laststandonzombieisland

Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger

Warship Wednesday May 29, 2024: The Blue Beauty

Via the Archivio di Stato di Livorno

Above we see the sleek and elegant, almost light cruiser lines, of the Italian-built one-of-a-kind Soviet Red Banner Fleet’s Project 20I destroyer leader Tashkent, seen near La Spezia on 11 March 1938 during sea trials in which she would reportedly top 43.53 knots– a blistering speed for any warship of any class. You will note that her armament isn’t installed and she is in a very light condition (3,422 tons vs 4,175 full) however, once her guns and torpedo tubes were mounted and she went for speed trials, she still logged 42.7 knots, raising eyebrows around the globe.

Project 20I

The Russian Navy fell in love with large (for their day), light cruiser-sized, very fast destroyers going back to 1910’s Novik (1,620 t, 335 feet oal, 4x 4″, 8 x tt, 37.3 knots) and the earlier circa 1898 trio of Novik/Izumrud class scout cruisers (3,080 t, 360 feet oal, 6x 4.7″, 5 x tt, 25.8 knots).

Novik was a great destroyer for 1910. At some 1,600-tons full load, he could make 37.3 knots, which is still fast for a destroyer today, and carried four twin 18-inch torpedo tubes (eight tubes total) as well as four 4-inch guns.

With the Russian fleet all but destroyed during the Great War and the follow-on civil war that engulfed the world’s largest country from 1914 through 1922, followed by a half-decade of crippling famine and depression, as part of Stalin’s First Five Year Plan in 1928 a half-dozen Project 1/38 destroyer leaders were ordered to help rebuild. Better known as the Leningrad/Minsk class, they were the largest warships (2,350 tons, 418 feet oal) constructed in the Soviet Union at the time. Speedy ships, capable of some 40 knots, they carried five new pattern 5.1″/50 B-13 guns, eight torpedo tubes, mines, and depth charges, giving them a decent punch. However, they were miserable sea boats with a top-heavy design that made them pitch in almost any sea state outside of a flat calm.

As the Soviets were working with both Germany and Italy throughout the 1920s and 30s on several often murky rearmament initiatives, and Moscow was working with the latter on the Kirov/Maxim Gorky-class (Project 26) “medium” cruisers, went with the spaghetti option for a better-designed destroyer leader.

With high speed, stability, and the same rough armament as the Project 1/38 destroyer leaders as a baseline, the 54.6 million lire Project 20I design submitted by Odero-Terni-Orlando, Livorno, went some 40 feet longer and 500 tons heavier than the Leningrads. A powerplant of British-made Yarrow boilers and Parsons turbines (rather than going with Italian competitor Ansaldo) had an expected capability of 100,000 shp but this reached 125,500 on trials.

Original drawings by Odero-Terni-Orlando Shipyards, Livorno, 1936, via the Archivio di Stato di Livorno

Original drawings by Odero-Terni-Orlando Shipyards, Livorno, 1936, via the Archivio di Stato di Livorno

Original drawings by Odero-Terni-Orlando Shipyards, Livorno, 1936, via the Archivio di Stato di Livorno

While the ship couldn’t keep up her 40+ knots speed for long, she could still eke out a 2,800 nm range at 25 knots or 5,030 nm at a speed of 20 knots, giving them legs enough for overseas work. As such, the Soviets planned a series of 12 Project 20Is (4 for the Pacific Fleet, 3 in the Baltic, 3 in the Black Sea, and 2 for the Northern Fleet ) with the class leader built at Livorno and the other 11 constructed in the Motherland at Yard No. 190 (Zhdanov, Leningrad) and No. 198 (Marti South, Nikolaev).

Armament, as designed, would be six 5.1″/50 guns in three twin B-2LM mounts, a twin 3″/50 ZAU 39-K AAA mount, a half dozen 37mm ZAU 70-K “Boforski” AAA singles, and provision for another half dozen of the country’s soon to be famous new 12.7mm DShK 56-P-542 guns.

A torpedo battery of nine 21-inch tubes in three triple turnstiles, with enough reloads to allow for 18 fish, gave her an offensive punch. She could also carry 110 Model 1931 sea mines on rails along with two stern depth charge racks for 20 small (50-pound charge) BM-1 and four large (300-pound charge) BB-1 style ash cans.

Torpedo tubes, Tashkent

Meet Tashkent

Our subject was named for the ancient Central Asian Silk Road city that is the current capital of Uzbekistan and was a traditional Russian naval warship name going back to an 89-ton armed gunboat on the Tsar’s Aral flotilla in the 1870s and a Bolshevik river gunboat of the Volga military flotilla during the Russian Civil War.

