Crew of HMS Petunia and HMS Buttercup must have been glad when wartime security considerations led to discontinuing the writing of ship’s name on your cap band. Finally be able to go to the pub on liberty without a fight ensuing.
The Brits have a bevy of hilarious historical ship names:
- HMS Pansy (two of them!)
- HMS Fairy (five of them!)
- HMS Spanker (four of them!)
- HMS Cockchafer
- The Gay-class patrol boats (including HMS Gay Bruiser, HMS Gay Viking, and HMS Gay Archer)
Not to mention the Nimrod patrol aircraft. 
From that Wikipedia article,
but then
That sounds to me like he was perfectly aware of what happened, and approved. Which makes him even more guilty than the perpetrators, since they could at least plead the stresses of war.
Hey, loosestrife is a vicious invader.
…and sexually suggestive names:
- HMS Teazer (at least eight of them)
- HMS Tickler (at least five of them)
- HMS Torrid
- HMS Thruster (three of them)
- HMS Thrasher
Makes you wonder what exactly was going on in the Admiralty. No doubt merely upholding Royal Naval tradition.
My dad served on the USS Cobbler from 1948 to 1952. It was named for the cobbler. I went to a Cobbler reunion with my parents in 2008, in New London CT. It was an awesome experience, meeting all those sailors.
The same design was used to build Royal Canadian Navy corvettes in Canadian yards. In the movie Greyhound one of the escorts was the fictional HMCS Dodge, call sign “Dickey.” The US Navy had over two dozen, built in British and Canadian yards plus other navies had some as well. It was a popular design.
The Brits had some of the “lamest” ship names, but they also had the most badass: Warspite, Dreadnought, Conqueror, Indefatigable, Revenge, Vengeance, and Formidable, among others.
Or Thunderchild, which made an appearance in War of the Worlds.
Indeed. They definitely run the gamut. Part and parcel of having a large navy for hundreds of years, I suppose.
A British submarine once conducted a port visit to our homeport in Groton, Connecticut some years ago with the badass name of HMS Tireless (S88). It was notable because while we couldn’t offer them any alcoholic beverages onboard our boat (because USN warships and submarines are dry), they had no problem hosting us with the appropriate refreshments when they returned the favor. Anyway, after a drink or two, one of the officers from our crew kept referring to their sub as the Tiresome. He took a lot of shit for that. 
Sadly, Boaty McBoatface is not a naval vessel, only an underwater research drone.
But also including HMS Gay Cavalier which at least has some plausible deniability.
They could do a Shippy McShipface, but that would only be asking for trouble.
He most certainly did not champion air power at sea. He advocated for the Navy to be disbanded because it wasn’t needed since (in his mind) land-based airpower alone would defend US shores. He explicitly discredited the idea of aircraft carriers having any use. There is no shock whatsoever that the Navy doesn’t want a ship named after someone calling for its complete elimination in favor of land-based airpower. His ‘prophecy’ of air power is particularly bad when compared to the actual record of heavy bombers attacking warships at sea during WWII, which is what he advocated for, not either carrier based or single engine land-based aircraft.
From the wiki article on him you linked:
The day has passed when armies on the ground or navies on the sea can be the arbiter of a nation’s destiny in war. The main power of defense and the power of initiative against an enemy has passed to the air. – November 1918[43]
In 1922, while in Europe for General Patrick, Mitchell met the Italian air power theorist Giulio Douhet and soon afterwards an excerpted translation of Douhet’s The Command of the Air began to circulate in the Air Service. In 1924, Gen. Patrick again dispatched him on an inspection tour, this time to Hawaii and Asia, to get him off the front pages. Mitchell came back with a 324-page report that predicted future war with Japan, including the attack on Pearl Harbor. Of note, Mitchell discounted the value of aircraft carriers in an attack on the Hawaiian Islands, believing they were of little practical use because they could not operate effectively on the high seas or deliver “sufficient aircraft in the air at one time to insure a concentrated operation”.[44] Instead, Mitchell believed a surprise attack on the Hawaiian Islands would be conducted by land-based aircraft operating from islands in the Pacific.
Damn, I was misrememering some stuff and conflating the use of his namesake bombers in the Doolittle raid as more support for carriers than he actually ever show.
The big thing I recalled was air power meant Battleships were doomed. But he had a low opinion of carriers early on also it appears.
Apologies.
His real problem was that he very publicly went against the “chain of command” or higher ups, didn’t he? That was then and remains still today pretty tough on careers.
He also argued for a unified air service which would control all aspects of military aviation, including that of the Navy, and claimed to Congress that the flying personnel of Naval Aviation were in favor in a unified air service, when in fact they weren’t.
Having a unified air service would have killed or severely crippled Naval Aviation.
Given his position in the war of words fought among the services in Congress in the immediate aftermath of WWI, the only appropriate ship to honor his name would be a target ship for carrier based torpedo bombers.
