Of all time, of any navy? The “obvious” answer is, “the first one,” although its name, if it even had one, is probably long lost to time.
Limiting it to “known” ships, I would say USS Monitor - the minute it saw action, pretty much every other warship worldwide became obsolete. You could make a similar case for whatever the first legitimate aircraft carrier was, although surface ships - especially ones with AA guns - hardly became obsolete because of them.
I don’t disagree with your logic. A ship type that forced a revolution in everyone’s fleet, even its own, clearly has vast leverage. And therefore a decent claim to being the most impactful of all naval ships up to the era of its launching.
Interestingly, the nuclear attack submarine has (arguably) rendered all surface naval vessels obsolete. And is therefore the latest example of revolutionary naval tech causing such a revolution (that I know of).
But from when USN’s Nautilus SSN-571 first sailed in 1955 until the first publicly acknowledged nuclear attack sub scored a kill (UK’s HMS Conqueror S48 over Argentina’s ARA General Belgrano C-4 in May 1982) took 27 years. If surface navies are obsolete due to SSNs (which I honestly expect they largely are), it’s taking the brontosaurus’s brains at Fleet HQs around the world a very long time to process the signal from that probably fatal bite on their distant butt.
Different Missions. Subs are Nuclear Deterrents and Ship killers.
Most of the US Fleet is designed to protect and support the Carriers which are Force Projection. Each Carrier Fleet can very swiftly change the balance of power in the area it sails to. This is in a way of no prior ships. Battleship just didn’t have the range. They were mainly ship to ship combat and shore support. Carriers can send sorties well inland.
Not really, its just that most countries don’t have subs capible of doing the things that the US and Russian subs can do, and do so in significant numbers. We still need carriers to project non-nuclear force into hostile territories, subs can’t do that. So as long as the top two dogs aint fighting head to head there is still a need for conventional navial ships of all types.
I vote for the first sail boat, it sure beat rowing and was the top proven technolgy for a very significant length of time. Sails took ships around the world! So if I had to name a signifacnt ship of sail, I’d say it would be Magellens ships that made it back.
And that’s really the punch line on all this stuff. … How hard are the contenders trying?
Everything from a runabout loaded with explosives to an aircraft carrier and everything in between has great utility against another power who can’t, isn’t yet, or won’t fight back (or pre-empt) with numerous SSNs.
But in a full-bore war where both navy’s standing orders amount to “Find and sink the entire enemy navy wherever and whenever you find them”, I think SSNs will totally rule that roost. And remarkably quickly compared to normal notions of naval combat.
There is a lot of intelligence that goes into that potential scenario today. We probably know where every Russian and Chinese sub are right now. We sure as hell want to know where they are. Excellent chance the Russians and Chinese are tracking ours. All 3 nations have top notch subs, even if the Russian surface fleet is crap now. China’s surface fleet is improving.
Even taking all that as true (and, FWIW, I have some reservations about just how much of a game changer Monitor was by itself, both as an ironclad and as a gun platform) I feel like what you would essentially reduce the question to is “What was the most important technological development in naval history?” In which case the answer must surely be, as you say, the first floating platform associated with any Navy, for having pioneered the adaptation of the natural phenomenon of buoyancy to warfare.
But surely, that cannot be what this thread is about? It’s basically the same reason I object to Dreadnought and Nautilus being put forward as “most important”: they are perhaps notable for the technological developments that they showcased, but (1) if they had never existed, some other equivalent “first” would surely have come along, and (2) their actual service histories were underwhelming. Dreadnought, for example, is mildly infamous for achieving its sole victory against an enemy combatant by ramming (and perhaps the only example in history of a battleship intentionally sinking a submarine), which required no guns at all, and which had been a tactic going back well into antiquity.
