Greetings Comrades in Japan

Expanding the Fleet

The sea, our sea, We will faithfully guard thee - Unofficial Motto of the Polish Navy

June 27, 1976 P.C

Polish People's Republic

Gdynia, Naval Shipyard

Admiral Ludwik Janczyszyn proudly showed Edward Gierek the location of the keel for a ship under construction. That ship was the future ORP Huragan, a prototype ship of a completely new class of destroyers for the Navy.

This was the first ship of its kind to be built in a Polish shipyard since the completely unsuccessful attempt to build two more Grom-class destroyers in 1939. Unfortunately for them, barely a month after the keels were laid for the two ships, the Third Reich invaded Poland and the plates being prepared for their hulls were destined for the "Kashubian Dragon" armored train.

Janczyszyn hoped that this time they would succeed in building new ones, which was all the more significant since the names for Grom and Błyskawica's younger "sisters" were Orkan and ... Huragan. Especially since, unlike their never-realized predecessors, the entire Huragan class was to be built exclusively in a Polish shipyard, using only what Poland would produce.

Well, the difference between those Groms and the new Huragans is that the Huragans do not serve as a flywheel to build a shipbuilding industry. After all, People's Poland already has one. Now the Poles are simply trying their hand at building a full-fledged military ship.

Anyway, the connection between the new Huragans and the old Groms is much deeper than it seems. Technically speaking, Stocznia Marynarki Wojennej[pol. Navy Shipyard] (SMW for short) which entered the tender for the new destroyer alongside the other four civilian shipyards (i.e. Gdansk Shipyard, Gdynia Shipyard, Północa Shipyard and Szczecin Shipyard, respectively), simply presented a modernized design of the Grom class. No inquiries were made to the Japanese shipyards in this case.

As a result, SMW won the entire tender, as it was obviously able to offer the fastest timeframe for putting the new destroyers into service. However, although the original plan was to lay the keel for the new Huragan as early as 1975, preparations for the war against Parpaldia as well as the development of a new modernization plan for the armed forces consumed another year.

Which, of course, SMW engineers took advantage of to redesign the whole project a bit. Mainly in terms of future upgrades, in passing cutting costs on the entire project by getting rid of non-future elements as well as removing features of the original plan that were designed for buoyancy in the Baltic.

There was nothing surprising about this if it were not for the very fact that the plans they showed originally and which became the foundation of the Huragan class before the final present shape was developed were in fact the plans of the original Orkan and Huragan ! Both of these destroyers were to be altered in detail from Błyskawica and Grom and which are the necessary improvements proposed by the then 2nd Republic sailors sailing on both ships.

The last thing worth mentioning is such a small, extremely intriguing fact which was not allowed to be mentioned during the times of the "Eternal" Polish-Soviet "Brotherhood". Namely, that the destroyers leased from Sowieckij Sojuz were far inferior to the more than forty-year-old Błyskawica. If one were to ask the average sailor who had served on OORP Wicher II, Grom II, Warszawa and Błyskawica which of these ships was the best in terms of service, he would indicate Błyskawica without hesitation. The old lady of the Polish fleet, despite so many years on her back and a kind of technological backwardness, still prevailed over both Smielys and Kotlin.

Hardly surprising, Russia is famous for many things but among them is certainly not the ability to build ships. Well, unless we want to laugh and present as an example of not building ships.