Egret Class: The First Class to lose as ship to a guided missile - Key Ships Series 6, Episode 1

The three Egret-class sloops combined enlarged Bittern-class ideas with anti-aircraft control equipment, but two were lost in unusually revealing air attacks.

The class history begins with Auckland, Pelican, and Egret's 1937-38 construction, including Auckland's intended name and Egret's builder, J. Samuel White.

The Egrets traded speed and armour for a concentrated four-twin 4-inch battery and fire-control equipment suited to convoy air defence.

Auckland was intended for surveying New Zealand, yet her design already held the spaces and fittings needed to become an armed wartime escort.

The Egrets were meant to defend convoys from aircraft and submarines, while their 4-inch guns could still deal with smaller raider-support vessels.

Auckland was hit repeatedly by dive-bombers while helping escort an oiler to Tobruk; her crew abandoned ship and HMAS Parramatta rescued survivors.

Pelican survived damage at Narvik to serve on dangerous British coastal convoys, sink or help sink several U-boats, and operate from Torch to the British Pacific Fleet.

Surveying, fishery protection, communications, harbour security, and anti-piracy work gave the Royal Navy many peacetime reasons to maintain sloops that could become wartime escorts.

Pelican helped destroy four U-boats, earned honours across several theatres, and remained useful through British Pacific Fleet and post-war service.

Egret began the war at Lourenço Marques and on Indian Ocean raider hunts before moving through the Mediterranean to North Sea and West African convoy duty.

During the heavy attack on Convoy SL 97, the escorts held off U-boats and aircraft long enough for Gibraltar-based reinforcements to arrive and U-93 to be destroyed.

In the Bay of Biscay in 1943, a Luftwaffe attack with guided gliding bombs sank Egret and killed 198 people aboard, including four RAF electronic-warfare specialists.

Although Grenville evaded the weapons, the damage to several escorts and Egret's loss led the Royal Navy to suspend Bay of Biscay anti-submarine patrols and reroute convoys.

The closing question weighs the practical value of easily adaptable sloops against the possibility that more specialised ships might have survived modern air attack better.