There was a setup thread to obtain the list below. That thread is now closed and no new nominees are allowed
In the first elimination round, each player has five votes to cast as he or she sees fit, but cannot cast more than two for a single nominee. The first round will run through Mon. Feb 28 at noon CST. No vote trading, please - vote on the merits of each nominee. You need not have participated in the setup thread to vote, nor need you vote in the first round to vote in subsequent rounds. Each elimination round will run every 2 days after Feb 28.
Our list of nominees:
Actium - Octavian defeats Mark Antony; takes Roman Empire.
Battle of the Aegates Islands – Rome ends 23-year First Punic War, assumes lasting naval dominance
Aegospotami - Lysander’s destruction of the Athenian navy finished the Athenian Empire.
Baltimore - AKA the attack on Fort McHenry
Bismarck Sea: The Cannae of airpower vs naval power
Black May-when the Western Allies got the upper hand against the u-boats for good.
Cape Bon ( 468 ) - Vandals destroy combined Roman fleet, nail in the coffin for the Western Empire.
Cartagena de Indias – British beaten by Spain in Colombia
Chesapeake: French defeat British; Cornwallis doomed
Coral Sea – Introduction of aircraft carriers facing each other
Denmark Strait - The Bismarck and the Prinz Eugen of Germany meet the Prince of Wales and the Hood of Britain.
Diu: Portuguese smash the Ottoman/Mamluk/Indian fleet
The Downs - Larger Spanish fleet crushed, rise of Dutch dominance.
Operation Dynamo – Evacuation of Dunkirk allowed the Allies to live to fight another day
Falkland Islands in World War 1 seems pretty decisive.
Flamborough Head – I have not yet begun to fight!
Glorious First of June: Decisive British win over French
Gravelins: Spanish Armada turned back by England to meet their famous fate.
H.L. Hunley sinking the Housatonic - The first submarine to sink an enemy vessel.
Hampton Roads: USS Monitor vs. CSS Virginia - first ironclad duel
Hansan - Brilliant maneuvering leads to key victory in Imjin War.
Jutland During WWI- Germany effectively neutralized.
The sinking of the INS Eilat, 1967 - the first battle in which a vessel was sunk using ship-to-ship guided missiles.
Kamakazi “divine winds” origin – Mongol invasion of Japan fails due to typhoon
Lake Erie: Perry defeats British fleet; “We have met the enemy…”
Lepanto: Ottoman high water (heh) mark
Sinking of the Lusitania – One sided, but helped doom the Germans in the big picture.
Leyte Gulf: Swan song for Imperial Japan
Manila Bay – Led to Dewey being given the unique (at least for USA) honor of Admiral of the Navy
Marmara (677) - Greek Fire stopped the Arabs outside Constantinople - and the Byzantines would roadblock Islam for another 700 years.
The Masts - Arabs/Islam take to the sea and kick Byzantium butt.
Midway: U.S ambushes Japanese fleet
Myeongnyang - Shattered remnants of Korean fleet holds off and smashes a massively larger Japanese invasion fleet.
New Orleans: Farragut captures biggest Confederate city
Pearl Harbor - Japan is allowed to run amok and capture large amounts of territory
The Nile: strategically more important Napoleonic battle than Trafalgar
Noryang – Japanese invasions of Korea repelled
The Battle of the Philippine Sea - aka The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot - The USN destroyed the remnants of the IJN carrier force.
Sinking of Prince of Wales and Repulse - The blow from which the British Empire never recovered
Quiberon Bay - the cherry on the Year of Victory, it secured control over the Atlantic for Britain and doomed French Canada.
Salamis: Greeks turned back Persian fleet
Sluys - Massive French invasion fleet annihilated, preempting a descent on England.
Second Battle of Syracuse/Sicilian Expedition – Athenian expedition cut off/wiped out.
Taranto: ascendancy of the airplane over the “fleet in being” (even more notable considering the small, weak, obsolescent air units involved)
Trafalgar: Brits won against France/Spain in Nap.war
Tsushima - Japan annihilates the Russian fleet
The Yalu - Japan’s victory was the start of Japanese imperial expansion, and a death blow to the Qing Empire.
Yamen – Mongol-controlled Yuan Dynasty crushed Song Dynasty in China
Too bad the nomination thread is closed. I was going to mention this book about the naval battles of the Guadalcanal campaign, battles which were apparently underrated for their ferocity and in decisively cutting off Japanese expansion towards Australia. The only thing I had known about the naval side of the campaign was that the ships had left the Marines.
I think the thread will hinge on how each of us interprets “decisive” and “battle.” “Decisive” could legitimately mean:
[ul]
[li]A convincingly lopsided win (e.g., Battle of Tsushima, Battle of the Bismarck Sea) [/li]
[li]A victory, even a narrow one, which reversed a seemingly inevitable historical trend (Gravelines/Spanish Armada, Salamis, Operation Dynamo [which even looked like a defeat])[/li]
[li]A victory with long-lasting historical impact, even if it only secured the fortunes of a dominant power instead of reversing the trend (Trafalgar, Cape Bon, Diu)[/li]
[li]A battle which decisively established a new technology or tactic as dominant (Hampton Roads, Coral Sea, Taranto)[/li][/ul]
As far as “battle” goes, I asked (and was answered satisfactorily) whether airplanes attacking ships counted, but we have a couple of items on the list that appear to be weather-related events (Kamakaze “divine winds” origin – Mongol invasion of Japan fails due to typhoon) or entirely unopposed attacks on merchant vessels (Lusitania).