I think of it this way: if the ship had been struck by a meteor and sank (but somehow no one died, and everyone agreed the loss was owing to no fault of the design or the concept) sometime between demonstrating whatever technology it showcased and actually putting it to use in operations, and there would have been no first-order effects upon the historical record even absent replacement (eg: no one can say that the sudden disappearance of this ship would have affected the outcome of any battle or planned operation, even if the loss of the ship had resulted in one less ship being present), then the ship itself was not important.
…which is why I keep coming back to CV-6 as the most important, even though it wasn’t even the first of its class, let alone a leap forward like Nautilus.
Clearly I agree. To me a ship needed to do something. Not just be a proof of concept tech/engineering game-changer.
I’m not a naval historian but I came in to say this. The Enterprise was a magnificent ship with an unparalleled service record, but it didn’t break much technological ground. The Monitor, however, was the first steam powered ship with a screw propeller, plate armor protecting the deck, and a rotating turret. Plate armor was impractical on a sailing vessel as it made the ship too heavy to sail sufficiently, steam powered screws had only been introduced the year before on the HMS Warrior (and the Warrior had sail to supplement the steam engine), and a rotating turret had never been put on a ship before the Monitor.
The Monitor was, in many ways, a proof of concept that was so amazingly successful that nearly every single naval ship subsequent to its construction utilized these basic features.
Perhaps, but sail had been the standard means of propulsion for naval vessels since ~1000 BCE and fixed-position cannons located on a specially-designed gun deck had been standard since the early 1500’s. The Monitor abandoned these standards and proved the superiority of having the power and navigational control of a powered screw propeller, the tactical advantages of having artillery that can be quickly and easily adjusted horizontally and vertically, and the protection iron plate armor provided. By the end of the century pretty much every naval vessel utilized these design features.
Clearly I disagree, but if we use your definition then what limitations are there? Does the boat that ferried Washington across the Delaware River on Christmas night, 1776 count? What about the USS Augusta, the ship upon which Roosevelt and Churchill fleshed out the Atlantic Charter in 1941, the document that later became the foundation for the United Nations? Arguably these vessels had just as much of a role in shaping history, and thus can throw their name in the running for “most important”, as the Enterprise did.
I would say no and no. Because those vessels were fungible in ways Enterprise was not. Just as naming Dreadnaught or Nautilus seems to change the question to be about the technology instead of the ship, your examples seem to change it to “Who was the most important person with the most important reason to ever be embarked in a military vessel?” or “What is the most important mission a ship has ever been called upon to carry out?”
It also wasn’t seaworthy. While it was the first with its specific combination of technologies, it wasn’t actually a combination that was usable without further development. Warrior was a lot closer to how armoured steam-powered battleships actually developed. Monitor by contrast became the name for a class of small coastal defense vessels.
If we’re allowing technology-advancing ships to compete here, then I’d submit that Dreadnought is the clear winner. While Monitor debuted the turret, it wasn’t otherwise revolutionary except in how little freeboard it had. Gloire and Warrior were both armoured, screw-driven, steamships. Their sails were for operational endurance, not motive power in battle, which is why Monitor could forgo them. Monitor didn’t render Warrior and her ilk obsolete, and indeed would have been outmatched by them. Ongoing battleship development iterated from the design of Gloire and Warrior, not from Monitor.
Dreadnought, on the other hand, was a complete sea change in naval architecture. Nothing afloat was remotely competitive with her. Existing battleships were immediately called pre-Dreadnoughts, and all vessels designed thereafter followed the her basic layout. And if she hadn’t been built, it’s not clear when or even if the big gun turret battleships that are what we all think of when we hear ‘battleship’ would have become a thing.
But I think the technology-based candidates aren’t that interesting. We could separately debate what technology or combination of technologies was the most revolutionary or whatever, I suppose. I think the far more interesting sort of ‘important ship’ criterion is that of what ship performed in its career the most important set of naval tasks. Enterprise is certainly a strong candidate.
I’m not anti- CV-6.
But what the OP and to a lesser degree @ASL_v2.0 has turned this into is:
Which captains / crews had the most distinguished battle records and which ship(s) were they embarked on while running up that score?
