Including or excluding aircraft carriers if you wish to have seperate lists for simplicity. “Shared” kills count among multiple ships so for example Bismarck gets sinking credit by King George V, Rodney, and Ark Royal for all landing at least one hit.
I tried looking this up on Google but nobody really seems to list the exact ships sunk per ship. Carriers tend to be even more confusing since such as at Pearl Harbor multiple ships were hit by multiple sorties, so I’d be curious if anyone has a firm list of “X ship contributed to the sinking of the following ships” and if we could find a top 10 overall of what sank what.
There is a really good chance without doing a lot of research that it is the most decorated ship of WWII. CV-6 The USS Enterprise. She was at one point for months our only capitol ship in the Pacific. She was involved in almost every battle of the Pacific. Scrapping of this mighty warship was a terrible decision. She should have been a museum.
It took the USS New Jersey, BB62 5 extra decades to pass the Big E for most decorated ship. The Enterprise earned 20 Battle Stars in 4 years, a remarkable achievement.
I see she is credited with 911 Enemy Planes and 71 ships sunk and damaged or destroyed another 192!
I doubt any other ship will match these numbers.
Just realized I know a member that might know the exact answer or how to find it fairly fast. @Elendil_s_Heir can you help with this question?
The Enterprise’s “kills” seem to have been credited to bombers operating from the ship; even so, the reference to to 71 ships sunk and another 192 damaged or destroyed is a bit confusing. Does “destroyed” mean blown up but not sunk?
I suspect “destroyed” means lost to further service in the enemy’s fleet, either by sinking, explosion or, as with the carriers USS Franklin and Bunker Hill, severe damage not repaired for the duration of hostilities.
I agree with What_Exit that the glorious WWII carrier USS Enterprise just might be the top scorer here, but I know of no book or website that catalogs warship kills as the OP asks.
And by “modern,” Asuka, do you mean during and since WWI? Some of the ships which fought at Jutland might be on the list. If later, some other contenders would be, as you suggest, the Japanese carriers whose aircraft struck Pearl Harbor in 1941, or the U.S. carriers at Midway and other fleet actions in the Pacific. I doubt that any battleships or cruisers would be on the top ten list since 1914, or even 1939, but I could be wrong.
The OP asks about warship vs. warship, so I doubt any of those mentioned by DrDeth would be in the top ten.
Most modern warship commanders would be happy with a career record of a single sinking of an enemy ship, I suspect, let alone multiples.
Of the more than twenty major actions of the Pacific War, Enterprise engaged in all but two. Her planes and guns downed 911 enemy planes; her bombers sank 71 ships, and damaged or destroyed 192 more. Her presence inspired both pride and fear: pride in her still unmatched combat record, and fear in the knowledge that Enterprise and hard fighting were never far apart.
The most decorated ship of the Second World War, Enterprise changed the very course of a war she seemed to have been expressly created for.
So this site and Wiki gleaned the exact same information from I don’t know where.
Yes when I say modern I’d say since the birth of the steel navy so very late 1800s when we first started seeing what we now know as “battleships”.
Also merchant ships sunk is what Im trying to avoid since that’s when you get really confusing stats such as an Essex class carrier sinking over 200 ships but only one of those was an actual warship (as in meant to fight other ships not a cargo vessel)
You should probably have made “warship kills only” explicit, then, because by any other standard killing a merchant ship is no less a valid kill than sinking a warship.
I wonder if this is actually answerable without novel research and complilation. As I said, most warship victory counts made no distinction between warship or non-warship opponents.
Anyone know of some kind of register or database of pre-filtered or filterable naval victory statistics?
The only warship I know personally is the USS Cod (now a museum ship in Cleveland), and her crew most assuredly did distinguish between warship and non-warship kills. Her mast is decorated with an icon for each kill, and the icons are different: A red sun (based on the civilian Japanese flag) for the merchant ships, and a red sun with rays (based on the Japanese naval flag) for warships (plus a number for sail-powered junks, and a martini glass for the world’s first and only submarine-to-submarine rescue operation).
I don’t know if larger vessels have the tradition of kill icons, though, or whether they distinguished the same way as Cod did.
I agree that the practice of keeping kill marks distinguished among different types of targets. But that’s not helpful in the context of the question, since no one is going to count kill marks on every warship which has ever engaged in ship-to-ship combat.
You would need to find comprehensive statistics with the distinction recorded.
When I visited the USS Yorktown AND USS Hornets they also had kill markers on the sides that distinguished between killing merchant ships and warships. Hornet sunk Zuikaku IIRC and Yorktown sunk the Yamato and Yahagi.
It’s almost certainly a carrier, and probably Enterprise, but pilots are pretty unreliable score keepers and many of their kills are often assisted by planes from other ships or land bases in addition to submarines who often perform the coup de grace as a wounded ship limps home.
If we disqualify carriers I wonder if a destroyer might be a candidate. Japanese destroyers at Guadalcanal did horrific damage as did US destroyers at Leyte Gulf.
Agreed on all points. I can’t think of any ship that approaches Enterprise’ record. Yorktown (CV-5), Zuikaku, and Shokaku were arguably just as effective, but only up to when they sank. Enterprise was in the right place at the right time, repeatedly, and didn’t get sunk.
For subs, how about I-19? Sank a carrier, a destroyer, and damaged a battleship, all with one 6-torpedo salvo.
For surface ships, I like the IJN cruiser Haguro. Sank 2 Dutch cruisers and crippled a British cruiser at Java Sea, with what might be the longest range ship-to-ship hit by cruiser gunfire. Later caught and assisted in sinking the British cruiser. At the Battle of Empress Augusta Bay, was outnumbered 2:1 by modern US cruisers and hit one 3 times at long range, at night.
At the Battle of Samar, assisted in the sinking of an American carrier and a destroyer.