NMS Regele Ferdinand was the lead ship of her class of two destroyers built in Italy for the Romanian Navy in the late 1920s.

[4] They could carry 480 long tons (490 t) of fuel oil[2] which gave them a range of 3,000 nautical miles (5,600 km; 3,500 mi) at a speed of 15 knots (28 km/h; 17 mph).

[3] The ship was assigned to the Destroyer Squadron,[9] which was visited by King Carol II of Romania and the Prime Minister, Nicolae Iorga, on 27 May 1931.

Beginning on 5 October, the Romanians began laying minefields to defend the route between the Bosphorus and Constanța; the minelayers were protected by the destroyers.

On the nights of 22/23 and 24/25 June, Regele Ferdinand, Regina Maria and the flotilla leader Mărășești covered the laying of defensive minefields off Odessa.

On 14 November the German 2,793-gross register ton (GRT) oil tanker SS Ossag was torpedoed at the entrance to the Bosporus by the submarine L-23 as she was being met by the sisters.

[15] Regele Ferdinand and Mărășești escorted the minelayer Amiral Murgescu as she laid a minefield off the approaches to Sevastopol harbor on the night of 13/14 September 1943.

[12][13] The submarine S-33 made an unsuccessful attack off Yevpatoria on a ship escorted by Regele Ferdinand on the early morning of 22 September.

[17] Successful Soviet attacks in early 1944 cut the overland connection of the Crimea with the rest of Ukraine and necessitated its supply by sea.

Shortly after the latter submarine missed with her pair of torpedoes, the freighter was bombed and set on fire by Soviet aircraft.

They put a skeleton crew aboard to operate her pumps and to stabilise her before a pair of tugboats arrived the next morning to tow her to Constanța.

[18] Adolf Hitler suspended the evacuation on 27 April, but relented on 8 May after further Soviet attacks further endangered the Axis forces in Sevastopol as they closed within artillery range of the harbour.

Other hits started small fires, but the biggest problem was an unexploded bomb that pierced the port oil tank, causing a major leak.

About an hour later, her captain radioed for help, shortly before the final attacks destroyed her radio room and damaged her starboard fuel lines; despite passing oil hand-to-hand in a bucket brigade, the ship ran out of fuel early the following morning and had to be towed a short distance to Constanța.

[21] Before being renamed Likhoy on 20 October, the ship was commissioned into the Soviet Navy on 14 September as part of the Black Sea Fleet, along with her sister.