Which is a darn fine question to ask. But is it the one in the OP? I have my doubts.
IMO the ship is a tool. The men won all those battles in the PTO. Good tools help. But naval history is rife with good ships sunk by bad warfighting on the parts of their crews.
I think a very good case can be made that the collective commanders, officers, and crewmen of CV-6 Enterprise and her air wings between late 1941 and late 1945 accomplished more than any competing batch of seamen & airmen on any side in that war, and plausibly on any side in any war.
But that’s not talking about a “ship” as I understand one. Maybe amongst Navy people they think of the ship as the single embodiment of all who sail her over her lifespan. That just feels very foreign to this non-Navy veteran.
Perhaps we’re talking across a cultural barrier here at least a bit?
How so? Couldn’t any of the Yorktown-class carriers have done the same if given the same opportunity?
I think my objection to Enterprise being the most important is that she was a raider and not a defender. The Japanese weren’t going to expand any further just because the US had no carriers in the Pacific. If Enterprise was sunk along with Hornet in 1942, the Allies would have still been able to island hop through the Solomons using captured airfields and 1943 would have proceeded mostly as it did until the new carriers came on line and island hoping further East could proceed.
No. Because there were only three of them, two of which were lost in action. That’s the point: scarcity made Enterprise uniquely important to the US a efforts in the Pacific during the early stages of the war, and the Pacific was a pretty important theater of a pretty important war.
Every loss affected operations, every loss during that early phase made Enterprise a larger and larger percentage of the US Navy’s combat power in the Pacific, and that much more critical. It is most important because it was the most powerful ship through the smallest bottleneck of ships to due initial scarcity at the outset and relatively high attrition during the early course of the war.
But if the Enterprise had been lost and the Yorktown was the last remaining carrier in the Pacific, would things have gone down differently? Was it the physical ship, or was it the crew and the tactics used that made the Enterprise so important?
ETA - Or does it really matter? CV-6 was there and did the job.
This is my belief. She did the job and got the results.
If we’re going for evolution, the Dreadnaught does seem more important than the Monitor. But the first attack subs could be argued for. More so than the first nuclear attack sub. Now the nuclear ballistic subs are a weird one and just mobile MAD platforms.
There really isn’t a first carrier as they evolved from carrying a few seaplanes to the first flattop launching planes to the angle deck super carriers and then the Nuclear version of said.
Then we have Science vessels like the HMS Beagles.
All of those are nice and accurate prophecies, except for the little fact that Montevideo is the capital of Uruguay, not Argentina…
That’s how I see it. If Enterprise had been lost at Midway and Yorktown survived, we might be having a different conversation, about how Yorktown was the most important Navy ship of all time. But history is funny like that: it plays out how it plays out. We can run counterfactuals to consider the implications of a given change to history (eg: what if, instead of Enterprise, Yorktown had been lost? Or what if Enterprise had been lost prior to Midway? Or alongside Yorktown at Midway?) and that might help to illuminate the greater historical importance of one ship relative to another (particularly where, as I have argued, ships of a given kind were plentiful enough to have been essentially fungible for key roles), but that doesn’t change the actual historical record. Enterprise survived, and so would go on to participate in later campaigns, even to the end of the war, and so add to its historical importance. Yorktown would not.
Again, Enterprise was a powerful ship–a capital ship–during one of the tightest bottlenecks of all times for capital ships (partly due to wartime losses, partly due to the fact that battleships in practice were reduced to secondary importance, which further magnified any carrier’s relative importance even among other capital ships), and she endured the longest within that bottleneck, coming out on the other side to a final victory in one of the most consequential wars in human history, only to have its ass-plate sheered off and stuck unceremoniously at a park in New Jersey, the rest broken down into scrap.
So not only the most important Navy ship of all time, but also one of the saddest examples of a failure of historical preservation. Constitution should be moored in its shadow, Olympia should be tied up alongside as a dumpster to store its refuse, and Victory’s timbers should tremor for Enterprise’s accomplishments.