Soviet destroyer Skory (1939)

Skory (Скорый) 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, Skory was completed in 1941 to the modified Project 7U design.

With her sea trials cut short by the beginning of Operation Barbarossa in June, Skory was assigned to the Baltic Fleet and fought in the defense of Tallinn, Estonia, providing naval gunfire support to Soviet troops. During the evacuation of Tallinn on 28 August, she struck a mine while attempting to tow the damaged destroyer leader SOVIET DESTROYER Minsk and was nearly broken in half, sinking within minutes with the loss of 57 crewmen and an unknown number of passengers.

Design and description
Originally built as a Gnevny-class ship, Skory 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 from 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
Skory was laid down in Shipyard No. 190 (Zhdanov) in Leningrad with the yard number 524 on 29 November 1936 as a Gnevny-class destroyer. She was relaid down as a Project 7U destroyer on 23 October 1938, and launched on 24 July 1939. When Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, began on 22 June 1941, the ship was still fitting-out. Her trials were drastically curtailed as a result of the war and the Soviet naval jack was raised aboard her on 15 July, before joining the 2nd Division of the Baltic Fleet Light Forces Detachment three days later. Skory accompanied the hospital ships Iosif Stalin and Andrey Zhdanov to Tallinn on 25 July, and was officially transferred to the fleet on 1 August.

During her brief career the destroyer fought in the defense of Tallinn, expending 172 shells from her main guns between 24 and 28 August. While in the Tallinn roadstead on 26 August, a German shell struck her upper deck, killing three sailors and damaging the aft depth-charge launcher. During this day and the next, Skory received at least one direct hit and several near misses, also without significant damage. During the Evacuation of Tallinn, she accidentally rammed the subchaser MO-407, but remained afloat. On 28 August Skory was ordered to take the destroyer leader SOVIET DESTROYER Minsk in tow, after she was damaged in the area of Cape Juminda by the explosion of a mine caught in her paravanes. While backing toward Minsk at 21:30, Skory struck a mine that nearly tore the hull in half. Within minutes the ship capsized and sank with the loss of 57 crew members, including the captain, in addition to an unknown number of Baltic Fleet Naval Aviation mechanics. Skory was struck from the Soviet Navy on 10 September.