Soviet destroyer Silny
1939 Soobrazitelny-class destroyer
Silny (Russian: Сильный, lit. 'Strong') was one of 18 Storozhevoy-class destroyers (officially known as Project 7U) built for the Soviet Navy during the late 1930s. Although she began construction as a Project 7 Gnevny-class destroyer, Silny was completed in 1940 to the modified Project 7U design.
Serving with the Baltic Fleet, she participated in minelaying and escort operations after the start of the German invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa) in June 1941. Silny engaged German minesweepers in the Irbe Strait on 6 July without result, and was taken out of action by propeller damage later that month. Returning to service in late August, she conducted shore bombardments during the Siege of Leningrad. Bomb damage from an air raid in late September caused her to spend the rest of the year under repair. The destroyer saw little action for the rest of the war, aside from firing shore bombardments during the Krasnoye Selo–Ropsha and Vyborg–Petrozavodsk Offensives in 1944. Postwar, she continued to serve in the Baltic and was briefly converted to a target ship before being scrapped in the early 1960s.
Design and description
Originally built as a Gnevny-class ship, Silny 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 112.5 meters (369 ft 1 in) and a beam of 10.2 meters (33 ft 6 in), but they had a reduced draft of 3.98 meters (13 ft 1 in) at deep load.
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