What are the top ten modern warships in "kills" of other warships?

[Elendil_s_Heir]

@Darren_Garrison

@Elendil_s_Heir

Most modern warship commanders would be happy with a career record of a single sinking of an enemy ship

Hopefully they would be even happier with a record of zero.

For an ambitious Navy officer? I doubt it.

[silenus]

For subs, I’ll offer the USS Batfish, which sank a minesweeper, destroyer and 3 subs on a single patrol.

[gnarator]

@What_Exit

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.

Nothing matches the Big E.

[TokyoBayer]

@gnoitall

As I said, most warship victory counts made no distinction between warship or non-warship opponents.

Most statistics on ship losses in WWII clearly distinguish between naval (warship) vessels and merchant vessels and give a total. I can’t recall a source that doesn’t separate them for statistical purposes,

https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/Japan/IJN/JANAC-Losses/JANAC-Losses-6.html

That is a list of Japanese naval and merchant vessels sunk by US subs in WWII. It doesn’t provide the total number of each class for each sub, but it wouldn’t be hard to count that.

Counting all the enemy vessels sank was a deliberate effort by the US military. From one of the reports available online:

In January 1943 the Chief of Staff, U.S. Army, and Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Navy agreed that the formation of a joint committee to assess enemy Naval and merchant shipping losses during World War II would be desirable. Accordingly the JOINT ARMY-NAVY ASSESSMENT COMMITTEE was appointed for this purpose. This committee consisted of representatives of the Navy, the Army, and the Army Air Forces, with a joint Army-Navy secretariat.

It may take time to comb through the various material available online, but the information is there.

[Asuka]

HMS Warspite (03) was the ship I was thinking of when I made this topic since it has the most “confirmed” I’ve seen. Every enemy ship on the list I found was hit by multiple of Warspite’s main gun shells greatly contributing to their destruction.

It sunk at the Battle of Narvik the German Destroyers

• Z13 Erich Koellner
• Z17 Diether von Roeder
• Z12 Erich Giese

It sunk at the Battle of Cape Matapan the Italian heavy cruisers

• Pola
• Zara
• Fiume

[Capn_Carl]

Yes, Warspite was a lucky and dangerous ship. Also damaged a German battlecruiser at Jutland, and her seaplane sank a U-boat.

[Andy_L]

Here’s a collection of submarine battle flags BattleFlags (I’m hoping the parachutes indicate rescues)

[Quercus]

@Chronos

and a martini glass for the world’s first and only submarine-to-submarine rescue operation).

In case anyone else thought that sounded slightly off, I’ll save you the looking it up: wikipedia says Cod carried out '“the only international submarine-to-submarine rescue”. (The Cod rescued the crew of a Dutch submarine. I’m pretty sure in WWII at least one US sub rescued another US sub)

<Not trying to nitpick you Chronos, just trying to save other people time in case they have the same neurotic need to look it up as I did >

[bump]

Wouldn’t “Modern” need to be clarified?

If we’re talking since WWII, then it’s most likely HMS Conqueror, as it’s the only warship that sunk another on its own since then that I can find (ARA General Belgrano). Several others have partial kills (USS Enterprise & USS Joseph Strauss (IRIS Sahand), HMS Antrim, HMS Brilliant and HMS Plymouth (ARA Santa Fe) ) in either Operation Praying Mantis or the Falklands War.

Or if you go a little smaller, it’s possible that one of the Israeli missile boats in the Battle of Latakia may have got more than one of the Syrian boats, but it’s not clear from what I looked up.

[What_Exit]

@bump

Wouldn’t “Modern” need to be clarified?

The Op did clarify.

@Asuka

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”.

[Elmer_J.Fudd]

It’s kind of a moot point since wooden ships were rarely “killed” or sunk in battle. They were far more often captured which is something that almost never happens in modern sea warfare.

[RickJay]

@bump

If we’re talking since WWII, then it’s most likely HMS Conqueror, as it’s the only warship that sunk another on its own since then that I can find (ARA General Belgrano).

Not at all. There were some warships sunk by other warships in the India-Pakistan war of 1971; most notably, the Indian frigate Khukri was torpedoed by the Pakistani submarine Hangor, killing two hundred men. (HMS Conqueror still holds the distinction of being the only nuclear sub to sink a warship.) The Korean War had some naval warfare, though mostly between larger Allied ships and North Korean PT boats. In the Six Day War, Egyptian missile boats sank INS Eilat, which had already sunk a number of their PT boats. In the 1974 skirmish over the Paracel Islands, the Chinese and Vietnamese sank a few of each other’s ships. And not long ago, a Goergian missile boat was sunk by a Russian corvette in one of the little battles those countries have been fighting.

There are likely other examples.

[gnarator]

If since late 1800s, I wonder how Mikasa and other battleships in Togo’s fleet fared in the Russo-Japanese War.

[What_Exit]

My wife had a program on the Smithsonian Channel last night, this one was so bad it could have been on the History channel.

I roughly quote.

By 1941 thanks to spies the Japanese Navy had moved from Feudal to modern in a decade

I blew up, “Right, the Feudal Navy that destroyed the Russian Fleet in 1905. That Feudal Fleet.”

I hate grossly inaccurate history. Drives me nuts.

[Chronos]

Well, strictly speaking, they said they did it in a decade, not which decade. Any decade prior to 1941 would make that statement true.

Also strictly speaking, they still had shoguns and daimyos and so on in 1941, right? So they were still feudal.

[gdave]

@Chronos

Also strictly speaking, they still had shoguns and daimyos and so on in 1941, right? So they were still feudal.

Umm…no? The shogunate was abolished as part of the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Daimyos were folded into a new, non-feudal aristocracy between 1868 and 1871, and their feudal holdings were folded into the new prefectural system. By 1872, there was no shogun, and no daimyos.

Still, that all happened within a decade…