Soviet destroyer Smyshleny (1940)

Smyshleny (Смышлёный) 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, Smyshleny was completed in 1940 to the modified Project 7U design.

Assigned to the Black Sea Fleet, she covered the evacuation of the Danube Flotilla to Odessa a few weeks after the German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June. During the Sieges of Odessa and Sevastopol in 1941–1942, the ship ferried reinforcements and supplies into those cities, evacuated wounded and refugees and bombarded Axis troop positions. Smyshleny struck a Soviet mine on 6 March 1942 and sank the following day as the flooding could not be contained. All but two of her crew perished when she sank.

Design and description
Originally built as a Gnevny-class ship, Smyshleny 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 m and a beam of 10.2 m, but they had a reduced draft of 3.98 m at deep load. The ships were slightly overweight, displacing 1727 MT at standard load and 2279 MT 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 54000 shp using steam from four water-tube boilers, which the designers expected would exceed the 37 kn speed of the Project 7s because there was additional steam available. Some fell short of it, although specific figures for most individual ships have not survived. Variations in fuel oil capacity meant that the range of the Project 7Us varied between 1380 to 2700 nmi at 19 kn, that upper figure demonstrated by Storozhevoy.

The Project 7U-class ships mounted four 130 mm 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 76.2 mm 34-K AA guns in single mounts and three 45 mm 21-K AA guns, as well as four 12.7 mm DK or DShK machine guns. They carried six 533 mm 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 3 kn.

Construction and career
Smyshleny was laid down in Shipyard No. 200 (named after 61 Communards) in Nikolayev as yard number 1077 on 15 October 1936 as a Gnevny-class destroyer with the name Polezny. She was relaid down as a Project 7U destroyer on 27 June 1938, and launched on 26 August 1939. The ship was renamed Smyshleny on 25 September 1940 and was commissioned into the Black Sea Fleet on 10 November.

Following the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, on 22 June 1941, the fleet sortied to lay defensive minefields off its base in Sevastopol on the morning of 23 June. The following day, Smyshleny and the destroyer SOVIET DESTROYER Besposhchadny, commanded by the leader of the 3rd Destroyer Division, SOVIET DESTROYER Kharkov, sailed to the Danube estuary to support the river monitors of the Danube Flotilla in response to a report of Romanian destroyers leaving the port of Constanța. The destroyers bombarded Romanian troops around Snake Island, supported several amphibious operations and laid and swept mines before returning to Sevastopol on 25 June, without engaging Romanian surface forces.

In the first weeks of the war, the Black Sea Fleet was tasked with disrupting Axis supply lines by bombarding Constanța and its oil tanks. The time of the bombardment was set for 05:00 on 26 June, to be preceded by a 30-minute airstrike by aircraft of the fleet beginning an hour earlier. For the raid, the heavy cruiser SOVIET CRUISER Voroshilov and SOVIET DESTROYER Moskva were to cover the bombardment of the port by the latter's sister ship Kharkov, Smyshleny and her sister SOVIET DESTROYER Soobrazitelny. To prevent Axis air attack, the ships began to depart Sevastopol at night, at 18:00 on 25 June. However, before exiting the bay, the ships were ordered back to port because the plan was changed by the People's Commissar for the Navy, Vitse-admiral (Vice Admiral) Nikolay Kuznetsov, who ordered that the two destroyer leaders conduct the bombardment, with the other ships in support. As Smyshleny steamed out of Sevastopol later that night, one of her paravanes got caught on the seabed and she could not participate in the mission. The following day, she helped to escort the damaged Kharkov back to Sevastopol.

The ship supported the defenders of Odessa by ferrying troops and supplies beginning in late August and by bombarding Axis troops on 27–29 August. During the evacuation of the port in mid-October, she laid a minefield off Ilyichevka in conjunction with the destroyer SOVIET DESTROYER Bodry on 14 October and then provided fire support the next day. The following month, Smyshleny began escorting supply and troop convoys to and from encircled Sevastopol and attacked Axis troops with her main guns. Between 28 November and the end of the year, the ship fired almost a thousand shells. On 28–30 December, she covered the amphibious landings at Kerch and Feodosia.

Smyshleny again bombarded German positions near Sevastopol on 1 January 1942 and then escorted a cargo ship carrying troops and supplies to Sevastopol two days later. On 6 January, the ship attempted to land reinforcements at Eupatoria during a Soviet counterattack, but was driven off by heavy German fire and bad weather. She bombarded German positions at Eupatoria on 16 January as a diversion for a small amphibious landing at Sudak. During a storm on 22 January, the destroyer was slightly damaged while at anchor in Tuapse. Smyshleny bombarded Axis troops on 21, 27–28 February and 2, 4 March. After escorting a convoy to Kerch on 6 March, the ship accidentally entered a Soviet minefield enroute to Novorossiysk. She struck a mine that knocked out her power, but jury-rigged repairs allowed her to proceed homewards at a speed of 8 kn. Unrepaired leaks gradually flooded her second and third boiler rooms and she lost power again. Stormy weather prevented her from being towed home and she gradually sank at 44.71667°N, 36.75°W on 7 March. The shockwave when her depth charges detonated killed almost all of the crew; only two survivors were rescued.