Hunt I destroyer
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With UPS / Customs still blocking my book sent in January I will still not order anything from Warlord.
So scratch building. This time a typical vessel of East coast and Channel fights., a Hunt I. The type had many clashes with German S-Boote and Torpedoboote.
The original design asked for a small AA destroyer with 6x 4” guns, a quad 2pdr Pompom and four torpedo tubes. ASW with two DC throwers and a dropping ramp aft. Speed was set at 30 knots, six less than most fleet destroyers. An escort with some attack capacity.
November 39 18 had been building but now someone had a look at the plans and found a serious blunder, a miscalculation. The ships would be so top heavy that the slightest sotm would make them sink. Type ship Artherstone was fast changed before launch. 1/3 of the guns are drope3d and all Torpedo tubes. Even than it was found necessary to add much weight down in hull following first test. So the speed dropped under most conditions from 30 to 25 knots.
Despite this the Hunt I became the prime escort at East Coast , fighting German Bombers and Schnellboote. For that the vessels there got a 2pdr bow chaser and later two 2cm AA guns.
Many also fought in Channel, for example single ones used with MTB to back them. In October 42 a mixed force of 8 MTB, tw Hunt I and three Hunt III (with 2 TT each) attacked the German raider Komet, escorted by T 4,10,14 and 19. RN attributed the sinking to a torpedo from MTB 236 but the Torpedoboote noticed no torpedo hit but a fire caused by 4” shells. It made the aircraft fuel (for Arado 196 plane) explode, causing a secondary much bigger one that blew the raider apart.
The 1935 / 1937 Torpedoboote had TT but just a single 10,5 cm each. Designed to cover the retreat following a torpedo attack. The tactical doctrine saw no reason to shooit it out. So every meeting ended the same. The Germans fired all torpedoes and retreated. More than once the following RN ships got hit, some are lost.
I based my model on L 54 Cotswold. In service November 1940 it served at East Coast. The CO was Peter Knowling, the first officer Peter Dickens. Later the famous leader of MTB flotilla 21. In Cotswold he learned that small craft are nearly invisible at night. And hard to hit.
The Hunts had a “Headache room”, there a rating, that understood German, searched for transmissions. On Cotswold one was a Jewish refugee. One night he heard “Torpedo ready”, than Torpedo in water”. The destroyer was alone, 10 miles ahead of a convoy. Alerted they turned back to help. Suddenly the rating heard “XXXX, they turn”. Cotswold itself was the target. Any doubts about ended after firing star shells and doing evasive moment and hearing another XXXX comment.
20<sup>th</sup> April 1942 Cotswold hit a mine, laid the night before by S-Boote. The hull broke but the deck kept both parts together, so it was able to reach a harbor for long repairs. Dickens and most of the crew left. The repaired ship later served in Channel and D-day landings. 1946 in reserve and scrapped 1956.
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