Page:Victory at Sea - William Sowden Sims and Burton J. Hendrick.djvu/93

1917] without enough destroyers to meet the submarine campaign ; this situation was not due to any lack of foresight, but to a failure to foresee that any civilized nation could ever employ the torpedo in unrestricted warfare against merchant ships and their crews.

The one time that this type of vessel had come prominently into notice was in 1904, when several of them attacked the Russian fleet at Port Arthur, damaging several powerful vessels and practically ending Russian sea power in the Far East. The history of the destroyer, however, goes back much further than 1904. It was created to fulfil a duty not unlike that which it has played so gloriously in the World War. In the late seventies and early eighties a new type of war vessel, the torpedo boat, caused almost as much perturbation as the submarine has caused in recent years. This speedy little fighter was invented to serve as a medium for the discharge of a newly perfected engine of naval warfare, the automobile torpedo. It was its function to creep up to a battleship, preferably under cover of darkness or in thick weather, and let loose this weapon against her unsuspecting hulk. The appearance of the torpedo boat led to the same prediction as that which has been more recently inspired by the submarine ; in the eyes of many it simply meant the end of the great surface battleship. But naval architects, looking about for the " answer " to this dangerous craft, designed another type of warship and appropriately called it the " torpedo boat destroyer." This vessel was not only larger and speedier than its appointed antagonist, but it possessed a radius of action and a seaworthiness which enabled it to accompany the battle fleet. Its draft was so light that a torpedo could pass harmlessly under the keel, and it carried an armament which had sufficient power to end the career of any torpedo boat that came its way. Few types have ever justified their name so successfully as the torpedo boat destroyer. So completely did it eliminate that little vessel as a danger to the fighting ships that practically all navies long since ceased to build torpedo boats. Yet the destroyer promptly succeeded to the chief function of the discarded vessel, that of attacking capital ships with torpedoes ; and, in addition to this, it assumed the duty of protecting battleships from similar attack by enemy vessels of the same type.