The Ships of Brawling Battleships Steel: Russia Battleship Gangut

Laid down on June 15, 1909, launched on October 7, 1911 and commissioned in December 1914, Gangut carried a main armament of twelve 12 inch main guns mounted three per turret; one centerline forward, one centerline aft and two centerline amidships that could fire to both sides. Gangut was the name ship in a four-ship battleship class for the Baltic Sea and was the first Russian dreadnought. Considered rather fast for battleships, the Gangut class acquired their speed at the cost of armor protection and this deliberate design feature (the Russians wanted a cross between a battleship and a battle cruiser), which included stretching the armor over as large an area as possible, gave the ships very limited staying power. She was powered by turbines with coal-fired boilers and supplementary oil burners. The "Gangut" name commemorated the Battle of Gangut, a naval battle in the Baltic Sea won over the Swedes by Peter the Great in 1714. The Russian Navy’s strategic problem was that it been largely eliminated during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 (except for the Black Sea Fleet, perpetually trapped there by the Turks) and the navy had to be rebuilt to maintain three separate fleets, one in the Black Sea, one in the Baltic Sea and one in the Pacific Ocean, that faced different opponents and operating conditions and which could not really combine with each other. The Ganguts were designed for operations against the Germans in the Baltic. During World War One, none of her sorties resulted in any action. Taken out of service in 1919, she was given a complete refit, converted to oil-fired boilers in 1926–1928 and renamed Oktjabrskaja Revoljucja. The ship was further modernized from 1931–1934. It didn’t matter; Stalin’s purges destroyed whatever skill and imagination that the Soviet Navy inherited from the old Czarist Navy. During World War II, she bombarded Saarenpa, Finland during the 1939 - 1940 "Winter War." On September 23, 1941 she was hit by four to six bombs while anchored at Kronstadt and took four more bombs there on April 4, 1942, which put her under repair until November 1942. In January 1944, she bombarded German positions near Leningrad while anchored in the Neva River. The Oktjabrskaja Revoljucja went out of service in 1956 and was scrapped.

See other battleships: Yavuz Sultan Selim, Imperator Aleksandr III, Imperatriza Ekaterina