Short Cruise on a Destroyer Escort, By Ernie Pyle:
“So now I’m a D-E sailor. Full-fledged one. Drenched from head to foot with salt water. Sleep with a leg crooked around your rack so you won’t fall out. Put wet bread under your dinner tray to keep it from sliding.
They are rough-and-tumble little ships. Their afterdecks are laden with depth charges. They can turn in half the space of a Destroyer. Their forward guns can seldom be used, because waves are breaking over them.
They roll and they plunge. They buck and they twist. They shudder and they fall through space. Their sailors say they should have flight pay and sub pay both — they’re in the air half the time, underwater half the time. Their men are accustomed to being wet and think nothing of it.
I came back from the northern waters on a D-E. When a wave comes over and you get soaked and a sailor laughs and says, ‘Now you’re a D-E sailor,’ it makes you feel kind of proud.”
Destroyer Escort, WGT (Butler) type, plows into heavy seas, during operations in support of the Lingayen Gulf invasion, 12 January 1945. USS Colorado (BB-45) is steaming in the distance. Photographed from the escort carrier USS Makin Island (CVE-93) 80-G-301255