The London Naval Treaty provisions allowed unlimited numbers of vessels between 600 and 2,000 tons if they stayed below specified limits on speed, guns, torpedoes, armour, and aviation. Within those rules Britain could have built capable sub-twenty-knot escorts with four 4.5- or 4.7-inch guns and ample lighter weapons. A sustained programme would have supplied useful wartime escorts while developing yards in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, and South Africa before the emergency. Those yards could later have moved into destroyer construction and conversion work as treaty limits collapsed. Existing interwar sloops remained useful throughout the Second World War, weakening the claim that such ships could simply be mass-produced later. Cheap, practical force multipliers are often ignored because they attract less political attention than capital ships and carriers.
Chapter · 1:51:41-2:04:31
Treaty loopholes and the missing sloop fleet
The London Naval Treaty left room for capable small combatants, yet cost and political attention kept Britain from building the long-range sloop force that convoy warfare needed.