What was the most important Navy Ship of all time?

Great Debates
1

I nominate The Big “E”, CV-6, The USS Enterprise. She served all of WWII. She was involved in every major battle but one in the Pacific.

Bad weather delayed her return to Pearl from December 6th so she was not in port when the Japanese struck. She was near enough to launch Squadrons however and so participated even in Pearl Harbor. She escorted the Hornet on the “Doolittle Raid”. Was a major part of the great victory at Midway, though the Yorktown did at least as much in this battle before sinking.

This left only the Enterprise and the Hornet as the Pacific Carriers.

At the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, the US Navy triumphed but the Enterprise was badly damaged. Her Damage Control Parties patched her up well enough and quick enough to return to Pearl. Here they managed to repair her in just 36 days. She formed up with the Hornet again for the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands. She took two bomb hits this time but remained in action and recovered a significant number of planes and crewmen from the Hornet that was sunk in this battle.

This left The Big “E” as the sole defender of the Pacific. She raced from battle to battle like no ship had ever done before here. Often sailing out with repair crews still onboard and at one point with 75 Seabees onboard aiding in emergency repairs. So from October 26, 1942 to the Summer of 1943 she held the line as the only US Carrier in the Pacific.

Her exploits continued throughout the war, fighting the entire war. On at least 3 occasions the Japanese reported her sunk. This picked her up the additional nicknames of The Grey Ghost & The Galloping Ghost. She fought in the Battle of the Philippine Sea, Battle of Leyte Gulf. She was the first ship capable of night flight operations and hit Luzon & Tokyo, striking shore targets and shipping from Formosa to Indo-China including an attack on Macau, supported the Marines in the Battle of Iwo Jima

In all she received 20 Battle Stars in WWII, the most and the most in our history at that point. Here is the complete list of her Battle Stars. The USS New Jersey eventually passed her but not until the 1990s.

Post war she was part of the massive Operation Magic Carpet in both the Pacific and the Atlantic returning servicemen home from foreign theaters.

Very sadly she was scrapped in 1958 instead of becoming a museum ship. But the name rose again in the form of our first Nuclear Powered Carrier, CVN-65 The USS Enterprise. Then a certain Gene Roddenberry named his Starship after CV-6, a “heroic ship” as he thought of her.

2

The commander of Serapis finally called on Jones to surrender. He replied, “Sir, I have not yet begun to fight!”

Though Bonhomme Richard sank after the battle, the battle’s outcome was one of the factors that convinced the French crown to back the colonies in their fight to become independent of British authority.

3

The Indianapolis. It delivered the Hiroshima bomb and inspired an excellent dramatic monologue in Jaws.

4

Nothing matches the Big E.

20 battle stars. Presidential Unit Citation. Navy Unit Commendation. Only major battle missed was Coral Sea, as she was coming back from the Doolittle raid.

There’s a reason Star Trek used the name Enterprise for their ships.

5

Since the OP did not specify U.S. navy ships, H.M.S. Dreadnought (1906) should be considered.

As the first battleship to feature an all-big gun (12") main battery and turbine rather than reciprocating engines which gave it a speed advantage, it immediately made existing battleships obsolete and sparked an international naval arms race.

6

CSN Hunley - added a dimension

7

Ships from any Navy qualify. I was fully expecting a nomination of the HMS Victory.

Ships like The USS Monitor, the CSN Hunley & the HMS Dreadnought are interesting for being significant leaps forward. I feel like the
USS Nautilus (SSN-571) as the first nuclear sub and CVN-65 USS Enterprise as the first nuclear carrier also would join this group.

8

The USS Monitor was quite important from a technological standpoint.

9

The Nautilus deserves a spot in this discussion. Not for war time service precisely, but it was the launch of the modern nuclear navy.

10

Twice now this month that I have had to correct this persistent misconception. Saratoga was still active, tho technically during the latter battle she was still apparently in drydock.

11

Some great contenders here! I think HMS Dreadnought and USS Enterprise are probably the frontrunners so far.

USS George Washington, the first SSBN, and her successors perhaps did more than any other warships to see that World War III never broke out.

There were ironclads before USS Monitor, but her revolutionary design, especially her rotating turret, were obviously extremely influential.

HMS Victory, for her key role at Trafalgar, and USS Constitution, best-known of the first six outstanding sail frigates of the infant US Navy, are certainly also contenders.

The first Greek trireme, name now unknown, is probably also worthy of a nomination. Western civilization hinged to some extent on the victory of the Greeks over the Persians at Salamis.

I assume you used CSN and not CSS advisedly; she was never actually commissioned into Confederate service.

12

I’d argue that while the Enterprise (CV-6) certainly had an illustrious career and was highly decorated, it wasn’t important in the sense of the entire Navy through its history.

