Ships
- USS Cotten (DD-669) Captain from 24 July 1943
F. T. Sloat, a lieutenant commander in the United States Navy, was the first commanding officer of the destroyer Cotten. He took command on 24 July 1943, the day the ship was placed in commission. Cotten, hull number DD-669, was a Fletcher-class destroyer, built for the work that dominated the later Pacific war: screening aircraft carriers, hunting submarines, and standing in with amphibious forces off hostile beaches.
The ship had been built at the Federal Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company in Kearny, New Jersey, and she carried the name of Captain Lyman A. Cotten, a Navy officer of an earlier generation. Sloat’s first duty was to make a new ship and a new crew into a single unit. Fitting out, machinery trials, gunnery drills, and damage-control practice all fell to him before Cotten could be sent to the fleet.
Through the rest of 1943 he took her through shakedown and training and brought her into the Pacific. A destroyer of her class carried five 5-inch guns, a bank of torpedo tubes, depth charges, and a growing battery of lighter antiaircraft weapons. She was fast enough to stay with the carriers and well enough armed to fight aircraft, submarines, and surface ships. Sloat commanded her through that change from a yard ship on the Atlantic coast to a unit preparing for combat.
Early in 1944 Cotten went forward with the fleet into the Central Pacific offensive. Destroyers of her type spent those months on screening stations around the carriers and fire-support ships, on antisubmarine patrol, and on call for shore bombardment as American forces moved through the Marshalls and on toward the next island groups. The captain’s day was a round of station-keeping, radar and lookout watches, and sudden calls to general quarters when aircraft or a submarine contact appeared.
Sloat’s recorded command of Cotten began with her commissioning on 24 July 1943 and covered the months in which she was worked up and sent into that campaign. As her first captain he set the routines of a wartime destroyer: how the guns were manned, how the engineers answered for speed, and how a crew that had come aboard in a New Jersey yard learned to fight a ship at sea.