USS Charles Lawrence
1943 Buckley-class destroyer escort
USS Charles Lawrence (DE-53) was a Buckley-class destroyer escort of the United States Navy, commissioned in 1943. She was converted to a high-speed transport in 1944 and redesignated APD-37. After being decommissioned in 1946, she was finally scrapped in 1965.
History
USS Charles Lawrence was named in honor of Ordnanceman Charles Lawrence (29 December 1916–7 December 1941), who was killed in action during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor 7 December 1941.
Charles Lawrence was laid down on 1 August 1942 at the Bethlehem-Hingham Shipyard, Inc., in Hingham, Massachusetts, launched on 16 February 1943, sponsored by Mrs S. Lawrence and commissioned on 31 May 1943.
Battle of the Atlantic
Assigned first to escort central Atlantic convoys of tankers between Norfolk, Virginia, and Casablanca, Charles Lawrence made one such voyage between 16 August and 24 September 1943. She was then transferred to the high-speed tanker convoys formed at New York City from ships which had sailed independently up the east coast, now swept of the submarine menace, from West Indian oil ports. Between 13 October 1943 and 23 September 1944, Charles Lawrence escorted eight such convoys to Northern Ireland, returning with the tankers in ballast to New York. These convoys only lost one tanker in their passages. Along with the constant alertness against submarine attack, Charles Lawrence maintained a high standard of seamanship to keep the seas in all kinds of weather.
“USS Charles Lawrence” enters the record as 1943 Buckley-class destroyer escort. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Charles, Lawrence and Buckley-class 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 Apr 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7868222. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1943, 1944, 1946 and 1965.
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This entry incorporates text from “USS Charles Lawrence” 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.