That honor would have to go to the Continental Navy and US Navy ships of the Revolutionary War, Barbary Wars, and War of 1812 . They’re the ships that set the institutional tone for the US Navy- that it could fight and win vs. the best navies of the world, and that as a navy it was second to none.

Ships like the USS Randolph of 32 guns, that took on the 64 gun HMS Yarmouth, and at its own cost, prevented the Yarmouth from capturing the shipping that the Randolph was protecting.

USS Bonhomme Richard in the battle of Flamborough Head, where John Paul Jones uttered the famous lines “Sir, I have not yet begun to fight!”

And the *USS Chesapeake" vs. the HMS Shannon of “Don’t give up the ship” fame. Or USS Constitution vs. HMS Guerriere, along with several more actions.

These set the tone for the Navy as an institution for the next 200 years. The Enterprise was merely following their lead.

13

I think CV-6 had the greater impact by far. Catchie slogans emanating from a battle might make a participating ship historically prominent, but I don’t think that makes the ship important.

I think there is a strong case for CV-6 because of the overall importance of CVs in the Pacific during WWII, and the fact that the USN had such a relatively threadbare force throughout much of the early conflict. CV-6’s erasure from the historical record, absent replacement, would have had far greater impact than the erasure of any other ship, even if the war would still ultimately have been won by the Allies (because the Axis powers were just that strategically bankrupt).

The erasure of CV-6 would have resulted in one fewer CVs for the USN for a longer period of time that encompassed more highly consequential battles than any other CV, and at all times when a single CV would have represented a hefty double-digit percentage of all CVs in the USN, and so might well have prevented, or at least significantly delayed, important operations from being carried out, and so drastically altered the course of WWII, if not the ultimate victory.

I don’t think the same could be said of any other ship in any other conflict. Even other important ships in other important conflicts were liable to be replaced by another: Enterprise could not have been during so many key moments in the Pacific War.

14

I go back before HMS Victory to Cook and HMS Endeavour:

and HMS Beagle:

The one focussed British attention on Australasia and the Pacific, and other helped Darwin develop his thinking on evolution (and though command of the Beagle may not have played any direct part in his thinking, its commander, Fitzroy, later went on to develop the beginnings of scientific weather forecasting as we know it today).

15

I don’t want to disparage Enterprise or Victory but their accomplishments were far from single handed. Huge fleets supported all of their triumphs. Dreadnaught and Nautilus were game changers and until adversaries updated their fleets they would have been the decider in any conflict.

16

Had neither Dreadnaught nor Nautilus been commissioned, that is just wiped from historical existence, they would have been replaced in the historical records as “firsts” by essentially identical vessels without much delay, and so history would have marched on. Ditto with Beagle, Endeavor, and Victory: all were ships among ships. Had one or even all three been obliterated from history, there were plenty of others to take on their most consequential roles even if the fleet had remained down a ship relative to history. Cook and Darwin alike could have explored in other vessels. Nelson could have commanded his fleet from the deck of another first rate.

Again. I think Enterprise stands out because it existed at such a time when no replacement was possible within the critical time period.

17

The Maine.

18

That’s a pretty specious argument because you could say the same thing about any major development since the beginning of homo sapiens. If whoever came up with the idea of attaching a stone to the end of a string to make it go further and faster hadn’t thought of it, someone else surely would have.

19

I think that you just made your own point. No one remembers who made the first sling. Like no one remembers ships that were first to do things. The Enterprise has a record of significant accomplishments, along with being a critical part of the first generation of ships that made big gun ships obsolete. For hundreds of years big gun ships ruled the oceans, then the aircraft carriers took them down.

20

Well, yeah, I happen to agree, even if you think I shouldn’t. A sling might (or might not, I honestly haven’t thought about it) be among the most important inventions in human development, but that doesn’t make the first person to come up with the idea, or to demonstrate the idea in practice, the most important person in history because it’s hardly as if no one else could have filled that role. It’s easy to say the same about ships that are important for showcasing innovative technology or for having one singularly important errand-type mission at a time when major navies were flush with ships to be sent on such errands.

Part of what makes Enterprise a good contender for “most important” is the paucity of like ships available to fill a like role at the same time of great need for capital ships (and aircraft carriers in particular). I mean, when you think about it, Midway sounds incredibly underwhelming from a tactical perspective in terms of ships lost if you know nothing about the role of aircraft carriers or their scarcity relative to other ships. And yet, for the sole reason that it resulted in the loss of 4 relatively scarce IJN CVs to the USN’s loss of only 1 very scarce (at the time) CV, it’s regarded as a major victory, perhaps even a turning point in WWII.