Wickes-class construction spread a common design across many builders, including yards with little previous naval work. Beam ranged from roughly 31 feet 7 inches to 31 feet 9 inches, normal-load draft could vary by up to five inches, and displacement by about fifty tons. These differences help explain why some references divide the ships into subclasses. Sims's urgent demand for escorts helped expand the program to 111 hulls. Discussions of borrowing British destroyers for American crews are presented as an embarrassment that strengthened the argument for domestic construction. Coordinating many yards and an order larger than the entire 1915 ship program required a rapid expansion of the production system. The dimensional variation illustrates the difficulties of building at that scale across yards with uneven experience.
Chapter · 49:43-53:04
Wickes mass production exposed the cost of rapid yard expansion
The 111 Wickes-class ships came from a rapidly expanded yard network whose uneven experience produced measurable differences among nominally common destroyers.