Tribal to Weapon: The history of the Royal Navy's WWII Destroyer choices

The Tribals' heavy guns helped clear a path through enemy destroyers for the fleet's torpedo attacks.

The separate Tribal flotilla designation went with a specialised role at the front of the destroyer force.

Four Tribals kept contact with Bismarck overnight while the Polish destroyer Piorun served as a mobile reserve.

A forward destroyer could use its guns to make a larger target visible to the ships lining up a torpedo attack.

Pilots' choice of targets in peacetime exercises gave navies a misleading picture of which ships would be attacked in war.

A high-angle twin 4-inch mounting gave the Tribals a way to engage aircraft and proved useful against small attack boats.

The J-class hull and machinery carried prewar destroyer design into the wartime emergency flotillas.

A shorter machinery arrangement made a compact, single-funnel destroyer and exposed both boiler rooms to damage in the same area.

A destroyer's speed in rough weather mattered as much as its cruising benchmark when screening capital ships.

Some destroyers received wiring for future radar sets and then had to have it stripped out when the equipment arrived.

The J and K armament combined six 4.7-inch guns with a ten-torpedo broadside. The N-class example shows what giving up half that broadside could buy.

Existing destroyer strength gave the Royal Navy room to revise its emergency designs while they were going into production.

Britain's inherited yards supported wartime production, while neglected dock upgrades can leave ships waiting for repairs.

The Hunt design used a sloop-derived hull to give convoys an escort with greater punch.

Errors in scaling and weight calculations affected how some Hunts rode and how much equipment they could take later.

The surviving Tribal destroyer in Hamilton gives visitors a rare chance to see one of these hulls in person.

The Royal Navy could fill much the same convoy escort role with ships built from different design traditions.

The unbuilt L70 would have combined the Tribals' gun power with a fleet destroyer's ten torpedo tubes.

The new 4.7-inch mounting improved gun elevation and required changes to the standard destroyer bridge.

A mechanical fire-control computer helped destroyers direct high-angle gunfire and could make use of later radar data.

Ark Royal had 4.5-inch guns in 1938. Destroyers still needed a mounting that worked within tighter weight limits.

A lighter 4.5-inch mount took time to develop, and prewar planning may have assumed time the Navy did not have.

A German torpedo took off Eskimo's bow in the fjord, but she continued trying to cover the destroyers following her.

The first emergency destroyers reused the J-class pattern and varied the gun fit between ships.

Fifteen flotillas of eight ships explain the programme's nominal scale, including a flotilla that did not reach completion.

The next emergency destroyers restored hull volume for fuel and better endurance at 20 knots.

Quiberon's service with Force Q shows how cruisers and emergency destroyers could cut into Axis troop traffic.

Three passes over a submarine raise the question of how many charges Quiberon actually carried compared with her listed allowance of 45.

Tie-down points on Haida give a physical clue to reports of destroyers firing more torpedoes than their tube count suggests.

Savage put a large-ship mounting into a destroyer hull to test a gun installation for the Battle class.

The fifth and sixth emergency flotillas added ships while Savage tested an unusual main gun fit.

The experimental destroyer went into fleet service, from diversions off Norway to Arctic convoys and the Battle of the North Cape.

Compare Savage with sister ship Scourge to see how much space a new main gun mounting could take away from the standard layout.

The U and V flotillas kept 4.7-inch guns and changed both the superstructure and how their leaders were named.

The U and V designs changed the layout while keeping much of the equipment interchangeable with earlier destroyers.

The W class kept the 4.7-inch gun while the Z class took the 4.5-inch. Both illustrate changes in sensors and close-range fits.

A nominal 70-charge load with fewer racks shows why rack counts alone cannot establish how many depth charges a destroyer carried.

The two flotillas survived the Second World War. One of their ships was later lost in Israeli service.

Four C-class groups went ahead, and the adaptable hulls remained in use long after the emergency programme.

The C class kept the Fuze Keeping Clock and took 4.5-inch guns. Supply of the stabilised Hazemeyer mount still affected what ships received.

A ship's official fit and the stores a crew took into combat could differ in any navy.

An order of battle can name every cruiser and still leave most ships anonymous if it gives only a destroyer count.

An inner escort could move out to prosecute a submarine contact while the stronger destroyers kept their places on the outer screen.

The wartime inner screen offers a possible model for uncrewed escorts, with open-ocean reliability and political oversight still to solve.

Sikh's group used gunfire and smoke to contest Littorio's approach to the convoy, with heavy smoke also obstructing British aim.

A personal account about an improvised projectile illustrates the difference between a memorable story and a documented engagement detail.

A battleship closing with several destroyers had to account for how many torpedoes they might still have aboard.

The Battle class filled the gap left by losses and damage among large destroyers. Its armament grew out of the Savage trial.

Twin 4.5-inch guns forward and a heavy Bofors battery show the priority the Battle design gave to air defence.

British armoured-deck carriers and a dense anti-aircraft screen were intended to help cover the landings before aircraft could operate ashore.

The gun mounting sought for wartime destroyers appeared in service with the postwar Daring class.

The Weapon class gave yards that could not build a Battle-class ship a larger job than repeating an emergency destroyer.

The Weapon class arranged boiler and turbine spaces in separate units to limit the effects of a hit.

The Weapons could serve as radar pickets after the war, but their position between large fleet destroyers and the C class was harder to justify.

An earlier Weapon programme might have filled a gap while the Battles waited for equipment. The Navy gave priority to other classes.

The hull images suggest how the J and L designs influenced later wartime destroyers.

Repeated changes produced better destroyers over time. More straight repeats might have put useful ships in service sooner.