Warship names and their entomology

[Marc]

Inspired by the thread on the decommissioning of the U.S.S Enterprise.

Thought it would be interesting to see how different countries name their warships.

The Royal Australian navy seems to be all over the place.

The Adelaide class FFGs had the names of large cities (Adelaide, Canberra, Darwin, Newcastle, Sydney and Melbourne). Sydney and Melbourne had been carriers (and before that Sydney had been a CL sunk in a battle with the German raider Komoran in WWII).

The now scrapped Oberon class subs had kept the RN tradition of names that started with the class name letter. Their replacement Collins class subs have been named after famous naval personal though in the case of the Sheehan it was for an Ordinary Seaman recognised for great valor).

The Armindale patrol boats are named are Australian towns as were the previous Fremantle class.

Rivers were the name source for the Huon class mine sweepers.

The ANZAC FFNs seem to be all over the place and no names have been announce for the upcoming Hobart Class DD except the class leadering being the Hobart (who's predecessor was a DDG that saw action in the Vietnam War).

 

[Jono]

Actually, the Hobarts will be named, Hobart, Sydney and Brisbane.

The two Canberra class vessels that the RAN has ordered will be named Canberra and Adelaide.

 

[Bloodwhiner]

US Navy naming:

Tugs/fireboats - Indian tribes
Submarine Tenders - submarine pioneers
Repair ships - Mythological figures
Oilers - Rivers; Cities; Famous battles; famous ship designers or builders
Cargo Ships - Medal of Honor recipients
Cargo Ships RO/RO - Stars; Comedian; Capes; various other names
Hospital Ships - Peaceful or comforting words
Combat Stores - Cities; Mythological figures; Stars
Ammunition Ships - Volcanoes; words denoting fire and explosives
Crane Ships - State nicknames; various
various Mine Craft - Famous USMC battles, abstract qualities; word of action, birds
Nuclear Subs - Fish and marine creatures; President; Admiral; Politicians; Cities & towns; States of the Union
Ballistic Subs - Presidents; Distinguished Americans; States of the Union
Destroyers - Distinguished USN/USMC officers & enlisted men
Cruisers - Distinguished Americans; Famous battles, Cities; States of the Union
Landing Ships - Cities honoring pioneers, counties
Amphibious Assault - Famous USMC Battles, Famous aircraft carriers
Battleships - states of the union
Aircraft Carriers - Famous Navy ships; Presidents; Admiral; Politicians; Famous battles; Places associated with aviation history

 

[Mark de Vries]

The Royal Dutch Navy names her frigates of the De Zeven Provinciën and Karel Doorman classes after historic naval heroes or, in one case, the ship of one of those heroes (HNLMS De Zeven Provinciën).
Four future offshore patrol vessels of the Holland class will be named for provinces.
The Alkmaar class minehunters are named for cities.
The single Amsterdam class replenishment ship is named for the Dutch capital.
The single Zuiderkruis class Joint Support Ship will be named for a constellation.
The two Rotterdam class amphibious transport docks are named for a city and a historic statesman.
And the four Walrus class submarines are named for sea mammals.

 

[Goliath]

The ships of Canadian Forces Maritime Command are named as follows:

12 Halifax-class frigates are named after cities.
3 Iroquois-class destroyers are named after First Nations.
12 Kingston-class coastal defence vessels are named after cities and towns.
8 Orca-class patrol boats are named after animals.
2 Protecteur-class auxiliary oilers are given helpful-sounding names.
4 Victoria-class submarines are named after towns and cities.
HMCS Oriole sail training vessel is named after a bird.

Most ship names are English, but a few are French: HMCS Montréal, HMCS Ville de Québec, HMCS Protecteur, and HMCS Renard.

HMCS stands for "Her Majesty's Canadian Ship".

Trivial Fact: for thirteen years, from 1985 to 1998, West Edmonton Mall in Edmonton, Alberta had more submarines than the Canadian Navy; the Mall had four, while the Navy had only three.

Since 1998, however, the Navy has acquired four Upholder-class submarines from the United Kingdom, and WEM has retired its submarine fleet in favour of bumper boats.

