French frigate Commandant Bory

Designed to navigate overseas, the escorts were fully air-conditioned, resulting in appreciated comfort, which was far from being the case for other contemporary naval vessels.

A posting on an Aviso-escort was a boarding sought after by sailors because it was a guarantee of campaigning overseas and visiting the country.

Four other similar units were built at Ateliers et Chantiers de Bretagne (ACB) in Nantes for the Portuguese Navy under the class name João Belo.^[1]

All French units were decommissioned in the mid-1990s. Three ships were sold to the Uruguayan Navy.^[2][3]

In 1984, Commandant Rivière underwent a redesign to become an experimentation building. It will retain only a single triple platform of 550mm anti-submarine torpedo tubes and all the rest of the armament was landed, replaced by a single 40mm anti-aircraft gun and two 12.7mm machine guns.

Commandant Bory was laid down in May 1958 at Arsenal de Lorient, Lorient. Launched on 11 October 1958 and commissioned on 5 March 1964.

In 1979, she underwent refit.

She was decommissioned on 1 September 1996, she served from 1996 to 2004 as a breakwater in Brest.^[4][5]

The ship was sunk as a target in 2004.