USS Atherton
1943 Cannon-class destroyer escort
USS Atherton (DE-169), a Cannon-class destroyer escort, was the only ship of the United States Navy to be named for Lt. (jg) John McDougal Atherton, who died when USS Meredith sank near Guadalcanal during World War II.
Atherton (DE-169) was laid down on 14 January 1943 at Newark, New Jersey, by the Federal Drydock & Shipbuilding Co. The ship was launched on 27 May 1943, sponsored by Mrs. Cornelia A. Atherton, the mother of Lt. (jg.) Atherton, and widow of Peter Lee Atherton of Louisville, Kentucky.
The vessel was completed at the Norfolk Navy Yard and commissioned there on 29 August 1943.
Namesake
Peter Lee Atherton and Cornelia Atherton (née Anderson), both businesspersons from Kentucky, welcomed a son named John McDougal in 1918. The youngest of four children, he had three older sisters: Valerie and Sarah and Cornelia. He also had an older half-sister, Mary, from his father's first marriage. Once he joined the Navy, he served on board USS Meredith (DD-434) as a line officer.
“USS Atherton” enters the record as 1943 Cannon-class destroyer escort. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Atherton, Cannon-class and destroyer can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7867477. Authority coordinates are 14.495, 120.918. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1943 and 1918.
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This entry incorporates text from “USS Atherton” 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.