 

[Alidar Jarok]

Etymology, btw. Unless we're talking about ships named after insects

 

[Marc]

Etymology, btw. Unless we're talking about ships named after insects

Well the U.S does have the Wasp class vessels

 

[Roshi]

Marc, I think the proper word you were looking for was "etymology", as noted by Alidar Jarok, or more specifically "onomastics", which is the study of proper names.

 

[Marc]

Marc, I think the proper word you were looking for was "etymology", as noted by Alidar Jarok, or more specifically "onomastics", which is the study of proper names.

my excuse is I've used the bloody word - just never written it

 

[FrontLine]

As bloodwhiners post shows, the US navy has gone loco when it comes to naming ships.

It used to be real easy. During WII Battleships were named after states, Battlecruisers were named for cities, sub were named for fish, destroyers were named for famous sailors, and aircraft carriers were named for, well I dunno. That naming convention was all over the place. Then when Battleships were retired, Missile submarines were named after states and attack subs were named cities and aircraft carriers were named (with the exception of the Enterprise) after famous naval or ploitical figures. Now...its anyones guess. I think the US Navy has a dart board with names on it. When they are comissioning ships they just throw a dart at the board and volia, they have a name for a ship.

 

[Marc]

As bloodwhiners post shows, the US navy has gone loco when it comes to naming ships.

It used to be real easy. During WII Battleships were named after states, Battlecruisers were named for cities, sub were named for fish, destroyers were named for famous sailors, and aircraft carriers were named for, well I dunno. That naming convention was all over the place. Then when Battleships were retired, Missile submarines were named after states and attack subs were named cities and aircraft carriers were named (with the exception of the Enterprise) after famous naval or ploitical figures. Now...its anyones guess. I think the US Navy has a dart board with names on it. When they are comissioning ships they just throw a dart at the board and volia, they have a name for a ship.

I guess in someways naval traditions are now becoming a thing of the past.

I can sort of see naming ships are poltiical figures becoming a quasi reward for some sort of political service (in the U.K you get a knighthood, in the U.S you get a warship named after you). If some-one has really made significant contribution to the Navy beyond pure political opportunism than it's fine. Did Ronald Reagan ever do anything really significant for the Navy to justify a carrier named after him (where as George H. W. Bush had at least been a naval aviator serving with disctinction in WWII).

After all I'm sure there a plenty of naval heroes and significant figures they could name ships after without going purely political - after has there ever been a carrier named after Eugene Ely?

 

[John Picard]

As bloodwhiners post shows, the US navy has gone loco when it comes to naming ships.

It used to be real easy. During WII Battleships were named after states, Battlecruisers were named for cities, sub were named for fish, destroyers were named for famous sailors, and aircraft carriers were named for, well I dunno. That naming convention was all over the place. Then when Battleships were retired, Missile submarines were named after states and attack subs were named cities and aircraft carriers were named (with the exception of the Enterprise) after famous naval or ploitical figures. Now...its anyones guess. I think the US Navy has a dart board with names on it. When they are comissioning ships they just throw a dart at the board and volia, they have a name for a ship.

I guess in someways naval traditions are now becoming a thing of the past.

I can sort of see naming ships are poltiical figures becoming a quasi reward for some sort of political service (in the U.K you get a knighthood, in the U.S you get a warship named after you). If some-one has really made significant contribution to the Navy beyond pure political opportunism than it's fine. Did Ronald Reagan ever do anything really significant for the Navy to justify a carrier named after him (where as George H. W. Bush had at least been a naval aviator serving with disctinction in WWII).

After all I'm sure there a plenty of naval heroes and significant figures they could name ships after without going purely political - after has there ever been a carrier named after Eugene Ely?

Yes, Ronald Reagan *did do something* to deserve a carrier named in his honor. He rebuilt the US military, which was hollowed out during the Carter administration. The military was badly demoralized because of cutbacks, attrition, rampant drug use, and almost no spare parts on-hand. Reagan wanted to build a 600 ship Navy to show America's might and readiness to address threats of the then-present and future. He wanted 12 active aircraft carriers as well.

The Navy also recycles names of ships. This past weekend, the Navy commissioned a new USS Truxton (DDG-103), which was formerly the only named ship of the Truxton class (CGN-35).

Here is a history of the ships named Truxton.

 

[J.T.B.]