Ordered from OTO Livorno in September 1935 in conjunction with the NKTP, she was laid down in January 1937, launched that December, and accepted (unarmed) by Soviet representatives in March 1939. Her contract price was paid in a mix of French francs and British pounds sterling.

Russian destroyer Tashkent under construction at the OTO shipyard in Livorno, Italy in 1937

While it had been planned to send her to the Baltic Fleet where the Leningrad yard would have ready access to her while they made eight copies for service from Murmansk to Vladivostok, the fact that the toothless destroyer would have to transit Spanish waters– where German Kriegsmarine ships and Italian “pirate” submarines were operating in the tail end of the Spanish Civil War, led Moscow to order Tashkent to Odesa in the Black Sea.

Sailing sans any guns under the guise of a passenger ship– complete with a Sovtorgflot or Soviet Commercial Fleet flag, a partial Italian crew, and tarpaulins with faux portholes painted on them stretched across her superstructure– she passed through the Bosphorus and arrived in Odesa on 6 May 1939, turned over to the Soviet Navy some 85 years ago this month.

Following a series of workups after which her Italian contract yard personnel were released, she went to Nikolaev for a temporary armament fit that included old-style 5.1″/50 B-13 singles as her planned twin turrets weren’t yet available. She nonetheless kept her blueish-gray Italian livery until 1941, earning her the nickname of the “Goluboy kreyser” or Blue Cruiser.

You have to love those Italian cruiser lines

Destroyer Tashkent with initial 130-mm B-13 naval guns armament, 1940

War!

With Stalin and Hitler officially on the same side for the first 22 months of WWII, to the horror of Eastern Poland and the Baltics, Tashkent only got into the fighting past Barbarossa but she quickly made up for lost time.

Under Capt. (3rd rank) Vasily Nikolaevich Eroshenko (Frunze 1930), Tashkent was at Nikolaev, finally receiving her twin 5.1″/50 mounts and dark wartime scheme in June 1941 but soon was able to sortie to Sevastopol where she would lead a scratch destroyer squadron that included three smaller (2402 t) Russki Project 7 type tin cans– Bodriy, Besposhchadny, and Bditelny.

With her twin turrets installed

Dispatched to help defend threatened Odesa on 22 August, she spent a week there, delivering NGFS (540 5.1-inch shells) to Red Army troops fighting advancing German and Romanian divisions until she was damaged by a 12-bomb near miss from German bombers on 30 August that forced her to limp back to Sevastopol at 12 knots to repair split seams and flooding of frames 192-205. She left a detachment of her crew behind in Odessa to join the doomed 1st Naval Infantry (Marine) Regiment ashore.

Cobbled back together with cement and steel patches in drydock under a blacked-out camouflage screen with volunteer yard workers only allowed onboard after dark, and with the Germans advancing on the Crimea and isolating Sevastopol by early October, Tashkent was withdrawn with the rest of the fleet to the Eastern Black Sea.

Tashkent and submarine Shch-212 in Poti, Georgia 1942

Tashkent moored with the submarine D-5 6.26.1942

She soon returned in early December to land 700 tons of vitally-needed ammunition in the besieged city and in January came back to deliver a brigade of Siberian Riflemen from the newly formed 386th Rifle Division, on both runs remaining in the area pulling naval gunfire support until her 5-inch magazines were exhausted.

Ship’s boy Borya Kuleshin, later holder of the Order of the Red Star, aboard Tashkent, his PPShka at the ready.

Tashkent shelling German positions near Sevastopol, while still in the harbor

With Siberian Riflemen

Further resupply runs/NGFS stints to Sevastopol by Tashkent would occur regularly over the next five months, earning her legendary status as the guardian angel of the city. Her ability to make high-speed 30+ knot runs through the 250 sea miles from Novorossiysk to Sevastopol made her invaluable, akin to the Japanese cruisers and destroyers running supplies and troops via “The Slot” down the New Georgia Sound to Guadalcanal in 1942.

To be sure, other Black Sea ships of all stripes made similar runs, but none as many times as the Blue Cruiser, which in the spring and summer of 1942 would carry 19,300 troops to the city along with over 2,500 tons of munitions and supplies.

Her final blockade run on 26 June to Sevastopol brought 944 replacement soldiers, a half-battery of light field guns, 760 Mosin rifles, 125 PPSh burp guns, 20 tons of ammunition, 26 tons of food, and 4.5 tons of other vital cargo. She left just after midnight the next morning with a cargo of 2,100 evacuees, primarily women and children along with war correspondent and novelist Evgeny Petrovich Petrov.

