Battleships pounding through high seas and aircraft carriers launching planes from pitching decks are the images most frequently associated with 20th-century naval might. The destroyers that attended and protected these ships are bridesmaids—part of the photograph but not the story. Clint Johnson, deploying what he calls a “bold argument,” asserts that the standard picture is out of focus. “Destroyers,” he writes in “Tin Cans & Greyhounds,” “played the major role in fighting both world wars.”
In pressing his case, Mr. Johnson, a history writer whose prior work includes several books on the Civil War, has set himself a high bar. The story of destroyers and their crews is not as unsung as he suggests, particularly given the contributions of James D. Hornfischer in “The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors” (2004) and several volumes by John Wukovits, most recently “Tin Can Titans” (2017). Mr. Johnson has nonetheless navigated the shoals of such established chronicles and produced a technical history of destroyers as all-around naval weapons. Anyone interested in these ships will value his efforts.
From the surprise Japanese destroyer attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur in 1904, Mr. Johnson proceeds to catalog the many classes of destroyers and smaller destroyer escorts in the American, British, Japanese and German navies through four decades and two world wars. The ships and their weapons evolved at the same time. Depth charges, for example, went from “sinkable mines attached to lanyards attached to buoys” to devices that could measure water pressure and then explode at preset depths.
When Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917, the United States declared war and joined Britain to keep North Atlantic sea lanes open. Adm. William Sims arrived in Europe to command U.S. Naval forces and advocate a convoy system—in which merchant ships would travel in groups, with destroyers defending them at the outer rim. Even Japan, an ally of the United States and Britain in this conflict, deployed eight destroyers to the Mediterranean to shepherd Allied convoys.
Only a handful of Wickes-class destroyers, with their four distinctive smokestacks, crossed the Atlantic before the end of World War I. But these “four pipers,” along with 156 ships of the similar Clemson class, would later prove the backbone of the U.S. Navy's efforts in World War II before newer destroyers came off the ways. They carried four 4-inch guns, 12 torpedo tubes and two depth-charge racks and could spirit their 122-man crews through the seas at 35 knots.
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