3. Akagi:

Admiral Chūichi Nagumo's flagship serves as proxy for the whole Pearl Harbor strike force, a body composed of all six Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) frontline carriers and their escorts. Nagumo's was the most formidable such force of its day. Commanders and crewmen, moreover, displayed the audacity to do what appeared unthinkable—strike at the U.S. Pacific Fleet at its moorings thousands of miles away. Extraordinary measures were necessary to pull off such a feat. For example, freshwater tanks were filled with fuel to extend the ships' range and make a transpacific journey possible—barely.

The Pearl Harbor expedition exposed logistical problems that plagued the IJN throughout World War II. Indeed, Japan's navy never fully mastered the art of underway replenishment or built enough logistics ships to sustain operations far from home. As a result, Nagumo's force had too little time on station off Oahu to wreck the infrastructure the Pacific Fleet needed to wage war. And, admittedly, Akagi was lost at the Battle of Midway, not many months after it scaled the heights of operational excellence. Still, you have to give Akagi and the rest of the IJN task force their due. However deplorable Tokyo's purposes in the Pacific, her aircraft-carrier force ranks among the greatest of all time for sheer boldness and vision.

2. HMS Hermes (now the Indian Navy's Viraat):

It's hard to steam thousands of miles into an enemy's environs, fight a war on his ground, and win. And yet the Centaur-class flattop Hermes, flagship of a hurriedly assembled Royal Navy task force, pulled it off during the Falklands War of 1982. Like Midway, the British carrier saw repeated modifications, most recently for service as an anti-submarine vessel in the North Atlantic. Slated for decommissioning, her air wing was reconfigured for strike and fleet-air-defense missions when war broke out in the South Atlantic. For flexibility, and for successfully defying the Argentine contested zone, Hermes rates second billing here.

1. USS Enterprise (CV-6):

Having joined the Pacific Fleet in 1939, the Yorktown-class carrier was fortunate to be at sea on December 7, 1941, and thus to evade Nagumo's bolt from the blue. Enterprise went on to become the most decorated U.S. Navy ship of World War II, taking part in eighteen of twenty major engagements of the Pacific War. She sank, or helped sink, three IJN carriers and a cruiser at the Battle of Midway in 1942; suffered grave damage in the Solomons campaign, yet managed to send her air wing to help win the climatic Naval Battle of Guadalcanal; and went on to fight in such engagements as the Philippine Sea, Leyte Gulf, and Okinawa. That's the stuff of legend. For compiling such a combat record, Enterprise deserves to be known as history's greatest aircraft carrier.

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College

*****

5 Best Submarines: 

There have been three great submarine campaigns in history, and one prolonged duel. The First and Second Battles of the Atlantic pitted German U-boats against the escorts and aircraft of the United Kingdom and the United States. The Germans very nearly won World War I with the first campaign, and badly drained Allied resources in the second. In the third great campaign, the submarines of the US Navy destroyed virtually the entire commercial fleet of Japan, bringing the Japanese economy to its knees. US subs also devastated the Imperial Japanese Navy, sinking several of Tokyo’s most important capital ships.

But the period most evocative of our modern sense of submarine warfare was surely the forty year duel between the submarines of the USSR and the boats of the various NATO navies. Over the course of the Cold War, the strategic nature of the submarine changed; it moved from being a cheap, effective killer of capital ships to a capital ship in its own right. This was especially the case with the boomers, submarines that carried enough nuclear weapons to kill millions in a few minutes.

As with previous “5 Greatest” lists, the answers depend on the parameters; different sets of metrics will generate different lists. Our metrics concentrate on the strategic utility of specific submarine classes, rather than solely on their technical capabilities.

· Was the submarine a cost-effective solution to a national strategic problem?

· Did the submarine compare favorably with its contemporaries?

· Was the submarine’s design innovative?

And with that, the five best submarines of all time:

U-31:

The eleven boats of the U-31 class were constructed between 1912 and 1915. They operated in both of the periods of heavy action for German U-boats, early in the war before the suspension of unrestricted warfare, and again in 1917 when Germany decided to go for broke and cut the British Empire off at the knees. Four of these eleven boats (U-35, U-39, U-38, and U-34) were the four top killers of World War I; indeed, they were four of the five top submarines of all time in terms of tonnage sunk (the Type VII boat U-48 sneaks in at number 3). U-35, the top killer, sank 224 ships amounting to over half a million tons.

The U-31 boats were evolutionary, rather than revolutionary; they represented the latest in German submarine technology for the time, but did not differ dramatically from their immediate predecessors or successors. These boats had good range, a deck gun for destroying small shipping, and faster speeds surfaced than submerged. These characteristics allowed the U-31 class and their peers to wreak havoc while avoiding faster, more powerful surface units. They did offer a secure, stealthy platform for carrying out a campaign that nearly forced Great Britain from the war. Only the entry of the United States, combined with the development of innovative convoy tactics by the Royal Navy, would stifle the submarine offensive. Three of the eleven boats survived the war, and were eventually surrendered to the Allies.

Balao:

The potential for a submarine campaign against the Japanese Empire was clear from early in the war. Japanese industry depended for survival on access to the natural resources of Southeast Asia. Separating Japan from those resources could win the war. However, the pre-war USN submarine arm was relatively small, and operated with poor doctrine and bad torpedoes. Boats built during the war, including primarily the Gato and Balao class, would eventually destroy virtually the entire Japanese merchant marine.

The Balao class represented very nearly the zenith of the pre-streamline submarine type. War in the Pacific demanded longer ranges and more habitability than the relatively snug Atlantic. Like their predecessors the Gato, the Balaos were less maneuverable than the German Type VII subs, but they made up for this in strength of hull and quality of construction. Compared with the Type VII, the Balaos had longer range, a larger gun, more torpedo tubes, and a higher speed. Of course, the Balaos operated in a much different environment, and against an opponent less skilled in anti-submarine warfare. The greatest victory of a Balao was the sinking of the 58000 ton HIJMS Shinano by Archerfish.

Eleven of 120 boats were lost, two in post-war accidents. After the war Balao class subs were transferred to several friendly navies, and continued to serve for decades. One, the former USS Tusk, remains in partial commission in Taiwan as Hai Pao.

Type XXI:

In some ways akin to the Me 262, the Type XXI was a potentially war-winning weapon that arrived too late to have serious effect. The Type XXI was the first mass produced, ocean-going streamlined or “true” submarine, capable of better performance submerged than on the surface. It gave up its deck gun in return for speed and stealth, and set the terms of design for generations of submarines.

Allied anti-submarine efforts focused on identifying boats on the surface (usually in transit to their patrol areas) then vectoring killers (including ships and aircraft) to those areas. In 1944 the Allies began developing techniques for fighting “schnorkel” U-boats that did not need to surface, but remained unprepared for combat against a submarine that could move at 20 knots submerged.

In effect, the Type XXI had the stealth to avoid detection prior to an attack, and the speed to escape afterward. Germany completed 118 of these boats, but because of a variety of industrial problems could only put four into service, none of which sank an enemy ship. All of the Allies seized surviving examples of the Type XXI, using them both as models for their own designs and in order to develop more advanced anti-submarine technologies and techniques. For example, the Type XXI was the model for the Soviet “Whiskey” class, and eventually for a large flotilla of Chinese submarines.

George Washington:

We take for granted the most common form of today’s nuclear deterrent; a nuclear submarine, bristling with missiles, capable of destroying a dozen cities a continent away. These submarines provide the most secure leg of the deterrent triad, as no foe could reasonably expect to destroy the entire submarine fleet before the missiles fly.