USS Slater, The Last Destroyer Escort

Moored in the Hudson River in Albany is the only World War Two destroyer escort still afloat in the world, and the only one that still carries its original battle armament.

The USS Slater was launched in nineteen forty-four from the Tampa Shipbuilding Company, named for Frank O. Slater, an Alabama sailor killed during the Battle of Guadalcanal in nineteen forty-two. Destroyer escorts were not glamorous ships. They were three hundred six feet long, built fast and in quantity, designed to do the unglamorous work of Atlantic convoy duty, hunting the German submarines that were sinking Allied merchant ships at a catastrophic rate.

The Slater served in both oceans. In the Atlantic it ran antisubmarine patrols, using sonar, depth charges, and hedgehog mortars to push submarines below their operational depth or destroy them outright. In the Pacific, it defended naval task forces from Japanese submarine and kamikaze attacks. Destroyer escorts like the Slater were the ships between the supply convoys and the U-boats, and the margin they provided in the Battle of the Atlantic was one of the war's decisive operational factors.

After the war, the United States transferred the Slater to the Greek Navy, where it served as a training vessel for decades under the name Aetos, meaning Eagle. Greece decommissioned it in nineteen ninety-one and returned it to the United States in nineteen ninety-three. The Destroyer Escort Historical Museum brought it to Albany in nineteen ninety-seven after a lengthy restoration to its nineteen forty-five configuration.

It opens to visitors from April through November. The guided tours cover the navigation bridge, radio rooms, weapons systems, and the crew berthing spaces where a hundred and eighty-six sailors lived for months at a stretch in conditions that, by any modern standard, were brutal. The ship is the last physical record of a class that numbered five hundred sixty-three vessels and helped turn the tide in both oceans.