On this episode of Field Trip.

Oh, Gosh.

HAHA!

That was a lot louder than I thought it was going to be.

Hi, I'm Matt, and I'm Nicole.

And today we're on the USS Slater, which was a destroyer escort in World War two.

Yeah.

And it was also a National Historic Landmark, and it's right here in Albany.

So let's go check it out.

<i>Field Trip theme song</i> <i>Intense battle music</i> The USS Slater is a cannon class destroyer escort.

And to put these in historical context, in World War Two, England was standing alone against Nazi Germany.

And to starve England, the Germans put all these U-boats anti-submarine to sea to sink all the ships trying to supply the British islands.

They built a lot of escort ships to sink those U-boats, so the merchant ships could get through to England with all the supplies.

And USS Slater was one of those destroyer escorts built to escort the convoys to Europe and sink the U-boats.

I think what impresses people the most is when they get down inside the ship here and see how these sailors actually had to live and bunk.

Okay, so now we're in a typical Navy bunk room.

Okay.

There were five compartments on on this USS Slater like this where the crew lived.

Okay.

And this compartment holds about 36 people.

And you can see every sailor had a bunk, you know, with a mattress and a pillow.

And then we had the bunk locker down here where you kept everything you own.

Okay.

And this was a 1945 innovation.

The flame proof mattress cover.

If they put on the bedding when the ships were getting hit by kamikazes and you had the burning gasoline issue, just kept the bedding from burning and adding to the fire.

So.

Wow.

And one of the things we've done here is all the bunk straps, okay?

The sailors would actually tie themselves into their bunks so they wouldn't get to one out of the bunks when they're at sea, because remember, we're rolling and pitching side to side.

You imagine somebody picks your house up 25ft in the air, throws you forward 50 yards and drops you back down.

That's what these guys are living with.

Are people allowed to try one of these out?

Yeah.

We'll let the little kids climb into the bunks, you know, they can actually experience.

Are we considered little kids?

Yeah.

You'll consider little kids if you want to climb up.

Yeah.

You know which which one should we try out?

I'd say this one right here, you know.

All right.

You first.

Nicole.

Oh.

It's tight.

Yeah.

Oh!

So comfy!

Strap yourself in.

No.

Thank you.

He may just want to stay here the rest of the day, you know.

Nicole: bye Matt.

We're in a ship's galley now.

And this is where they cook the food for the 200 men in the crew.

All the food would be prepared here.

And then again, carried down in big pans down to the mess deck and served down there.

So what do they typically eat?

They got a menu right here.

We got Cream of Peas soup, chicken over biscuits.

You know, we got chicken broth and ham and macaroni salad, just all kinds of stuff.

But when you hit the end of the supply line at Okinawa and you'd been out at sea about three weeks, you know, you were down a bit pretty much, you know, crackers, hardtack and spam, you know, so.

Yum.

Yeah.

So.

So, this looks cool.

Where are we here?

We are in the combat information center.

Okay, this is kind of like the situation room where the brains of the ship at the start of World War two, when we developed our radar and we developed sonar and we had lookouts.

All this information is coming in from the different sources, and they didn't really have a way of analyzing it.

So they decided to create a space, you know, that would receive all the information from the radars, the sonar, the lookouts, and analyze it to give the captain the recommendation about what the best course of action was.

This was a summary plot board right here.

You put yourself in the center and you plotted all the ships in the convoy that you were with on this board, and then you kept track of them.

And then if somebody showed up on this board that basically hadn't been there before, that was the one you worried about essentially recreating the radar picture on this summary plot board so everybody can see it.

Wow.

Why the red lights?

Yes, because dark adapt.

It made it easier to see the radar scopes, you know.

So.

And then in here there's another noise.

Lots of noises on this.

You're hearing sonar.

Okay.

Oh, sonar and World War two sonar didn't have a visual presentation.

You just listen for the echo return, you know?

And depending upon Doppler, you know, if the sonar, you know, you're getting closer to the ship, the Doppler would go, the pitch would go up.

You know, if the submarine were going away from you, the pitch would go down, you know?

So.

We're in the pilot house now.

And so you had the helm right here, which actually steered the ship.

The engine order telegraph over there, which gave orders down to the engine room so they could make adjustments to the engines that go faster, slower forwards or backwards.

And then you had your compasses right here.

You had a gyrocompass, which was a mechanical compass, which lined up with the North and South pole, okay, with the master gyro down below.

And that would actually give you the two course to steer.

And then you had your magnetic compass right there used in case of gyrocompass failed.

And that would point toward magnetic north.

And you could make corrections to.

So you could get the two more on that out of control.

A lot of controls.

A lot of controls.

I'm Steve Long and I was a signalman when I was in the Navy.

That meant flashing light semaphore and flag hoist.

Each Navy ship has a four letter call sign, and you see it in 1 or 2 ways.

From a distance, you could use the 24 inch searchlight, which was a carbon arc.

Light semaphore was a way of signaling other ships within eyesight, and they were just literally, you know, you just do a, b, c, d, e, f, g. Normally once the ship is actually really open, we'll have USS Slater.

136.

Most of these things are two person operations.

Anyone reading the signals is transmitting it to someone who is copying him down.

It's gone up.

He let her get away.

He let it get away.

Yep.

You flunked the test.

Somebody's going back to boot camp.

Wow, Nicole, that was so much fun.

Yeah, there's so much to see.

We spent the whole afternoon on the ship, and there is more to take in than we could ever learn.

And, Share in one day.

Thank you so much for joining us on this episode of Field Trip.

Check out more episodes online at WMHT.ORG/FIELDTRIP And don't forget to let us know where you think we should go next.

All right, Nicole, raise the flag.

Raise the flag.

Okay, here we go.