The Tucker class of destroyers was a ship class of six ships designed by and built for the United States Navy shortly before the United States entered World War I. The Tucker class was the fourth of five classes of destroyers that were known as the "thousand tonners", because they were the first U.S. destroyers over displacement.
The design of what became the Tucker class was the result of compromises between the General Board of the United States Navy and the U.S. Navy's Bureau of Construction and Repair. The General Board, tasked with creating an integrated battle fleet, wanted a larger ship that could serve in a scouting role and proposed a ship larger than the unique British destroyer of 1907, and more than twice the displacement of any previous U.S. destroyer. Input from Construction and Repair resulted in a design that was an incremental development of the , which itself was similar to the first of the thousand tonners, the (which displaced about a third more than the preceding ).
The ships were built by four private American shipyards—Bath Iron Works, Fore River Shipbuilding Company, New York Shipbuilding Corporation, and William Cramp & Sons—and were laid down between February and November 1914; launched between April and July 1915; and commissioned into the U.S. Navy between July 1915 and May 1916. The ships had a median displacement of , were just over in length, and had a beam of about . Most of the ships had two direct-drive steam turbines and a single geared cruising turbine; was equipped with two geared steam turbines only and, as the first U.S. destroyer so equipped, greatly influenced later U.S. Navy destroyer designs. All of the ships were designed for a maximum speed of and a range of at more economical speeds. As built, they were armed with four guns and had four twin 21 inch (533 mm) torpedo tubes with a load of eight torpedoes, but all were later equipped with depth charges.
All six ships operated in the Atlantic or Caribbean until the U.S. entrance into World War I in April 1917, when all six were sent overseas to Queenstown, Ireland, for convoy escort duties. Several of the ships rescued passengers and crew from ships sunk by U-boats, and several had encounters with U-boats themselves; was torpedoed and sunk by in December 1917. All five surviving members of the class had returned to the United States by early 1919 and been decommissioned by June 1922. Between 1924 and 1926, four of the five (all but Wadsworth) were commissioned into the United States Coast Guard to help enforce Prohibition as a part of the "Rum Patrol". They were returned to U.S. Navy custody between 1934 and 1936, and had all been sold for scrapping by 1936.
Background
In September 1912, the General Board of the United States Navy asked the Navy's Bureau of Construction and Repair (C&R) to develop plans for the next class of destroyers. The General Board asked for a design with four guns, six twin torpedo tubes, and twenty floating mines, that could travel at up to with steaming radius of . C&R came back with a design for a long, displacement, triple-screw "super-destroyer" requiring to make the design speed of . The C&R design was similar to, but larger than the unique British destroyer of 1907, and more than twice the displacement of the largest U.S. destroyers.
The General Board, whose main concern was the integrated operation of the United States battle fleet, pushed for the design to provide more scouting capabilities for fleet operations. But the high cost of the design—$1,900,000 for hull and machinery vs. $790,000 for the ships—and the lack of operating experience with the —the first of the "thousand tonners" (destroyers exceeding displacement) which were just beginning to be launched—caused C&R to resist the much larger design. The Chief Constructor of the Navy, the head of C&R, pointed out that the British had not repeated the Swift design in the five years since her introduction, and noted that "a destroyer that gets too large loses many of the desirable features of the type".