The Bethlehem-Hingham Shipyard in Hingham, Massachusetts, sat on the south shore of Boston Harbor and produced 227 destroyer escorts during the Second World War. The shipyard had been built from nothing in 1942 on what had been a salt marsh; by 1945 it employed more than 23,000 people, including thousands of women on the welding lines. HMS Tyler began her life there on 6 October 1943 as the unnamed United States Navy destroyer escort DE-567. She was a Buckley-class boat — diesel-electric drive, 1,400 tons standard displacement, designed for the convoy escort role that the U-boat campaign had made desperately necessary. The Bethlehem-Hingham builders launched her on 20 November 1943. Before her hull paint had time to dry, she had been promised to the Royal Navy under Lend-Lease.

Lend-Lease, the United States' programme of supplying war materiel to allied nations against deferred payment, sent 78 destroyer escorts to the Royal Navy between 1943 and 1945. In British service they became the Captain class. DE-567 was commissioned simultaneously into the RN as HMS Tyler on 14 January 1944, the same day she was formally transferred. The captain and crew who took her over were British; the officers' bridge layout was reconfigured to RN preferences; the depth-charge throwers and pom-poms got their British names. But the hull, the engines, and the welds were American. So was the box of spare radio valves the Hingham yard had thrown in with the delivery.

Tyler's first major operation was the invasion of Normandy in June 1944. She was one of the escort frigates that screened the seaward flank of the cross-Channel convoys feeding the beachhead — anti-submarine work in the most heavily patrolled and contested waters of the war. Through the summer she ran patrols and escorts in the English Channel; through the autumn she alternated between Channel work and North Atlantic convoy escort. The pattern was tedious in the way that wartime maritime work was always tedious, until something happened — and then it became, for an hour or so, intensely violent. By January 1945 she was operating in St George's Channel, the body of water between southern Ireland and the Welsh coast, where the surviving German U-boats had concentrated their final patrols against Allied shipping into the Irish Sea ports.

On 21 January 1945, U-1051 torpedoed and sank the Norwegian merchant ship Galatea off Bardsey Island. Tyler arrived at the position later that morning and recovered one man from the water — the sole survivor. His name does not appear in the Wikipedia entry for Tyler, but he was Norwegian, he was alive, and he had watched his shipmates die. Six days later, on 27 January 1945, Tyler joined the British frigates Keats and Bligh in a coordinated depth-charge attack on a second submarine in the same waters. They sank U-1172, killing all 52 of her crew. This is the moral arithmetic of escort work. The Norwegian sailor whom Tyler picked up was alive because his ship's enemy had failed to sink Tyler herself. The men of U-1172 died because Tyler had been good at her job. There is no clean version of the story; there is only the version in which one frigate, escort group EG 22, hunted U-boats in St George's Channel through the last winter of the war.

When the war ended Tyler was sent back. She steamed across the Atlantic — an unremarkable crossing in unremarkable weather — and arrived at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard on 31 October 1945. The Royal Navy formally handed her back to the United States Navy on 12 November. She was struck from the Naval Vessel Register on 8 January 1946 and sold for scrap on 23 May 1946 to Hugo Neu of New York City, who resold her to the Northern Metal Company of Philadelphia. She was broken up in the summer of 1946. Her career had lasted twenty-two months from commissioning to disposal. In that time she had screened the invasion of Europe, plucked a single Norwegian out of the cold, and helped end fifty-two German lives below the surface of the Irish Sea. Then she became razor blades and reinforcing bar. Her shipmates went home.