The Flower Class Corvette Agassiz

Anatomy of the Ship

by John McKay, John Harland

The Flower class corvette was one of the most famous and numerous of all escort vessels, and the corvette Agassiz is the most representative of the Canadian Flowers, which were thrown into the thick of the bitter Atlantic convoy battles of 1941–2. Derived from a whalecatcher hull design, and intended as a cheap coastal escort that could be built by non-specialist yards, the Flowers were the only class available in large numbers when the submarine war flared up in earnest in 1941. As a result they were used on rigorous ocean convoy duties for which they were barely adequate, and their crews suffered greatly in one of the harshest arenas of the second world war.

As part of the renowned Anatomy of the Ship series, this book provides the finest documentation of the Agassiz, with a complete set of superb line drawings, supported by technical details and a record of the ship's service history. This is a superb description of the ship and her career.

160 pages, Hardcover

First published May 20, 1993

Reviews

[Owen Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

This should be considered a reference work for naval buffs. It contains a comprehensive set of detailed drawings of the construction of a Flower class corvette as used principally during the Battle of the Atlantic in World War 2. There are only 12 pages of text (including Acknowledgments and Introduction), 13 pages of photographs and the rest, 125 pages, of detailed drawings. The dust cover is itself a large drawing! It is a valuable work for model buffs whether for scratch building or modifying an existing model kit (i.e. the Revell plastic model kit, which I have, and will be converting to radio control).

The reader is expected to have extensive naval knowledge already - unfortunately, no glossary is provided for those of us who are less well informed.