American wartime destroyer construction is associated with large Fletcher and Sumner programmes. British War Emergency destroyers appear under a succession of class names, although many were variations on the same underlying design. The argument treats the differences between successive British batches as generally minor. Counting named classes therefore gives an incomplete picture of how much construction depended on repetition. This comparison introduces the production problem facing Japan's more ambitious destroyer designs.
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Allied destroyer production and misleading class names
Compare large American destroyer classes with British wartime batches whose different names can obscure their common design.