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The Captain class was a designation given to 78 frigates of the Royal Navy, constructed in the United States of America, launched in 1942–1943 and delivered to the United Kingdom under the provisions of the Lend-Lease agreement (the program under which the United States of America supplied the United Kingdom and other Allied nations with materiel between 1941 and 1945), they were drawn from two subclasses of the American Destroyer Escort (originally British Destroyer Escort) classification; 32 from the Evarts subclass and 46 from the Buckley subclass.

Captain class frigates served in World War II as convoy escorts, anti-submarine warfare vessels or coastal forces control frigates. During the course of World War II this class participated in the sinking of at least 34 German submarines and a number of other hostile craft with 15 of the 78 Captain class frigates being either sunk or written-off as a Constructive Total Loss.

In the Post-war period nearly all of the surviving Captain class frigates were returned to the US Navy as quickly as possible to reduce the amount payable under the provisions of the Lend-Lease agreement.

Early history
In June 1941 His Majesty's Government seeking to take advantage of the US lend-lease program asked the United States to design, build and supply an escort vessel that was suitable for anti-submarine warfare in deep open ocean situations. The requested particulars were a length of 300 ft, a speed of 20 kn, a dual purpose main armament and an open bridge. The United States Navy had been looking into the feasibility of such a vessel since 1939 and Captain E. L. Cochrane of the American Bureau of Shipping - who during his visit to the United Kingdom in 1940 looked at Royal Navy corvettes and Hunt class destroyers - had come up with a design for such a vessel. This design had anticipated a need for large numbers of vessels of this type, and had sought to remove the major bottleneck of production for vessels of this type: reduction gearing required for the steam turbine machinery of destroyers. Production of reduction gears could not be easily increased, as the precision machinery required for their construction alone took over a year to produce. Therefore, a readily available and proven layout of diesel-electric machinery, also used on submarines, was adopted. When the United Kingdom made their request, Admiral Stark (USN) decided to put these plans into motion and recommended that the British order be approved. Gibbs and Cox, the marine architects charged with creating working plans, had to make several alterations to the method of production and to Captain Cochrane's original design, most notably dropping another production bottleneck - the five inch /38 caliber gun - and replacing it with the three inch /50 caliber gun, which allowed a third gun to be added in a superfiring position ("B") forward. The result was a vessel that could be produced at half the cost of a fleet destroyer.

On August 15, 1941 President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorised the construction of 50 of the new Evarts-class design as BDE 1–50 (British Destroyer Escort) as part of the 1799 program (a plan to supply 1799 ships to the Royal Navy), The turbo-electric powered Buckley class were not part of the first order and were authorised later by Public Law 440 effective February 6, 1942. The Royal Navy placed orders in November 1941 with four ship yards: Boston Navy Yard, Mare Island Navy Yard, Philadelphia Naval Shipyard and Puget Sound Navy Yard. When the United States entered the war, they too adopted the BDE design. The BDE designation was retained by the first six destroyer escorts (BDE 1, 2, 3, 4, 12 and 46) transferred to the United Kingdom. Of the initial 50 ordered, these were the only ones the Royal Navy received; the rest were reclassified as destroyer escort (DE) on January 25, 1943 and taken over by the United States Navy. By the end of World War II the Royal Navy had received 32 Evarts and 46 Buckleys from Boston Navy Yard, Mare Island Navy Yard and Bethlehem-Hingham.

Te Royal Navy classified these ships as frigates, as they lacked the torpedo tubes necessary to be classified as destroyers. For those used to Admiralty-designed ships the Captains were unfamiliar: they had no break forward of the forecastle and a graceful shear to deck-line from the forecastle to midship, and the Evarts had daringly rakish cowls on top of the funnels. Those that served on these ships came to view these features as being very handsome. Amongst the differences with British designed vessels were the provision of bunks rather than hammocks, and the use of welds rather than rivets in the design.