Allied Escort Ships of World War II: A Complete Survey Hardcover – February 1, 1978

OUTSTANDING! This book goes far beyond the usual tabulations of ship characteristics, dimensions, and armament. For example, Chapter 1 discusses the extensive building programs in the UK, the USA, and Canada; Chapter 2 describes the production rates of the various classes of escorts in those three countries; Chapter 3 describes the deployments and effectiveness of the various escort classes, especially against the German U-boats in the north Atlantic. Chapter 1 "Escort Building Programs" describes the massive escort fleet that would have resulted had not significant orders been canceled in late 1943 and early 1944: the UK, US, and Canada would have produced more than 2,000 escorts. The design particulars of every class of escort (including minesweepers converted to escorts) designed or produced in the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, India, and New Zealand are then given in Chapter 4 and the construction period of every ship is listed. Finally, Chapter 5 describes the armaments and electronics used throughout the war on each ship class.

This book covers the major escort ship classes (over 150 ft. length), built in World War II, by the US (1,136), British (945), Canadians (320), and Australians (77). This includes destroyer escorts, frigates, corvettes, PCEs, PGs, and PCs, trawlers and fleet minesweepers. There are twenty-three classes from the United Kingdom and eleven from the United States. Each class of ships gets a short chapter with a few pages of text, a few photographs, a profile drawing, basic statistics, builders, build time in months and days, launch dates, and list of ships or subs sunk by class, list of class losses.There are also chapters on the escort ship construction program (42 pages), their wartime service in each ocean (76 pages), and the armament and electronics (33 pages). The appendix has a list of British pendant numbers. There is a lot of detail here, but not super detailed. This book makes a good historical analyses of the history of the ship's construction and wartime operation. Thus it will be useful to the naval historian. Alas, it will be of little help to the model builder. The photographs are generally good, but not great and there are almost no close in shots. Most of the profile drawings are above the waterline, but they are not all drawn to the same scale.Model builders will want to get two books of the Anatomy of the Ship series: "The Destroyer Escort England", by Al Ross, c. 1985; and "The Flower Class Corvette Agassiz", by John McKay and John Harland, c. 1993. These books will answer many of your questions about details.Historians of US Navy will also want to read "U. S. Small Combatants, an illustrated design history" by Norman Friedman. If you are interested in a greater understanding of the massive ship building program, you might also want to read "Ships for Victory, a history of shipbuilding under the US Maritime Commission", by Frederic Lane, c. 1951. The U.S. Coast Guard also did a lot of sub patrol work, and so I will also recommend "U.S. Coast Guard Cutters and Craft of World War II by Robert Scheina, c. 1982; and "U. S. Coast Guard in World War II", by Malcolm Willoughby, c. 1957.

Very satisfied