It used to be real easy. During WII Battleships were named after states, Battlecruisers were named for cities,

Cruisers were named for cities. Battle cruisers, when they were first proposed after WW1, were to be named after famous earlier warships. More on that below. When the battle cruiser concept was (sort of) revisited around WW2, the new ships (CBs) were named after territories: Alaska, Hawaii, and Guam. In between states and cities.

[...]and aircraft carriers were named for, well I dunno. That naming convention was all over the place.

The first carrier was named Langley for the aviation pioneer. But after the Washington naval treaty in 1922, two of the Lexington-class battle cruisers, mentioned above, were converted to carriers and the rest were abandoned. The carrier conversions kept their original names: Lexington and Saratoga, so the door was opened for aircraft carriers to bear historic warship names, and so it went for Ranger, the Yorktown class, Wasp, and much of the Essex and Independence classes. But, since a lot of distinguished early USN warships had been named after battles, the concept was watered down a little and some carriers were named after notable battles without a warship namesake, including battles of the then-current war. Also, following the precedent of Langley, a CVL was named Wright near the end of the war. Then in 1945 another exception was made and one of the new large carriers (CVBs) was named Franklin D. Roosevelt after the president died.

So by the end of the war you had famous warship, battle, aviation related and presidential names on aircraft carriers. Then the first supercarrier was named after the wartime SecNav and first SecDef, James Forrestal. So there are all kinds of precedents. Here is a list of fleet carriers up through CVN-76.

The Japanese have long used poetic-sounding environmental names for destroyers, like Tanikaze (Wind from the Mountain to the Valley) or Yoizuki (Moon Visible at Dusk) or Shiratsuyu (Shimmering Dew). On the other hand, they think it quite strange that a warship would have the name of a person.

ETA:

The Navy also recycles names of ships. This past weekend, the Navy commissioned a new USS Truxton (DDG-103), which was formerly the only named ship of the Truxton class (CGN-35).

Indeed. And the Arleigh Burke destroyer Bainbridge which was in the news recently with the Somali pirate standoff and rescue, carries the same name as the very first USN destroyer, DD-1.

--Justin

 

[FrontLine]

I guess in someways naval traditions are now becoming a thing of the past.

In some ways its about damned time. In others not so fast.

Did Ronald Reagan ever do anything really significant for the Navy to justify a carrier named after him (where as George H. W. Bush had at least been a naval aviator serving with disctinction in WWII).

He did build the Navy back up after it had been gutted. The goal was 600 active ships. I think they reached that for about a month. But yes he did.

 

[Goliath]

He rebuilt the US military, which was hollowed out during the Carter administration.

Rubbish. That's a right-wing myth--an electoral talking-point, like the bomber gap and the missile gap.

If anyone "hollowed out" the US military, it was Nixon and Ford.

By comparison, the cuts imposed during the first two years of the Carter administration were symbolic. And in the last two years of his administration, military spending went up dramatically.

In fact, once adjusted for inflation, real national defence spending increased every year of the Carter presidency.

What is more, many of Carter's decisions have proven to be far-sighted. To take just the most obvious example, he cancelled plans to replace the B-52 bomber with the B-1 (a far less useful and versatile aircraft, especially in the post-Cold War world) while approving both production of the F-117 and development of the B-2.

History has also justified Carter's decision to rely on cruise missiles in place of supersonic strategic bombers. While the US Navy fired 288 Tomahawks during the Gulf War of 1990-91 (and the USAF fired 35 AGM-86s from B-52s), Reagan's B-1 bomber fleet sat around uselessly, flying not a single sortie.

All Reagan did was continue the military buildup begun by Carter--while cutting taxes at the same time, thereby causing an enormous increase in the public debt.

 

[John Picard]

He rebuilt the US military, which was hollowed out during the Carter administration.

Rubbish. That's a right-wing myth--an electoral talking-point, like the bomber gap and the missile gap.

If anyone "hollowed out" the US military, it was Nixon and Ford.

By comparison, the cuts imposed during the first two years of the Carter administration were symbolic. And in the last two years of his administration, military spending went up dramatically.

In fact, once adjusted for inflation, real national defence spending increased every year of the Carter presidency.

