The London Naval Treaty exempted combat vessels under 600 tons and ships up to about 2,000 tons that stayed within specified armament, torpedo, and speed limits. Those rules still allowed useful sloops, escorts, gunboats, anti-submarine vessels, minelayers, and even small seaplane-carrying ships in unlimited aggregate tonnage. Navies could have built or stockpiled wooden small craft, trained reserve crews, and maintained the jigs, technicians, and suppliers needed for rapid expansion. Fairmile development shows how quickly wartime output could scale once the system existed, but annual peacetime orders would have created a much larger starting base before 1939. Cheap small vessels lacked prestige, yet their absence left navies short of exactly the craft they needed in aggregate.
Notable Point · 1:31:23-1:41:01
Treaty-exempt small ships and missed procurement
A late treaty discussion argues that navies could have built useful small escorts and gunboats without treaty tonnage limits, but failed to prepare production.