Home Ordnance Pamphlets & NavPers O.D. 4607 — DD 692 Class Equipment List

O.D. 4607 — Ordnance Equipment List for Destroyers, DD 692 Class

Bureau of Ordnance, Navy Department — 5 May 1943 — 45 Sheets

O.D. 4607 is the Bureau of Ordnance Ordnance Equipment List for Destroyers, DD 692 Class (2,200 Ton), dated 5 May 1943 and issued in 45 numbered sheets. It supersedes O.D. 4420. The document was originally classified Restricted; the copy reproduced here came from the National Archives and carries their declassification marking and a “best available copy” notice — the scan is legible throughout, but the original photocopies are faded in places.

An “Ordnance Data” publication is not a manual. It is a list — the authorized ordnance outfit for a class of ship, item by item, with quantities, unit weights and total weights, cross-referenced to the Bureau drawing or sketch number for each piece of equipment. It told the shipbuilder what had to be fitted, the Bureau of Ships what stowage and weight to design for, and the forces afloat what armament the class was ultimately supposed to carry.

Sheet 2 records the hulls covered: DD 692–791 and DD 805–890. That range is the 2,200-ton destroyer program as it stood on order in the spring of 1943; ships within it were completed to both the Allen M. Sumner and the later lengthened Gearing designs. One of them, USS Laffey (DD-724), has her own page on this site — this list is the paper record of the ordnance outfit she was built to.

What the List Covers

Sheet 3 is the index of sheets. The sixteen equipment groups it names are:

Index of Sheets — O.D. 4607, Sheet 3
SheetsTitle
4–5Main Battery
6–840-mm Antiaircraft Battery
9–1020-mm Antiaircraft Battery
11–15Fire Control Equipment
16Torpedo Control Equipment
17Small Arms and Security Equipment
18Miscellaneous Equipment
19–20Pyrotechnics
21Smoke Screen Equipment
22Chemical Warfare Training Material
23–25Depth Charge Equipment
26Torpedo Tubes and Equipment
27–28Torpedoes and Equipment
29–32Ammunition — Ship’s
33Ammunition for Small Arms and Security Equipment
34–45Spare Parts, Tools and Accessories

Sheet 3 also totals the whole outfit at approximately 1,012,000 pounds — roughly 452 long tons of ordnance in a 2,200-ton destroyer. Nearly a third of that figure is the main battery alone, and another third is ammunition.

The main battery on Sheets 4–5 is the 5″/38 caliber dual-purpose twin gun and mount assembly, three mounts to the ship — six guns. The list breaks each mount down to its component assemblies with individual weights: gun, right- and left-hand housings, mount, carriage, slides, stand, gas ejectors, sights, elevating and training gear, shield, powder and projectile hoists, firing and lighting circuits, and the gun train and gun elevation indicator-regulators.

The depth charge sheets (23–25) list release tracks with hydraulic control, six single-barrel depth charge projectors with arbors and impulse charges, and a note that O.P. 904 “will be released when completed” — a reminder that this is a wartime document written while the equipment it describes was still being documented. For the projector itself, see OP-831 — Depth Charge Projector Mark 6.

The ammunition sheets (29–32) give the ship’s allowance in rounds: 1,800 rounds of 5″/38 A.A. Common and 200 illuminating projectiles for the main battery, plus cartridges in Mark 9 tanks, a separate mobilization supply, drill projectiles, dummy cartridges and test cartridge cases, dummy time fuzes and drill lock primers. A footnote allows that “20 dye-loaded common projectiles per gun may be substituted for A.A. Common at the discretion of the Task Force or other responsible Commander.”

Note that the document numbers its pages as sheets, not pages. The table of contents in the viewer below gives both: the sheet number as printed on the document, and the viewer page it lands on.

Using the viewer: Use the Full Table of Contents button (bottom-right) to jump directly to any equipment group. Use the double caret (») symbol at top right of viewer to adjust scrolling.

⇓ Download O.D. 4607 PDF — 1.7 MB

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