USS Slater: The Last Destroyer Escort

On the Albany waterfront sits one of the most important surviving warships in the United States, the USS Slater. She is the last destroyer escort still afloat in America, the sole survivor of five hundred sixty-three ships built for the same urgent purpose: keeping Allied convoys alive in the North Atlantic during World War Two.

Destroyer escorts were invented in a crisis. In the early months of the war, German U-boats were sinking Allied merchant ships faster than they could be replaced. The United States and Britain needed a smaller, cheaper, faster-to-build warship capable of carrying depth charges, sonar, and anti-aircraft guns. American designers delivered the destroyer escort class in nineteen forty-three, and the shipyards churned out hundreds of them in less than two years.

The Slater was launched at the Tampa Shipbuilding Company on February thirteenth, nineteen forty-four, and commissioned May first. She was named for Frank O. Slater, an Alabama sailor killed during the Battle of Guadalcanal in nineteen forty-two. Over the following year, she made several round-trip crossings of the North Atlantic, escorting convoys through waters where German submarines hunted. She also served in the Pacific, arriving as the war was ending.

Afterward, the Slater was transferred to the Greek Navy, where she served as a training vessel until nineteen ninety-one. The Destroyer Escort Historical Museum acquired her and brought her to Albany in nineteen ninety-seven, where volunteers spent years restoring her to wartime configuration with her original armament intact.

She is a National Historic Landmark, and her decks let you walk from the galley to the pilot house through three levels of a ship that protected the lifeline of the entire European war effort.