What are the most epic naval battles in history?

What are the most epic naval battles in history?

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Helgeå
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Lepanto
twitter.com/AnonBabble

Salamis

Any naval battle in the 17th and 18th centuries was epic as it gets. Earlier sea vessels were comparatively small time, and later ones were so gigantic that they were used for support, intimidation and strategic bombardment, so ship-on-ship combat was somewhat more rare and less exciting.

The Spanish Armada.
Queen Elizabeth I of England had increasingly become a figurehead for the Protestant struggle in France and the Netherlands, where the Dutch were in revolt against Spanish rule. Her subjects had enraged the Spanish King by raiding his American possessions and even the coastline of Spain itself: Drake sacked Cadiz in 1587 and the Earl of Leicester was leading an English contingent assisting the Dutch revolt in the Netherlands.

The Pope excommunicated Elizabeth and issued an encyclical absolving Catholics from their allegiance to the English Crown, encouraging a series of plots to murder the Queen, who in turn beheaded the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots in 1587, the focus of the plots. Mary’s execution was the final spur for the Spanish invasion of England.

For the Spanish the Armada was a religious crusade marked by a number of crusader emblems.180 priests and monks accompanied the fleet and the crews were enjoined to strict religious observance and conduct.

Central to the Armada was the mass of merchant vessels, known as hulks or urcas, converted for war by the addition of higher fore and after castles and a greater complement of guns and carrying the Spanish army with its artillery and baggage. Many of these ships came from the towns of the Hanseatic League in the Baltic. Flagship of the “hulk squadron" was the Gran Grifon from Rostock.

I know it's a meme battle and the all-contrarian anons of Veeky Forums will hate me for saying this, but Trafalgar was a pretty
epic fucking battle.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Helgeå

>involved the nations of England, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden
>over 1000 longships involved
>Cnut the Great's ship is almost as long as a football field
>vikings are rich as fuck at this point from raiding, collecting danegeld and service in the Byzantine empire, everyone is probably in chainmail and gold hilted swords

Battle of Leyte Gulf

>fighting a naval battle in chainmails
shiggy diggy

>naval
>epic

Dogger Bank

...

>you will never witness a line astern formation

Tsushima for the lulz. Someone post the greentext of the voyage.

>Tsushima
>epic

Curb-stomp battle is anything but.

It's an epic fuck up.

Pretty much everything from the Anglo-Dutch war. 4 day battle, couple of hundred ships on each side, no line of battle just free for all. You could hear the battle going on in Amsterdam IIRC.

>In early 1807, a handful of British sailors—some of American birth—deserted their respective ships, then blockading French ships in Chesapeake Bay, and joined the crew of the USS Chesapeake. In an attempt to recover the British deserters, Captain Salusbury Pryce Humphreys, commanding the Leopard, hailed the USS Chesapeake and requested permission to search her. Commodore James Barron of the Chesapeake refused, and the Leopard opened fire. Caught unprepared, Barron surrendered, and Humphreys sent boarders to search for the deserters. The boarding party seized four deserters from the Royal Navy–three Americans and one British-born sailor–and took them to Halifax, where the British sailor, Jenkin Ratford, was hanged for desertion. The Americans were initially sentenced to 500 lashes, but had their sentence commuted; Britain also offered to return them to America.

>The incident caused severe political repercussions in the United States, and nearly led to the two nations going to war.[

Battle of Lepanto 1571

why would you line up on the windward side if your ship is heeling and your shots end up in the water? what would be the point? surely you'd want to be on the leeward side so that you're hitting masts and/or the top of the enemy line's decks due to ballistic drop?

Salamis
Actium
Trafalgar
Tsushima Straits
Jutland

Also: Lepanto

Actium - Basically the point where Rome became an empire, and also where people believe ancient Egypt fell (personally I don't regard the Ptolemaic kingdom to be ancient Egypt as we know it, but it's popular opinion that it was)

Lepanto - Beginning of the end for the Ottoman Empire. Their advances into Europe stopped in their tracks and they began their decline afterwards.

Trafalgar - Stopped Napoleon from invading Britain, and was the beginning of Britannia ruling the waves for a century.

Midway - Along with Stalingrad and El Alamein, one of the three battles that saw the advantage swing from the Axis to the Allies in WWII. Japan were fucked after this.

The beginning of the end was Vienna m8, Lepanto just ended their Mediterranean expansion

The Armada is kind of a depressing tale when you get right down to it.

>convert tons of ships into warships
>still operating on old-fashioned board-em-and-bash-em philosophy, so rev up those forecastles!
>appoint a guy who was happily living on his estate as admiral because lol, you're nobility
>spend the better part of a year trying to stock food for the journey while the soldiers sit in dank ships eating the food about as fast as it comes in and being resented by the newly conquered Portuguese townspeople
>finally leave
>get blown the fuck around at every turn due to unfavorable winds, varying sailing abilities of each ship and the fact that having bigass forecastles means more surface area for the wind to push around
>water goes bad so for the rest of this greentext, everyone's shitting their brains out
>stop a couple times in Northern Spain for supplies that aren't always supplied
>storm disperses fleet
>get most of it back, hope the ones that didn't aren't dead
>eventually get to Britain
>Brits let the sailors design their ships so they've almost completely nixed the forecastles and have made fast ships with loadsacannons
>battle 1, both sides kinda flounder around trying to figure out what the fuck they're doing
>subsequent battles see the Armada fucked up
>most ships sunk, a few get back home
>a few wash up on Ireland and the crews are mercilessly hunted down

Enjoy getting stabbed then.

midway tbf

...

Got to go with the Battle of Leyte Gulf.

Those tin can drivers put up one hell of a fight.

LELPANTO
E
L
P
A
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T
O

>lets make an awesome movie of one of the great naval battles, it will be an epic 4 hour non stop slaughter fest
>nah, better go for yet another capshit movie

Double dubs of truth

Battle of Myoengjang.

13 battered ships rout an entire Japanese fleet at least 30 times their size with tactics, terrain and giant brass balls.

More velocity to your projectiles?

Also more resistant to ramming.

Stabbing>drowning
At least against human beings you have a fair chance, against gravity you can only pray.

Most people back then couldn't swim anyways, so it's not like it made that much of a difference.

>tfw I didn't go see that movie about the Essex
I'm kind of ashamed of myself for not supporting it.

viva hollandia

Battle of Tsushima

The only true answer
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Lepanto

/thread

Were there any notable battles from back in the Hellenistic period where they were just giant ass gilded rafts?

Pic related, also the First Punic War had several significant engagements (Cape Ecnomus was one of the largest naval battles in history in terms of numbers of men involved).