Carrier pauses, shipyards, and escort production

The wartime pause in carrier construction answered pressure to emphasize the anti-submarine campaign. It also created the appearance of redirecting effort, because carrier hulls stayed on their slips and skilled workers were held back for possible repair jobs. Corvettes and other escorts came from smaller merchant shipyards, not the major naval yards building fleet carriers. British shipbuilding capacity therefore cannot be treated as a single pool of labor that ministers could simply move from carriers to escorts.