Among her cargo were the panels of the huge circa 1904 panoramic painting “Defense of Sevastopol” of Crimean War fame by Franz Roubo.

Sevastopol fell within the week.

On her way to Novorossiysk at 33 knots, Tashkent was spotted just after dawn by Luftwaffe aircraft, and formations of Junkers Ju 87 Stuka and Ju 88 bombers soon began dropping strings of bombs across her path, with waves coming every 5-10 minutes for four hours.

According to Soviet reports, her crew counted 86 aircraft and 336 bombs which, while miraculously no direct hits were logged (although over 100 passengers were lost or wounded), the unarmored Italian stallion popped so many seams and buckled so many plates that she shipped 1,700 tons of water and buried her bow.

Still, she made it close enough to Novorossiysk by 0900 for ground-based Red Air Force planes to provide top cover against the bombers and, linking up with the Project 7U destroyer Sobrazitelny which offloaded several hundred refugees, made it to port– albeit under tow.

Tashkent is approaching the destroyer Sobrazitelny to reload evacuees from Sevastopol. June 27, 1942

Evacuees from Sevastopol move from the damaged destroyer leader Tashkent to the destroyer Soobrazitelny

There, the barely floating wreck unloaded the rest of her precious cargo and was inspected by the mustachioed commander of the North Caucasian Front, Marshal Semyon Budyonny of the old 1920s Konarmiya.

Semyon Budyonny aboard Tashkent

Five days later, a 64-bomber raid on Novorossiysk left Tashkent riddled with bombs and, suffering an explosion of her torpedo magazine, settled on the bottom with almost half of her crew dead, hospitalized, or missing.

Salvage divers found no less than seven large holes in her hull, ruling out a service return.

Her guns were able to be recovered and went on to partially arm the destroyers Ognevoy and Ozmotelny along with an ersatz armored train, while her crew went to other units, for instance, her skipper, Capt. Eroshenko, reporting to the old Svetlana-class cruiser Krasnyi Kavkaz (Red Caucasus, ex-Admiral Lazarev) as that ship’s skipper in August 1942.

He would survive the war and retire from service in 1960 following command of the cruiser Chkalov, elevated on the retired list to a rear admiral.

Eroshenko’s grave at the Serafimovskoye cemetery in St. Petersburg includes the Tashkent in profile. He passed in 1970 at 64 and held just about every decoration the state could bestow a sailor.

Tashkent would later be raised in late 1944, but it was only to salvage her for scrap.

Epilogue

Of Tashkent’s planned 11 Russian-made sisters, none took to the water.

The destroyer San Marco (D563) (ex Giulio Germanico from the Capitani Romani class) passes through Venice post-war, with American DP 5″/38s installed.

The Soviets recycled Tashkent’s name as a Kara-class (Project 1134B) ASW cruiser built at Nikolaev in the 1970s that remained in service until 1992. She was later sold to a breaker in India.

As seen from the screening destroyer USS John Young (DD 973), foreground, the Soviet large anti-submarine ship Tashkent during operations with the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson (CVN 70), circa 1985. USN Photo DN-SC-85-12178

Beyond that, our subject has numerous monuments and markers around the Black Sea area, postage stamps, and the like while the Black Sea Museum maintains a large-scale model and relics.

She has been extensively remembered in maritime art and model box art.

1940 destroyer Tashkent with B13 singles – box art Trumpeter

1942 Sevastopol siege era destroyer Tashkent – box art Trumpeter

Italian built Tashkent Soviet Russian navy destroyer leader in Black Sea WWII by Adam Werka

Tashkent’s last run

In 1970, the Leon Saakov-directed Mosfilm technicolor war drama, More v gone (“The Sea is On Fire”), recalled Tashkent’s last trip to Sevastopol and evac run to Novorossiysk and, while there is clearly a lot of up talk to the glorious worker’s paradise, is stirring and was made with lots of help from the Red Banner Fleet.

Ships are more than steel
and wood
And heart of burning coal,
For those who sail upon
them know
That some ships have a
soul.

If you liked this column, please consider joining the International Naval Research Organization (INRO), Publishers of Warship International

They are possibly one of the best sources of naval study, images, and fellowship. http://www.warship.org/membership.htm

The International Naval Research Organization is a non-profit corporation dedicated to the encouragement of the study of naval vessels and their histories, principally in the era of iron and steel warships (about 1860 to date). Its purpose is to provide information and a means of contact for those interested in warships.

With more than 50 years of scholarship, Warship International, the written tome of the INRO has published hundreds of articles, most of which are unique in their sweep and subject.

PRINT still has its place. If you LOVE warships you should belong.

I’m a member, so should you be!