Coastal Forces of the Royal New Zealand Navy
division of the Royal New Zealand Navy
Coastal Forces was a division of the Royal Navy established during World War II. It consisted of small coastal defence craft such as motor launches, submarine chasers, air-sea rescue launches, motor gun boats and motor torpedo boats. It did not include minesweepers, naval trawlers or landing craft. This article is about the equivalent boats used in the Royal New Zealand Navy (RNZN).
From 1921 until 1941 the New Zealand Navy was a Division of the Royal Navy. The RNZN was not created until 1 October 1941. Within six months of its creation the RNZN commissioned twelve Class B Fairmiles and sixteen Harbour Defence Motor Launches (HDMLs)
RNZN Fairmiles
On 4 April 1941 the British War Cabinet approved a proposal for a striking force of anti-submarine motor-boats, six at Auckland, four at Wellington, and two at Lyttelton. Drawings and specifications of the Fairmile anti-submarine motorboat developed by Fairmile Marine were sent from England and it was agreed that these craft could be built in New Zealand providing the engines, ordnance and some prefabricated components came from England.
The Class B Fairmiles were 112 feet (34 m) long, displaced 85 tons and had a complement of 16. Twin 12-cylinder petrol engines generated 630 hp (470 kW) on each of two shafts for a speed of 20 knots (37 km/h). They were armed with a 2-pdr (40 mm) gun, a 20 mm Oerlikon cannon, twin 0.303 in Vickers GO machine guns, and 12 depth charges, and were fitted with an ASDIC sonar.
The public source identifies “Coastal Forces of the Royal New Zealand Navy” as division of the Royal New Zealand Navy. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Coastal, Forces and Royal.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5138291. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1921 and 1941.
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This entry incorporates text from “Coastal Forces of the Royal New Zealand Navy” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.