy designs had wandered back and forth between this limit and a lower approximately 1500 ton figure the problem with this limit was similar to the treaty limit on Cruiser displacement was that to build a ship with guns up to the maximum allowable caliber which many nations did tended to leave them both lacking in other departments and either dangerously top-heavy all with little room for expansion or both for example the immediately previous destroy classes carried a similar main battery and torpedo armament but would very rapidly lose guns and/or torpedo launchers either just to keep the ships upright or to make room for a meaningful and aircraft armament outside of angry words beyond the main battery or again to do both Chiklis benefited from being the first generation of destroyers the USN would design once the International Naval Treaty system had collapsed compared to the destroy as many other nations they also had to cope with long-range deployments across the Pacific and initially when word got around that a larger destroyers were was being designed the proposed armament was listed as five five-inch dual-purpose guns twelve torpedo tubes and 28 depth charges with speed requirements varying from 35 to 38 knots along with an 18-inch increase in beam over previous designs but this would simply have repeated the problems of the previous classes on a larger scale and luckily this was reined in with the final planned armament retaining the five single mounted 5-inch guns with two super firing forward two super firing aft and one just forward of the rear pair on the other side of a light anti-aircraft platform however the twelve torpedo tubes were cut down to two quintuple torpedo launchers on the centerline and an anti-aircraft Garwin armament of a quad one point one inch cannon mount and six single 50 caliber machine guns along with two Stern mounted depth charge racks which completed the loadout this gave them the firepower to take on pretty much any foreign design with only highly specialist ships having any kind of major advantage for example a tribal class outgunned a Fletcher quite significantly but the Fletcher carried many more torpedoes a number of Japanese destroyer classes carried many more torpedoes a but equally would be at a significant disadvantage in a gun duel and so on displacing just over 2,000 tons at standard loading their 60,000 shaft horsepower engines drove them through the water at just over 36 knots using a pair of screws although some individual ships were faster the reduction in armament compared to the initial plans and the increased beam left them very stable with plenty of room to take upgrades as a result shortly after Pearl Harbor caused the United States Navy to make the managers of Bofors and all akan are very happy indeed the Fletcher's started to gain anti-aircraft armament along with more and more advanced radars sonars and fire control Suites without becoming overly compromised or losing any of their primary weapons or torpedo tubes depending on the ship between two and five twin 40-millimeter Bofors mounts and typically seven single 20-millimeter Oerlikons plus half other dozen depth charge throwers would appear in relatively short order later in the war as the Imperial Japanese Navy surface threat was somewhat diminished and the kamikaze threat was rapidly increasing the ships would finally have to sacrifice something with a number of them losing one of the quintuple launchers for for a revised AAA battery of two cord 40-millimeter Bofors plus a twin mount along with a 7 single 20 millimeter being swapped for six twin 20 millimeter mounts for a total of 27 anti-aircraft guns if you included the main battery a very few would even reach the dizzying heights of 1440 millimeter barrels on a destroyer they would also be the last primarily gun based destroyers built by the United States Navy that used the single five-inch mount the derivative Sumner and gearing glasses were built using the ubiquitous five-inch 38 caliber twin turret found on practically every US ship larger than a destroyer during World War two their only real weakness was the flush deck hull which made them somewhat less seaworthy then was necessarily ideal but this was not usually a problem in the typically calm waters of the Pacific a total of 175 would be built with 13 of the ships cancelled toward the end of the war casualties would amount to 19 sunk and 6 damaged beyond repair in return for reaping a rather fearful toll of Japanese aircraft and not a few ships as well a three you were actually built with aircraft catapults instead of the rear torpedo launcher and middle gun but these were not considered a success and were converted back to their normal configuration fairly quickly in addition to all of this 52 of the ships would be sold after the war to a total of fourteen different navies including ironically the Japanese and West German forces with the last active ships leaving service within a Mexican Navy in 2001 a total of four of the class are preserved Kidd Casson young and the Sullivans are in the United States and the Veloz formerly USS Sherratt is in Greece that's it for this video thanks for watching if you have a comment or suggestion for a ship to review let us know in the comments below don't forget to comment on the pinned post for drydock questions

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 209,200

Rating: 4.9718356 out of 5

Keywords: wows, world of warships, USS Fletcher, USN, Fletcher class, Pacific War, World War 2

Id: u6NUn6105Ig

Length: 7min 55sec (475 seconds)

Published: Sat May 04 2019