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I wanted to make a defense of HMS Temeraire and Bellerophon, my dogs' namesakes, but they had so little experience in actual combat that I can't really do it with a straight face. What I will say is that British battleships (and ships-of-the-line, and pretty much everything they've ever floated off the slips) have infinitely better names than anything the US has ever fielded, especially our battleships. Warspite. Temeraire. Lion. Mars. Victory. Swiftsure. Duke Of York. Dreadnought. Ajax. Furious. Royal Oak. These are ships, goddammit.
I have only one complaint about the Royal Navy's naming: in their stripmining of antiquity, we never had a HMS Diomedes (my second favorite character from the Iliad, well-loved of Athena and possessor of the fine epithet "of the great battle cry." My guess for why (I have never looked to see if this is documented) is that after the HMS Diomede (unrelated, unimportant mythological character) was named, they thought it'd be too confusing to use his name.
Meanwhile we named one of our Nimitzes, mightiest ship afloat, after a senator who never served in the navy (but did support segregation, so there's that), and another after a Congressman who voted for a lot of naval appropriation. Many of the Arleigh Burkes are named after figures who much better deserve recognition--I have nothing bad to say about Daniel Inouye--but even he doesn't have the dignity a good warship deserves.
I will make half an exception for the Original Six and Bonhomme Richard, but every other US Navy ship name sucks. Fight me.
On further reflection I went slightly too far, in that some of the early carriers were well named. My car is the Yorktown, and I respect Enterprise, Hornet, Wasp, Intrepid, to name a few.
But overwhelmingly the US sucks at naming ships. (We're moderately better at planes.)
I'm sort of with you on US vs British ship naming. Theirs are definitely more evocative, but I think US practice from the early 1880s through about 1950 made a lot of sense. Then it all started to go downhill.
I'm with you on this. Carriers should have traditional carrier names. Submarines should be named after fish, regardless of their ability to vote.
This, I will fight you on. Inouye should not have a destroyer. Period. I have nothing against him as a man, but he should not get a destroyer. Destroyers belong to naval heroes. Inouye was Army. Get his name off of it. Actually, undo every name Mabus chose. Not even joking on this one.
I do like the US destroyer tradition. It reminds us of where we've come from. But I also would make it completely illegal to name them after living people, and anyone who severed in Congress should have to wait like 40 years after he's dead to get one. Unless he won the Naval Medal of Honor, which overrides all other considerations, and puts him in line immediately.
Eh. I didn't like the fish. USS Cod has no dignity. I will grant you "things of the sea", though. Neptune? Sure. Nautilus? Hell yes. Triton, Porpoise, Orca, Seawolf, that kind of thing works for me.
Sorry, Inouye was a bad example (I literally just picked a named-person Burke at random) and I agree totally that if we're going to honor people, they should be naval heroes. (I'm not sure how I feel about USS Mahan--important, check, naval, check, influential, hoo boy yes, but I'm tempted to say WW2 proved him mostly wrong-headed. Certainly the Japanese interpretation of his theory worked poorly.) I just meant I respect naming ships after heroes.
But even then, I don't like it. The names just aren't dignified in the same way. I wonder if part of my problem is the weird evolution of ship classes: when destroyers came in flotillas and were important insofar as they were screening the capital ships, I'd care less about using them to honor Chesty Puller or whomever. (Now that's an interesting case: does Chesty, a Marine, qualify as a naval hero to you?) Now that a destroyer is the name we have for a dominant surface combatant, it bothers me.
If I could invent a tradition from whole cloth it'd be this: all ships get dignified badass names: not contemporary people. No one after Nelson. All ships also get a patron/sponsor (not quite the traditional sponsor program--think more like a patron saint.) So we'd have a carrier (or in alternate reality, a battleship) USS Enterprise, but on the bridge there'd be a bust of Spruance or the Sullivans or the like. The convention would be that the ship's performance honors its patron ("Let's win the gunnery cup for Raymond!" and so on.)
100% agreed on "no living people, ever", though for whatever reason "Duke of York" or "Queen Elizabeth" doesn't bother me.
I'll grant you that some of the names they picked in the later part of WWII were a bit dismal, but we're not likely to have that kind of fleet again, and I strongly feel we should maintain the names of the great ships (and boats) of the past. Barb, Tang, Wahoo, Harder.
All of them are named after people. As are all of the other destroyers and frigates.
We'll deal with this soon enough.
That's a really good thought.
Yes
That one I really like, and will probably adopt for fictional universes going forward. I might start easing some of the really great admirals of the slightly more recent past in, but I'd put a 100-year limit on it. So we'd be up to Dewey now, probably. (The general principle is that they should all be names you recognize from boot camp.)
Royalty is one of my two exceptions to that policy. The other is the SS Francis J. O'Gara.
Oh, I'm 100% behind reusing shitty names of former greats, though I know very little about the WW2 subs.
Oh, sorry, you're right. I had thought a few battles had snuck in there, but I probably had transposed the name of a Ticonderoga in there. (Though before the '75 reclassification, technically there were DDGs with battle names, though I think only the first two had even been laid down?)
That's actually a really good question. Neither Friedman's Destroyers nor my oldest copy of Ships and Aircraft of the US Fleet mentions them being ordered under a different name, but I would expect them to have been. Point of interest, DDG/CG-47 was ordered in FY 78, and the first four ordered before they were reclassified in early 1980, just before Tico was laid down. I may ask around about the original name.
Naming ships after cities and states is fine by me -- it's one of the things the US is about, and since we aren't building battleships and cruisers any more, we ought to assign those names to actual working classes of warships. Not that fish are bad to name subs after, but subs are a lot more important now to naval combat than they were in 1925 or so.
Naming ships after politicians and presidents should be Right Out - we don't have monarchs, d--- it, and we ought not to imitate the British naming their ships after their monarchs. I'll accept "dead naval heroes" and "people who won the MOH" as source categories. Classical names, whatever, we don't have that as long tradition and it sounds silly. (I suppose we could use names that have some traction in American history, like Columbia or something.)
Anyone who likes idiosyncratic names for warships should check out the Flower-class corvettes and Tribal-class destroyers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flower-class_corvette
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribal-classdestroyer(1936)
Silly question (link to previous write-up if done already fine), but what are the major differences between ships of the same class? I know you mentioned the Iowa being the best, and as having been reactivated and armed with New Hotness, sounds about right. But otherwise, other than the nameplate and eg. fixing that the blueprints called for the commode in bunkroom 57(f)3 to be 3/8" too far to the left to allow the door to close, what ends up changing?
Iowa is the best. She's my ship, and I can't really explain it, but she's the best.
In practical terms, she's got a three-level conning tower, with space for an admiral, while the other three have two-level towers. This meant no Bofors on Turret II. Missouri and Wisconsin had the heavier bulkheads closing off the citadel fore and aft. Beyond that, it's all pretty minor. They were completed with different bridgework, and there's usually just enough difference in appearance to let an obsessive figure out from a good photo which ship it is. (Been there, done that.)
How close units of a class are in general varies widely. At one extreme, the Nimitz class had significant new elements in each ship, to the point that I've seen them described as ten individual single-ship classes. On the other extreme, ships like the Casablanca class escort carriers were literally built on an assembly line, and were basically identical, AFAIK. You'll see some minor changes based on completion date and mission, and more as time goes on and ships get refitted. You'll often see talk about subclasses, when a set of ships get built to slightly different plans.
I may do a post about this.