Corvette Warships – An introduction
Corvette from the flower class
A corvette is a small and easily manoeuvrable, lightly armed warship. If you are looking for info about the corvette car you can click here.
Originally, a corvette was defined as a warship larger than a sloop-of-war but smaller than a frigate, and would typically have a single gun deck. During the Age of Sail, corvettes were commonly used to patrol the coast, support large fleets, and engage in minor wars. Corvettes also participated in so called show-the-flag missions. The name corvette was first used in the 1670s when the French army started to use them.
During the early years a standard Corvette was 12-18 meters (40-60 feet) long and measured 40-70 tons burthen. They were lightly armed with 4-8 small guns on the gun deck.
Eventually, larger and larger vessels were included in the term corvette and by the year 1800 some corvettes were over 30 m (100 feet) long and measured 400-600 tons burthen. USS Constellation was one of the largest corvettes with sail and it measured 54 m (176ft); a U.S. corvette constructed in the year 1855 and mounted with 24 guns. The sheer size of her made some naval experts refer to her as a frigate rather than a corvette.
The design of corvettes changed to adapt to newer times when the age of sails ended. The first modern corvettes were the Flower class corvettes, a class of 267 UK Royal Navy vessels named after flowers. Among the first modern corvettes you also find a Canadian corvette class namned after cities and towns. Both classes were used in the battle of atlantic to protect convoys from German submarines.
It should however be mentioned that the flower class was never designed for this but for offshore patrolling and was therefore ill equipped to protect convoys in the open seas. Longer vessels would have been more suitable for open ocean work, while more heavily armed vessels would have been more apt at anti-aircraft defence. Another problem with the flower class corvettes was that they were only marginally much faster than the transport ships, this was not a big problem at the beginning of that battle for the atlantic but did increasingly become one as german subsmarine got faster and faster. Eventually, the Royal Navy started using frigates as escorts instead. From the smaller ship building yards that couldn’t construct frigates, a new corvette design emerged developed to suit the new needs. These Castle class corvettes were introduced rather late in the war and some of them remained in service well into the 1950s.
The Royal Australian Navy built their own class of corvettes for World War II; the Bathurst class corvettes. They were primarely meant to be used as mine sweepers and designed after the Bangor class minsweepers, corvettes in this class was namned after Australian towns. A total on 60 Bathurst corvettes where commisioned but only 36 was meant for the Royal Australian Navy, of the rest 4 was for the Indian Navy and 20 for the Brittish Admirality.
The bathurst class corvettes were as earlier mentioned designed to be mine sweepers but the WWII forced them to be used in a long row of different areas such as anti-submarine warfare, troop transportation, convoy transports and for bombarding enemy positions. In many situations the lightly armed corvettes had to perform duties for which they were ill equipped considering their small size and slow speed.
