Strashny () 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 , Strashny was completed in 1941 to the modified Project 7U design.
Accepted from the shipyard on the day that the German invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa) began in June 1941, Strashny was rushed into service for operations in the Gulf of Riga. While returning to Tallinn, Estonia, in mid-July after suffering bomb damage, her bow was severely damaged by a mine that took her out of the war for several months. Towed to Soviet naval bases, the destroyer was repaired during the Siege of Leningrad by taking a bow from an unfinished Project 30 destroyer. Returning to service in April 1942, Strashny bombarded Axis positions during the final months of the siege and in the Vyborg–Petrozavodsk Offensive. Postwar, she continued to serve in the Baltic and was briefly converted to an unarmed stationary training ship before being broken up for scrap in 1960.
Design and description
Originally built as a Gnevny-class ship, Strashny 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. Strashny herself reached during her sea trials in 1941. Variations in fuel oil capacity meant that the range of the Project 7Us varied from at .
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
In 1944–1945, Strashny exchanged both of her 21-K mounts for six 70-K AA guns in single mounts and an additional 34-K mount. By the end of the war, she had received a Lend-Lease British Type 291 search radar and a British Type 128 ASDIC system. 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 World War II
Strashny was laid down in Shipyard No. 190 (Zhdanov) in Leningrad with the yard number 519 on 26 August 1936 as a Gnevny-class destroyer. She was relaid down as a Project 7U destroyer on 31 March 1938 and launched on 8 April 1939. The destroyer began her sea trials in November 1940 but was forced to postpone them to May 1941 due to ice. Her guns were tested on 16 June, and she was accepted on 22 June, the day that Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, began. Four days later, the destroyer fired her first shots of the war when her anti-aircraft gunners defended the ship against a German air raid on the Tallinn roadstead. After an accelerated course of combat training, Strashny joined the 4th Destroyer Division of the Baltic Fleet. With her sisters and , she participated in operations in the Gulf of Riga. The destroyer was lightly damaged by near misses from German bombs on 13 July, which temporarily knocked out two boilers and a turbogenerator. Strashny escaped mostly unscathed from an air raid off Ruhnu on the next day, although concussion from near misses knocked out her main compass; her captain claimed her gunners shot down a pair of Junkers Ju 88 bombers. Bomb hits during a 15 July raid killed seven crew members and wounded 22, although the destroyer's anti-aircraft gunners claimed a Ju 88 downed. Bomb splinters started a fire in a shell magazine, which was extinguished, and holed her hull in multiple places, puncturing several oil tanks and knocking out power for her radio and electric navigation devices.