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Churchill once again turned to Roosevelt,
and in August the President approved an order to build 50 DEs for the British. A final design was worked out in November; the first keel was laid in February 1942, and six months later, in August the first destroyer escort, destined for the Royal Navy, was launched. The U.S. Navy's first DE was not commissioned until January 1943. Had the Navy delayed much longer, the ships might have missed the war.
Conventional destroyers were built for speed and firepower. But the DE, taking on smaller and wilier prey, needed maneuverability above all else. The most important feature of the DE was its narrow turning circle of 400 yards or less, a good match for the U-boat. A destroyer generally required 880 yards.
At sea the trim but deadly fighting ship was a challenging match for its underwater adversaries. In the words of Capt. Richard Rea, "The DEs were good sea boats. You could take a sea on either bow, and with its length, ride through it comfortably. They were not bad rollers by design, as many complained, and were responsive when maneuvering." DE sailors spoke with pride in describing their sturdy little ship even though it was never still, but lurched, lunged, pitched, rolled, and otherwise accommodated restless waters.
The DE also was armed with an impressive battery of underwater weapons: two depth-charge racks, eight depth-charge projectors (called K-guns), and the Hedgehog, a cluster of 24 mortars that could fire forward at an underwater target. In addition, each DE was equipped with sonar and radar, not to mention three torpedo tubes and long and short-range antiaircraft guns. If DEs could take care of U-boats, fleet destroyers would be free to operate elsewhere with strike forces, where their greater speed and offensive gun and torpedo power were more effective and more urgently needed.
That was the plan. The reality was that the Navy was already engaged in a massive shipbuilding program, and the new DEs were low on its list of priorities. The carefully designed ships became the receptacle for whatever was left over, incorporating a variety of power plans and weapons. In the
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end there would be six classes of DE, each with a different power source, ranging from diesel to turbo-electric. To the casual observer they all looked alike, but every sailor knew the difference.
Although the DE was essentially made up of spare parts, its basic design was simple enough to allow for mass production. The Navy assigned the manufacture of its highest-priority vessels, such as battleships, to experienced naval yards at Mare Island, California; Boston; and Puget Sound. These facilities were already overburdened in 1941, but officials at Mare Island accepted a contract for DEs anyway, even with the facility overwhelmed by the construction of larger vessels. Mare Island had a plan.
How could the yard possibly cope? It suffered not only from a lack of ways on which to build and launch the ships but from a shortage of space for the additional assembly of hull sections, decks, bulkheads, floor sections, and superstructures. The answer was simple, or at least simply stated: It would farm the work out. On December 2, 1941, less than a week before Pearl Harbor, Mare Island announced it was contracting the building of DEs to a factory in Denver, Colorado. Denver was a mile high and 800 miles from the sea, but it did have two advantages: no existing war industries and a ready supply of labor and housing. Mare Island would furnish the blueprints, building schedules, and leadership; Denver would provide the steel and sweat.
This introduced a policy of ordering out for pieces of the ships that would be taken up later by many other yards building DEs around the country, and it was the first of many shipbuilding innovations that the desperate need for mass production engendered. Between 1942 and 1945 the United States would produce 565 DEs, and the war and the U-boats would not pause and wait. An army of untrained workers, men and women, struggled to cope not only with enormous demand for vessels of a fresh,
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In 1939 the longest battle of World War II, the Battle of the Atlantic, got under way as German U-boats began prowling the seas between the United States and Europe. The battle would last until 1945, and during its early part German U-boats would send Allied ships, and therefore Allied supplies and troops, to the bottom in alarming numbers. The submarines were quick, easy to maneuver, and difficult to detect. The standard convoy proved an easy target, and the Allies realized they would need a new weapon if they were to survive.
Winston Churchill would later say that "everything elsewhere, on land, sea and air, depended ultimately on the outcome of this battle." It was not an exaggeration; it was common sense. Every ship lost was a major victory for Germany. In 1940, just after he became prime minister, Churchill anxiously appealed to President Franklin D. Roosevelt for "escort vessels: specially designed to destroy U-boats. In response the Navy's Bureau of Ships developed a plan for what would be called the destroyer escort (DE), drawing on characteristics of British and Canadian small destroyers called corvettes. The sole purpose of the DE would be to seek and destroy U-boats.
After the concept was agreed upon, it took time for the wheels of military bureaucracy to turn. Not until May 1941, a year and a half into the Battle of the Atlantic, was Navy brass ready to start building. But almost as soon as the first order was placed, Adm. Harold R. Stark, the chief of naval operations, changed his mind. He believed the resources needed to build the ships would be better used elsewhere, and he canceled the 50-ship deal. An alarmed
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