The revolutionary battleship Dreadnought of 1906 brought together in one package the new technology of oil fired boilers and steam turbines, and all-big-gun armament; in doing so she rendered all other capital ships then afloat completely obsolete. Ten years later the V&W Class did to destroyers what the dreadnoughts had done to battleships: they set a completely new and higher standard of technology and were a cut above anything that had come before. They were, however, less revolutionary than evolutionary and in this new book John Henshaw takes the reader through all the developmental stages with a detailed history of the step-by-step lessons that were learned, not all of which were fortuitous. The narrative is superbly illustrated with forty-five detailed profile and deck plans.

Background --Destroyer types of the late 1800s -- The new century : evolution not revolution -- Foreign developments -- The flotilla leaders -- The benchmarkers -- The big leaders -- The First World War and the Baltic Campaign, 1918-1919 -- Their design heritage -- The Second World War -- Miscellany -- The scoreboard.