I'm still working on my compulsive gathering of statistical data on ww2 warships, as I did for example here or there.
This time I focused on the Royal Navy destroyers of the world war 2.
And there are a lot of them !
I have a ship count of 368 ships in commission in sept. 1939 or commissioned before the end of the war. This includes ships of the RAN, RCN, RNZN as well as ships of Norwegian, Netherland ... navies acting under the operational control of the Royal Navy.
It does not include the escort destroyers (Hunt class for example).
As usual, there may be mistakes, inaccuracies, as well as approximations.
Below is a first synthetic table summarizing the geographic deployment of the destroyers for each year, reconstructed from a month-by-month database :
- RN_DD_stat_1.jpg (78.86 KiB) Viewed 3998 times
* Atlantic : convoy escort from US East Coast to GB and from Azores to Iceland. Note that the escort based at Greenock or Londonderry, even if geographically in the Home Waters are listed in Atlantic. The ships escorting the WS or HG convoys at the start of their journey are also listed here.
* Home Waters : North Sea, Channel. Includes operations along the Norwegian coast as far north as Narvik, as well as operations in the Bay of Biscaye.
* Gibraltar : ships based here or in transit between the Med and the Atlantic. Includes escorts for WS convoys for the second part of their journey.
* Mediterranean : Alexandria-based ships and Gibraltar-based for the month when they mainly operated in the Med, as well as ships temporary there for a given operation (Pedestal, for example).
* Indian : self explanatory
* West Indies : Caribbean Sea.
* South Atlantic : from Capetown and Falklands to a line Trinidad - North of Dakar.
* East Indies : Singapore-based ships, ABDA Command.
* China : China Station at Hong Kong.
* Australia : From Timor to New Zealand; Solomons excluded.
* Russian Convoys : escort (close or distant) of russian convoys as well as related missions.
* Red Sea : self explanatory
* Pacific : All Pacific Ocean, East Indies & Australia being excluded.
All values are in month.DD, except the line "sunk", which is just a number of ships (the 2+1 on this line means that 2 RN DDs were sunk in 1945 as well as one former RN DD -HMS Churchill- manned by the Soviet Navy in 1945).
What is interesting is the fact that the number of month.DD did not significantly decrease between 1940 & 1944, even though many ships were sunk and some withdrawn from front-line duty : the building yards proved capable to make good the losses -- replacing old ships by newer models in the process.
The table also highlights that even if the main concern of the Royal Navy was the home waters and the Atlantic supply line, it was still possible to invest a lot of resources in more remote areas - even though the far east had to wait for the victory on european seas.
The 1942 columns shows however that it was a year when the RN was really stretched thin, and simultaneoulsy taking heavy losses.
I plan to post charts of availability and geographic location on a DD by DD basis.
However it's a 368*72 matrix, and it will require some time to turn the raw data into user-friendly charts.
As always, all comments and suggestions are welcome.
