USS Fessenden DE/DER-142

About the "Edsall Class" Destroyer Escorts

A total of 85 ships of the EDSALL class were built by two shipyards, Consolidated Steel Co., of Orange, Texas and Brown Shipbuilding of Houston, Texas. The lead ship, USS EDSALL (DE 129) commissioned on 10 April 1943 at Orange, Texas. They had 5" guns as the main armament and had torpedo launchers. The DE's were unlikely to have much opportunity to use their "main armament" except for anti-aircraft, and the most critical weapon, the depth charges, were superior to those used on the big destroyers. The DE's had eight K-projectors , while "full destroyers" had only six. The smaller ships also had the critical and very effective hedgehogs that projected 24 contact bombs in front of the ship, another advantage over the larger DD's. All of these weapons made for a much larger and more flexible field of fire to use against a hidden sub. The Destroyer Escorts in general were designed to be easily manufactured by a radical new methodology that used pre-fab components shipped from all over the US. They were half the cost of a full Destroyer, took less than a year to build, yet had superior effectiveness against subs. 563 DE's of all types were launched during WWII, more than any other type of warship. They sank 29 Japanese submarines, and 60 German U-Boats (35 of these by Royal Navy DE's). Recently people, especially DE veterans, have become peeved that the DE was sometimes referred to as "expendable." Expendable." CVE's and DE's were regular companions escorting the vulnerable cargo ships. If a ship has a protective screen of warships around it then it's much harder for a Japanese sub to make a successful attack on the "prize in the middle. Of course that makes the screening ships something akin to a human shield. DE's are more useful, however, as a deterrent or distraction than as "linebackers". They had no armor, and a very shallow draught. Torpedoes would often be set to run deeper than the hull of a DE.  Torpedoes were known to pass through DE's and CVE's, not detonating due to the thinness of the hulls! So in that respect the DE's were not really "fodder" as much as "smokescreen (that had the ability to counterattack viciously). The strategic decision that actually caused the highest loss of DE's during the war, was their use as a "radar picket" in 1944/45. In this capacity they could alert the fleet of incoming Kamikazes. Unfortunately the Kamikazes attacked the picket ships viciously, and DE's were not very good at defending themselves against aircraft. The USS Fessenden was converted to a DER and assigned the extremely perilous picket duty, with long periods at sea without liberty. The picket concept was so successful that for decades after WWII many DE's stayed out at sea, specifically to continue this role during the Cold War.