Flower class - Guide 124

[Music] [Music] the flower class were one of the most common anti-submarine warfare vessels built during the Second World War despite the design having been literally thrown together at the last minute pre-war doctrine had always called for destroyers to serve in this anti-submarine role but in 1939 as the risk of war breaking out had begun to rise somebody had looked at a list of the roles the destroyers were expected to fulfill compared them to the list of destroyers the Royal Navy actually had and realized that you could replicate the entire existing destroyer fleet three times over and still not have enough ships building more destroyers was already being done but although it's faster to construct a destroyer than a cruiser or a battleship they're still fairly complex warships which would take a year or two to get into service cost of FF money and would in any case be prioritized to frontline roles to replace wartime losses so what was needed was something that was fast enough to keep up with convoys which wasn't a great stretch considering most merchant ships were hardly greyhounds of the sea but could also carry a useful anti-submarine warfare loadout and could be built quickly and cheaply enter Smith's stock company of Middlesbrough they've never built a warship before but what they did build was fishing ships and they were pretty good at it specifically and they had a design for a 700 ton whale catcher that they thought would be a good basis for what the Admiralty was looking for the Royal Navy would eventually decide to call the resulting design a Corvette why well simply put it was smaller than a destroyer and they had a whole range of different ships in the pipeline that fit that category so it was becoming increasingly apparent that the existing catch-all designation of sloop was hopelessly broad the designation of Corvette had no relationship to previous uses of the term which had been in the mid 19th century likewise frigate was applied to other designs that were simply bigger than a Corvette but smaller than a destroyer anyway using small commercial yards the flower class began to appear in there dozens and then in their hundreds coming in initially at a displacement of just under a thousand tons their weapons consisted of a single 4-inch gun a couple of fifty caliber machine guns a couple of rifle caliber Lewis machine guns a pair of depth-charged launchers and two depth charge rails with a total of 40 depth charges they were initially was supposed to mount some pompom 40 millimeter cannon but the machine guns were far more common outfit as the pom-poms were in high demand for full-scale warships they would also be equipped with basic radar and sonar systems with a few mostly for the Canadian Navy also having minesweeping gear added although this was rapidly removed when operations showed it really wasn't needed using a single old-school vertical triple-expansion engine producing just under 3,000 horsepower they were fairly slow at just 16 knots although this still made them faster than most merchantman and any submerged submarine of the time ships would be ordered for the Royal Navy and the Royal Canadian Navy and the French marine nationale but wartime transfers and the arrival of a number of trained crews from navies whose countries had been occupied would mean that these ships would serve in wartime service with the US Navy the Free French naval forces and the exiled forces of the Royal Netherlands norwegian hellenic belgian and yugoslavia v's along with the Royal Indian Navy and the Royal New Zealand Navy and immediately post-war the South African Navy a few of the marine nationale ships were being built in France and some of these were captured part built by the Germans and would be completed in two creeks marine service as the PA class patrol ships so technically they actually served on both sides of the war of course as the flower class the ships in British service were all named after various species of flower some other navies would follow their own conventions for example most Canadian vessels were named after various towns but the US Navy stands out as especially hilarious since they renamed their ships to the action class so you had ships like USS fury USS impulse USS surprise and USS tenacity but if you took a careful look for patches of newer paint you could probably make out their former names ships like begonia Veronica hibiscus and periwinkle and yes somebody working through Kew Gardens big book of plants did try to sneak in an HMS pansy unfortunately for us somebody else caught on and it was renamed as HMS heartsease before it was launched as the war progressed a number of improvements were identified and later flower class vessels would sport a number of changes as a result of this the most obvious was extending the fo'c'sle from the previous layout which was much akin to Royal Navy destroyers to a much longer layout that went all the way back to the funnel with the fo'c'sle this provided much more sheltered space for the crew which was very welcome since with the various additional systems added the needs of war and the shape of the bow the ships tended to be both very crowded and would also take a lot of water over the bow in most Atlantic weather although their origin as whale catchers meant they were actually fairly watertight and so it was mainly a case of just not wanting to be out at the main deck although remarkably stable in terms of not actually capsizing they're relatively short length to beam ratio left them very vulnerable to rather energetic rolling this led one group of US Navy and Royal Navy sailors who are down the pub one evening to conclude that whilst yes the Catalina flying boat may well be so good it could land on wet grass when it got there it would find a flower class rolling uncontrollably through the jus with both formal and informal upgrades retrofits and redesigns going on throughout the war it was hard to find any two identical ships by the time that most of them had been in service for a while but some modifications common to a large number of the class included more and new radar retractable sonar domes instead of fixed units the reduction of masts from two to one with the remaining mast moved behind the bridge rather than being placed in front of it relocation of the galley closer to the centre of movement which much reduced the crying over spilt milk and more depth charges Hedgehog anti-submarine warfare launchers are more flared bow a larger but lower bridge and more anti-aircraft armament typically a mix of additional Lewis guns and 20-millimeter Oerlikons with the latter more common on ships assigned to the more enclosed waters such as the Mediterranean early in the war when you boats would try to attack on the surface the flowers would simply charge them down forcing the submarine to stay put a slow underwater speed whilst the convoy went past as u-boats began to attack in packs and more and more from underwater positions the ships had to rely more and more on their sonar to deliver direct assaults to try and damage or destroy their quarry their slow top speed meant that it was important not to get too distracted as since a destroyer or a fast trigger it might be able to spend a few hours chasing down a submarine kill it and then catch up with the convoy a flower couldn't do this meaning that for them success was more about keeping the u-boats away from the merchantman than actually sinking the enemy that said a great many merchant sailors Oh their lives to the brief but spirited charges of flower class vessels which serve to keep the German vessels away from the wall vulnerable members of the convoy nevertheless they did manage to take part in sinking at least 51 axis submarines with HMS hyacinth sunflower and gladiolus having particular success losing 36 of their own number 5 - collisions and the rest two torpedoes mines and air attack a total of 294 ships would be completed before the design was replaced in production by more advanced examples such as the castle class after the war with so many ships available and so many newer designs and service a number would be sold on to Argentina Chile the Dominican Republic Greece India the Republic of Ireland South Africa and Venezuela where they would actually continue to serve for several more decades many more were sold into commercial use given their commercial origins with their weapons removed over a hundred ending up in such service one example of the class HMCS Sackville survives in canada after spending over three decades as a research vessel before being restored to her world war ii appearance and being moored as a museum ship in halifax that's it for this video thanks for watching if you have a comment or suggestion for a ship to review let us know in the comments below don't forget to comment on the pinned post for drydock questions

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 298,300

Keywords: wows, world of warships, WW2, Royal Navy, Flower class, Battle of the Atlantic, U-boat, convoy, wolf-pack

Id: NSk4ikhNUzg

Length: 10min 6sec (606 seconds)

Published: Sat May 25 2019