On page 19 of Admiral Jellicoe's The Grand Fleet 1914-1916, the admiral states that
"The fuel capacity of destroyers was only sufficient for them to remain at sea in company with a fleet for some Three Days and Nights, whereas the fleet could remain out for three or four times that period."
While destroyers are small by warship standards, this strikes me as a bizarrely short period.
The Acorn-Class carried 120 tons of fuel. To burn through everything in 3 days, it would be to be burning at about half the rate of a modern Arleigh Burke, a ship with over 10x both its displacement and output.
Were Britains ships truly so limited in endurance? Even the figure given for the fleet as a whole suggests less than 2 weeks deployment time. If yes, why were they designed in such a way? Was this purely a cost cutting measure to field as many ships as possible?
How did the endurance of WW1 ships compare to ships in the prewar era, particularly predreadnoughts?
Thanks!
Jellicoe was probably thinking of the Tribal-class destroyers rather than the Acorn class. The Tribals had only 90 tons of bunkerage, and their engines were immensely powerful for their size at 12500 horsepower. (Incidentally Wiki gives the Acorn class 170 tons, not 120 tons). I've seen the claim in several places, but cannot trace an original source, that Afridi and Amazon managed to use 9.5 tons each (of their 90 total!) on a trip of six miles; that would include raising steam, ie getting the boilers hot, but if true, it shows how they could be so short-ranged - they needed a tenth of their bunkerage just to get up to speed!
You ask why they were designed this way; in the case of the Tribals, the powerful engines were the result of one of Jack Fisher's inspirations, which required the class to reach 33 knots; the engines pushed the technological limits of the day and were immensely un-economical as a result. In other words, it wasn't fully intentional, but the result of really pushing the envelope on speed and accepting compromises elsewhere. In the next classes the RN apparently thought better of it; for the Beagle class that followed the Tribals, they actually went back to coal (the last class of coal-fuelled British destroyers), partly to save money, partly for concerns over the availability of oil in the case of war. Then for the Acorns, which were again oil-fuelled, they had almost twice the bunkerage of the Tribals and a top speed of only 27 knots.