The USS Sturtevant DE 239 was an Edsall Class Destroyer Escort in WWII. A Destroyer Escort was a small, very fast ship designed for anti submarine and air defense, a gun platform for protecting convoys in the north Atlantic. She was commissioned on June 16, 1943 and sailed under command of Lt. Commander Frederic W. Hawes. Near the end of WWII she was ordered to the Pacific, arriving in San Diego after the war ended, and was then ordered back to the Atlantic. She was decommissioned on 23 March 1956 and placed in mothballs. She was recommissioned in 1951, and served in various capacities in the Atlantic Fleet. On 31 October 1956, Sturtevant entered the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard for conversion to a radar picket destroyer escort ship. The conversion process lasted until 5 October 1957, when she was recommissioned as DER-239. On 7 February 1958, she departed Philadelphia for the Pacific Ocean to become the first radar picket in the distant early warning line of radar stations, protecting the U. S. from Russian missile threats. She served in the Pacific Fleet until 1960, when she was once again decommissioned. She was in the Pacific Reserve Fleet, (moth balls) until December 1972, when she was stricken from the Naval Register and sold for scrap. Your ashtray is off that ship, and would have been used in officers country, probably in the ward room. Sailors had much more simple ashtrays, perhaps a trench art ashtray made from the brass of a 5"38 shell, which is what I remember from the ship I was on. Here is a picture of DER 239.
