Svirepy () was one of 18 s (officially known as Project 7U) built for the Soviet Navy during the late 1930s. Although she began construction as a Project 7 , Svirepy was completed in 1941 to the modified Project 7U design.
With her sea trials cut short by the beginning of Operation Barbarossa in June, Svirepy was assigned to the Baltic Fleet and fought in the Gulf of Riga and the defense of Tallinn, Estonia, providing naval gunfire support to Soviet troops. Escaping relatively unscathed from the evacuation of the latter, she provided fire support during the Siege of Leningrad, though seeing little activity after repairs in early 1942. Postwar, the destroyer continued to serve with the Baltic Fleet, spending much of the late 1940s and early 1950s under refit before being scrapped in the late 1950s.
Design and description
Originally built as a Gnevny-class ship, Svirepy and her sister ships were completed to the modified Project 7U design after Joseph Stalin, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, ordered that the latter be built with their boilers arranged en echelon, instead of linked as in the Gnevnys, so that a ship could still move with one or two boilers disabled.
Like the Gnevnys, the Project 7U destroyers had an overall length of and a beam of , but they had a reduced draft of at deep load. The ships were slightly overweight, displacing at standard load and at deep load. The crew complement of the Storozhevoy class numbered 207 in peacetime, but this increased to 271 in wartime, as more personnel were needed to operate additional equipment. Each ship had a pair of geared steam turbines, each driving one propeller, rated to produce using steam from four water-tube boilers, which the designers expected would exceed the speed of the Project 7s because there was additional steam available. Svirepny herself reached during her sea trials in 1943. Variations in fuel oil capacity meant that the range of the Project 7Us varied from at ; Svirepny reached at that speed.
The Project 7U-class ships mounted four B-13 guns in two pairs of superfiring single mounts fore and aft of the superstructure. Anti-aircraft defense was provided by a pair of 34-K AA guns in single mounts and three 21-K AA guns, as well as four DK or DShK machine guns. They carried six torpedo tubes in two rotating triple mounts amidships. The ships could also carry a maximum of 58 to 96 mines and 30 depth charges. They were fitted with a set of Mars hydrophones for anti-submarine work, although these were useless at speeds over .
Modifications
By 1943, Svirepny had exchanged one each of her 21-K and machine gun mounts for an additional 34-K mount, a pair of 70-K AA guns in single mounts and two twin-gun mounts for Lend-Lease, water-cooled 12.7 mm Colt-Browning machine guns. By the end of the war, she had received a British ASDIC system and an early-warning radar of unknown type. After the war, all of her AA guns were replaced by eight water-cooled V-11M versions of the 70-K gun in twin mounts.
Construction and career
Svirepy was laid down in Shipyard No. 190 (Zhdanov) in Leningrad with the yard number 525 on 29 November 1936 as a Gnevny-class destroyer. She was relaid down as a Project 7U destroyer on 30 December 1938, and launched on 28 August 1939. After Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, began on 22 June, Svirepy was accepted by the Soviet Navy that day following much-reduced trials. However, she was not officially assigned to the Baltic Fleet's 4th Destroyer Division until 18 July, although the ship participated in combat earlier. Between 1 and 2 July Svirepy escorted the battleship from Tallinn to Kronstadt with her sisters and .
From 13 to 19 July, again with Smely and Strashny, she operated in Moonsund and the Gulf of Riga, fighting off repeated German air attacks. Near miss bomb explosions on 16 July flooded several compartments and bent the left propeller shaft, while splinters killed two and wounded eight crew members. During the Moonsund operations she fired over 360 76 mm and a similar amount of 45 mm shells, as well as more than 800 12.7 mm rounds, in addition to 22 130 mm diving shells at a submarine on 14 July and high-explosive shells fired in support of an 18 July amphibious landing on Virtsu. Returning to Tallinn on 20 July, she came under attack from German S-boats in Moonsund, but forced them to retire behind a smoke screen by firing fourteen 130 mm shells. After docking at Tallinn, Svirepy supported ground troops in the defense of the base, expending 328 main-gun shells in 25 bombardments.