Game:

Stalingrad (2004)

Duration: 4:09

14 views

2

The Navy reissued its requirements for a large cruiser to destroy enemy light cruisers in 1943, but none of the designs submitted were acceptable. The requirement was reissued in 1944 for a larger ship and the concept was approved by the Politburo in 1945. However, the Navy and the Shipbuilding Commissariat disagreed about the feasibility of laying down any ships of new design before 1950, so a committee was appointed under the chairmanship of Lavrentiy Beria to resolve the issue. It mostly sided with the Shipbuilding Commissariat, but a program of seven large cruisers was approved later that year. Preliminary design work was not completed until 1948 and the size of the ship ballooned to 40,000 tonnes (39,368 long tons). Stalin intervened several times during the design process and ordered the ship's displacement reduced to 36,500 metric tons (35,924 long tons) and speed increased to 35 knots (65 km/h; 40 mph) as well as specifying its armament as 305 mm guns, rather than the 220 mm (8.7 in) guns preferred by the Navy. All of these changes delayed approval of the detailed design until 1951.[22]

The first ship was begun in November 1951 and the other two followed in 1952; a fourth was apparently ordered from the Severodvinsk shipyard, but was cancelled before being laid down.[23] By this time Stalin's support was the main impetus behind the ships and little time was wasted cancelling them after his death on 5 March 1953. Stalingrad's hull was ordered to be used for weapons tests while the two other ships were scrapped where they lay. The hull was launched in 1954 after it was modified to suit its new role. It was towed from Nikolayev to Sevastopol in 1955, but it grounded at the entrance to Sevastopol Bay. Initial attempts to pull it off the rocks by brute force failed, and the capsizing of the battleship Novorossiysk further delayed salvage work, so that she was not freed until mid-1956. She served as a target for the first generation of Soviet anti-ship missiles and a wide variety of armor-piercing weapons before she was scrapped in the early 1960s, probably 1962.

Other Statistics