And I’ll throw one point at a late World War II battle, after the decision was more or less inevitable:
Battle of Manila Bay - 1
(I considered the Battle of Leyte Gulf, but that one introduced the kamikaze fighters, which renders it a bit more notable if not necessarily decisive.)
That campaign is not only dramatic as hell, but also an instructive example of the use of naval power – the Marines finally persuaded the Navy that, precious as ships were, they had to be risked to support the campaign. When the ships went into what was all-but-literally an inferno, the Navy indeed took it on the chin, eventually getting the better of and equally dedicated opponent after a seesaw series of savage, close-range encounters.
I love reading about it, but the difficulty for this thread is trying to pin down a “decisive” battle when it was really a whole series of events spread out in time and space that resulted in the final decision. IMHO, the “decisive moment” of the battle was the Navy’s committing to fight as many battles as it took, rather than one of those battles in particular.
On an unrelated note, I sorta wish I’d nominated the sinking of Cressy, Aboukir, and Hogue. It was the first time a single submarine sank multiple significant naval units and got clean away; it, more than any other event, established the submersible arm as a serious danger to entire surface fleets. Prior to this, there was doubt that subs really could hurt navies (as opposed to merchant ships):
Unless I misunderstand, the Manila Bay in question was from the Spanish-American War in 1898, not from WWII.
I’d hesitate to kick out Leyte Gulf early – it was the largest naval battle in history in geographical terms and in numbers of naval personnel engaged, and although it only “validated” the American naval lead, it was still a hell of a fight, and it marks the last significant naval activity by the once-mighty Imperial Japanese Navy (and the effects have lasted nearly 70 years so far).
:smack: Suddenly thinks of the D_Day invasion fleet – that might have been a good nominee!
ETA: and while I don’t know to what degree I’ll be gunning for them, I can’t really see any of the Pacific Campaign battles other than Midway and the Coral Sea as top 10 material.
2 votes for Kamakazi, since it wasn’t so much a battle as an Act of Nature
2 votes for Sinking of the Lusitania, again not much of a battle despite being politically decisive
1 vote for Hampton Roads, which I don’t interpret as being terribly decisive, although I can see how others might perceive the decisive element as the failure of wooden hulls vs. iron ones.
Operation Dynamo - The evacuation of the bedraggled British troops from Dunkirk, dramatic and important as it was, was not a “naval battle” - 2
Kamikaze* “divine winds” - Ditto - 2
Jutland - A battle, and a big one, but not decisive. The Germans by some measures got the better of the Brits, but in any event retained a fleet in being and kept the Royal Navy on its toes until the Armistice - 1
Since we’ve decided to get rid of the not-really-a-naval-battle entries, I’ll give a point each to the (original) Kamikaze, Operation Dynamo and split the remaining three between Baltimore, New Orleans and Cartagena de Indias, all of which were ship-vs-fort rather than ship-vs-ship.
As for the meaning of “decisive”: in my opinion, a battle gets top marks for:
(1) being a convincingly crushing win, effectively smashing the enemy as a fighting force;
(2) “decisive” in the sense that the effect of that smashing victory essentially “decided” the conflict between the powers involved (that is, was not simply a side-show to the war at issue, but the loss or win was key in that conflict); and
(3) “decisive” in the sense that the importance of the war so decided was extremely high, with clear and obvious world-changing significance.
To take some random examples:
Tsushima was a smashing Japanese victory, and so meets criteria (1), which effectively decided the conflict between Russia and Japan - criteria (2) - but that conflict was not of truly world-class importance: it doesn’t meet criteria (3).
Jutland - not a smashing victory, did not decide the conflict (though that conflict was of world-class importance).
Diu - a smashing victory, decided the conflict, world-class importance.
Conclusion: Tsushima was more ‘decisive’ that Jutland, but less so than Diu. (I realize there is lots of room to argue about all of these conclusions! That’s the fun part. )
I am discounting all those battles chosen because they demonstrate the importance of a new technology. If they don’t meet the basic three criteria above, they ain’t decisive IMO (though interesting). So the sinking of the Elat and Hampton Roads are right out (never mind the sinking of the Lusitania, etc.).
Black May - 1
Kamakazi “divine winds” origin -1
Sinking of the Lusitania -2
The Battle of the Philippine Sea -1
Neither the Kamakazi or the Lusitania were naval battles. Black May is closer, but wasn’t particularly reliant on naval prowess (the breaking of Enigma was a much larger factor). Also, by the time of Black May, the Allies were more than replacing any merchant marine losses. The Battle of the Phillipine Sea was simply an inevitable fleet action. Earlier battles were much more decisive in terms of determining the course of the war in the Pacific.
Kamikazi - 2
Sinking of the Lusitania - 2
Sinking of the INS Eliat - 1
The Kamikaze was not a battle, but a loss to natural forces. The Lusitania, while important politically, was little effect on the naval war. The sinking of the Eliat was an example of a technological leap rather than a decisive ‘battle’.
My take is that Enigma had been read (broken) during previous phases of the Battle of the Atlantic without tipping the battle. Black May was the result of cumulative improvements in technologies, intelligence, tactics, and numbers of escorts and aircraft, but it was (IMHO) a victory through direct fighting.
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