I’ve always liked the naming conventions the Japanese used, especially for their destroyers.
| Type of name | Examples | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Weather / natural phenomena | Fubuki, Shigure, Yukikaze | Blizzard, rain shower, snow wind |
| Wind | Kagerō, Hamakaze, Isokaze | Heat haze, beach wind, shore wind |
| Snow / ice | Yukikaze, Hatsuyuki, Shirayuki | Snow wind, first snow, white snow |
| Rain / clouds | Shigure, Murasame | Late-autumn rain, evening rain |
| Ocean / waves | Nami, Takatsuki, Arashi | Wave, high moon, storm |
| Seasons / time | Hatsuharu, Hatsushimo | First spring, first frost |
| Moon / sky | Akizuki, Teruzuki, Suzutsuki | Autumn moon, shining moon, cool moon |
Japan’s Navy essentially had a hierarchy of naming conventions:
Battleships → provinces / Japan
Battlecruisers → mountains
Cruisers → mountains, rivers, etc.
Destroyers → weather and natural phenomena
Carriers → often auspicious creatures, birds, dragons, etc.
But it wasn’t perfectly consistent because many carriers were converted from other types of ships, so they retained names from their original classification.
Subs were simply given numbers, with the prefix I (i) (伊) indicated a large/first-class submarine, Ro (呂) for medium subs and Ha (波) for small subs. The traditional ordering of Japanese syllabary (analogous to alphabetical order) started with いろは (i, ro, ha) so it would equivelent to Types A, B and C.
And that is much more about Japanese naming conventions than you every wanted to know.
Don’t forget Indestructible II!
IYKYK.
Oh, I was talking about the Navy logistics.
I don’t know a great deal about military funding in the 90s, but a number of experts have commented that our basic policies were formed in the post-Soviet collapse when we assumed we wouldn’t have large wars and reduced the number of smaller warships and axillary vessels.
I got Mitt Romney’s talking points completely wrong back in 2012 and joined in mocking him, especially with Obama’s retort that we had fewer horses and bayonets.
This is what Mittens said:
Our Navy is smaller now than any time since 1917. The Navy said they needed 313 ships to carry out their mission; we’re now down to 285. We’re headed down to the low 200s if we go through with sequestration. That’s unacceptable to me. I want to make sure that we have the ships that are required by our Navy.
This was before I started studying the logistics of the Pacific War so at the time I agreed with Obama, thinking only about the raw capability of carrier task forces.
Romney was right in that we weren’t building enough ships, including oilers, auxiliary vessels and smaller warships for the missions we were facing.
Unfortunately, he used a stupid sound bite, and his message got lost.
Anyway, my point is that the US doesn’t have the capacity for a war like this. At least it’s not the chocolate cakewalk that uninformed posters here are suggesting.
Competent leaders would have listened to the experts and not gotten us into an endless war in the first place.
War with Iran was always going to have to be one of those “thousand ship Navy” things. The “thousand ship Navy” is a… catch phrase (?) from circa 2005-2010 in which leadership tried to pitch the idea that “actually, we don’t need more ships, everything is fine.” Might have been from *Mullen’s time as CNO trying to suck up to the President and Congress to show that the Navy was a team player and didn’t need more money after all (and it worked, for him at least: he got to be CJCS). The idea being that while the USN might not have the ships to fight a country like Iran on its own, it could rely on allies to support it, so really we could count on not only our ships, but theirs. Hence the bumper sticker “thousand ship Navy.”
It was used to justify all manner of things, like “why aren’t we making any serious efforts to replace our aging minesweepers?” The retort: “Don’t need ‘em! Our European allies are still sweeping mines from WWII. They’ll be there to support us if we ever have to force the Straight of Hormuz” (that and “Oh, and LCS!”). Likewise, we could expect our allies to contribute auxiliary vessels and logistics infrastructure. Taken together, we’d be just fine even if we never did get the mystical “313 ships.”
And you know, it”s not the worst idea… as long as you make sure that the only wars you fight involve either (a) extensive planning and coalition building, necessitating significant lead time or (b) a clear villain who is obviously in the wrong (at least according to our and our likely allies’ perception of things).
The implicit assumption, then, was that we would either have a solid couple of years to march to war and trump up a casus belli to build a coalition if we ever went to war again Iran, or else war would come due to Iran’s own aggression, and our allies would join us in righteousness indignation to force open the Strait and bring Iran to its knees. And you know, that’s what we trained for: how to spot “the day” Iran decided to start a war, and respond effectively to save the ship or the strike group or whatever. Not for how to start the war on a whim, but how to react defensively but decisively.
We never figured on the US initiating war without any kind of coalition building or broad support. Because seriously, who the fuck goes to war with Iran on their own and doesn’t have a plan to keep Iran from blowing up our bases in the region and closing the Strait of Hormuz? I’d say it’s the kind of thing that every Ensign learns within a week of reporting to their first ship, just how much of a pain in the ass it would be to open the SoH in the event of a war with Iran, but that really over-sells it: a sharp-minded third-grader with a fascination for military matters could tell you as much just by looking at a map of the Middle East.
This war is like throwing stones in a glass house, and it’s our own fucking house.
Oh, and also a war crime. Let’s not forget that.
*ETA: Yep, it was that asshole Mullen: https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2006/december/laying-keel-new-maritime-strategy
Hey, the original Nimrod was a legendary biblical ‘mighty hunter’, the US slang comes from the use as a sarcastic comparison… Not the fault of the British that the US get their classical references filtered via Looney Tunes…