The Wagner geared steam turbines were designed to produce 70,000 metric horsepower (51,000 kW; 69,000 shp) which would propel the ship at 36 knots (67 km/h; 41 mph).
[7] Friedrich Ihn, named after the commander of the torpedo boat S35, who was killed during the Battle of Jutland in 1916, was ordered on 19 January 1935 from Blohm & Voss.
On 23–24 March 1939, Friedrich Ihn was one of the destroyers escorting Adolf Hitler aboard the pocket battleship Deutschland as the Germans occupied Memel.
[10] When World War II began, Friedrich Ihn was initially deployed in the Baltic to operate against the Polish Navy and to enforce a blockade of Poland,[9] but she was soon transferred to the German Bight where she joined her sister ships in laying defensive minefields.
[9] The ship was scheduled to conduct a minelaying operation off the British coast in early November, but it was cancelled when one of the other destroyers assigned to participate suffered machinery problems from contaminated fuel oil.
Ihn and her sisters Friedrich Eckoldt and Steinbrinck sortied again on the night of 18 December, but the British had turned off the navigation lights off Orfordness and the German were forced to abandon the attempt because they could not locate themselves precisely enough to lay the minefield in the proper position.
[17] Bonte led a destroyer minelaying sortie to the Newcastle area on the night of 10/11 January with Ihn, Heidkamp, Eckoldt, Anton Schmitt, Beitzen, and Karl Galster.
The British opened fire at extreme range and were forced to disengage in the face of long-range torpedo volleys and attacks by Luftwaffe bombers without having hit any of the German ships.
Ihn sailed from Brest on 27 July for another refit and was ineffectually attacked by British motor torpedo boats (MTB) off Calais that same day.
She was sent to Brest in February 1942 to escort the battleships Gneisenau and Scharnhorst, as well as Prinz Eugen through the English Channel back to Germany (Operation Cerberus).
Heavy weather forced Ihn and two other destroyers to return to port before reaching Trondheim and Prinz Eugen was badly damaged by a British submarine after their separation.
[24] On 6 March, the battleship Tirpitz, escorted by Ihn and three other destroyers, sortied to attack the returning Convoy QP 8 and the Russia-bound PQ 12 as part of Operation Sportpalast (Sports Palace).
The following morning, Admiral Otto Ciliax, commanding the operation, ordered the destroyers to search independently for Allied ships and they stumbled across the 2,815 GRT Soviet freighter SS Ijora, a straggler from QP 8 later that afternoon and sank her.
The destroyer rejoined the battleship in the morning and was able to shoot down one of five Fairey Albacore torpedo bombers[25] from the aircraft carrier HMS Victorious[26] that unsuccessfully attacked the German ships at 10:20.
[27] By May, Ihn was flagship of Captain Fritz Berger of the 5th Destroyer Flotilla and she was assigned to escort Tirpitz during Operation Rösselsprung (Knight's Move), the attack on the Russia-bound Convoy PQ 17.
The ships sailed from Trondheim on 2 July for the first stage of the operation, although all three of the other destroyers assigned to Tirpitz's escort ran aground in the dark and heavy fog and were forced to return to port for repairs.
Tirpitz, the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper and Ihn arrived at Altafjord on 4 July, but they were recalled shortly after sortieing on the 5th and never engaged any Allied ships.
The ships were spotted en route two days later by an aircraft from the Royal Air Force and the attempt was abandoned as the element of surprise was lost.
By this time she had developed some problems with her boilers and the British proposed to swap her for Theodor Reidel to avoid forcing the Soviets to wait for her to be repaired.
[30] Commissioned into the Soviet Navy as Prytky (Russian: Прыткий), the ship served in the Baltic fleet until she was struck from the list on 22 March 1952 and sold for scrap.