USS Bassett
1944 Buckley-class destroyer escort
USS Bassett (APD-73), ex-DE-672, is a United States Navy high-speed transport in commission from 1945 to 1946 and from 1950 to 1957.
Namesake
Edgar Rees Bassett was born on 10 March 1914 in Philadelphia. He enlisted in the United States Naval Reserve as a seaman 2d class on 13 February 1940 at New York City. Commissioned Ensign on 20 May 1941, he joined Fighting Squadron 42 (VF-42) on 9 June as it was preparing for its first Neutrality Patrol cruise on board the USS Yorktown.
He was awarded air medals for his aggressive performance of duty in the first few months of the war, especially for his strafing gun emplacements and Japanese barges during the raid on Lae and Salamaua, New Guinea, on 10 March 1942. He was also awarded the Navy Cross for his actions during the Battle of the Coral Sea. He shot down a Mitsubishi F1M floatplane over Tulagi during the Yorktown air group attack on shipping there on 4 May and strafed the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) destroyer Yūzuki as it fled Tulagi harbor. On the morning of 7 May, he flew one of the fighters that protected Torpedo Squadron 5 (VT-5) in its attack on the aircraft carrier Shōhō. That same evening, he helped to disperse a group of Japanese dive bombers and torpedo planes in the vicinity of the Yorktown task force. The following morning, he flew combat air patrol over Task Force 17 and assisted in the downing of one Japanese plane during the attack on his carrier.
“USS Bassett” enters the record as 1944 Buckley-class destroyer escort. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Bassett, Buckley-class and destroyer can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3547382. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1945, 1946, 1950 and 1957.
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This entry incorporates text from “USS Bassett” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.