Article
Flower-class Corvettes
Corvettes were small, lightly armed Canadian-built warships used for anti-submarine warfare in the Second World War. With the threat by German U-Boats to convoys on the North Atlantic from the outset of the war, Canada needed to produce ships quickly. The answer was the corvette, a vessel of barely 1,000 tonnes and about 63m long. Construction began early in 1940 and the first 14 appeared in the St Lawrence in the last months of the year. In total, Canada’s 111 corvettes comprised a quarter of its combat fleet; ten of those were lost in action.