What is more, many of Carter's decisions have proven to be far-sighted. To take just the most obvious example, he cancelled plans to replace the B-52 bomber with the B-1 (a far less useful and versatile aircraft, especially in the post-Cold War world) while approving both production of the F-117 and development of the B-2.

History has also justified Carter's decision to rely on cruise missiles in place of supersonic strategic bombers. While the US Navy fired 288 Tomahawks during the Gulf War of 1990-91 (and the USAF fired 35 AGM-86s from B-52s), Reagan's B-1 bomber fleet sat around uselessly, flying not a single sortie.

All Reagan did was continue the military buildup begun by Carter--while cutting taxes at the same time, thereby causing an enormous increase in the public debt.

Yeah, I guess that's why the rescue operation of the American hostages in Iran was such a resounding success You can drop your "right wing myth" BS and get your talking points from somewhere else than some rabid radio talk show.

 

[ProwlAlpha]

Well, let's hope that names like the Enterprise, Lexington, Saratoga, Constellation, Ranger, and Hornet gets carried on in the new America Class.

At least us Americans don't rename our ships on a practical yearly basis such as the Russian Navy or give the individuals rank (US Army vessels do it though) on their vessels (practically every minor navy, a minor navy is where their most powerful vessel is an outdated frigate (a 1960s, 1970s, or an early 1980s frigate with old missile technology with plans to refit with newer technology which is means that the vessel is laid up for an undetermined amount of time), a WWII destroyer (which hasn't left port in ten years), or an ex-Soviet submarine from the 1950s and 1960s).

 

[Goliath]

Yeah, I guess that's why the rescue operation of the American hostages in Iran was such a resounding success You can drop your "right wing myth" BS and get your talking points from somewhere else than some rabid radio talk show.

What a feeble reply. Pathetic, really.

"Some rabid radio talk show?" I haven't listened to the radio in years. You really shouldn't project your own shortcomings onto others.

But you want a source for my so-called talking points? How about the Brookings Institution? How about Stanford University Press?

The chief cause of the "hollowing-out" of the US Navy in the 1970s was not budget cuts under President Carter (as you and others would have us believe) but a problem known as "block obsolescence".

A very large percentage of the ships in the US Navy, at that time, had been built during the Second World War: and by the end of the 1960s a rapidly-increasing proportion of the fleet was more than thirty years old. In July 1970, for example, 300 out of the 760 ships in the fleet had been launched during World War II.

Those 300 ships were old, even by the Navy's own elastic standards: in the early 1960s, when the money was flowing freely, the USN had argued that carriers and cruisers were obsolete after twenty years, and destroyers after sixteen. To make matters worse, in constant dollars, funds for shipbuilding remained below their 1964 levels for eleven years thereafter. That is to say: under Johnson, Nixon, and Ford.

So, in fact, by July 1970, six years before Carter was elected, the US Navy was already hollow. Like a decadent tree, it looked large and strong from the outside, but was rotten at the core. Like the Royal Navy at the beginning of the 20th century, much of the USN in the late 60s and early 1970s was composed of ships that were too weak to fight, and too slow to run away. Certainly, they could not have held their own against the ships of the rapidly-expanding Soviet Navy, most of which (at the time) were quite new.

The USN was already so weak by October 1973--three years before Carter was elected--that the Soviets were able to overawe the Sixth Fleet in the Eastern Mediterranean during the crisis surrounding the Yom Kippur War, and force the Israelis to allow the escape of the trapped Egyptian Third Army.

The US Navy's old and weak warships were slowly being replaced with smaller numbers of larger, more powerful (and much more expensive) warships. For example: the Carter administration authorized the construction of the Ticonderoga-class cruisers, which remain in service today. But under these circumstances, a drastic reduction in the size of the fleet was inevitable. Between 1968 and 1975, for example, 46 new destroyers and frigates were commissioned, while 181 old destroyers and frigates were decommissioned.

As these figures indicate (and as I said in my first post): most of the "hollowing out" took place, not under Carter, but under his predecessors. Between fiscal years 1964 and 1972, the number of active ships in the USN declined by 259, from 917 to 658--a drop of almost 30 per cent. During this same period, the number of aircraft carriers declined by a third, from 24 to 16, while the number of tactical air wings declined from 15 to 11.

By comparison, between fiscal 1972 and fiscal 1981, the number of ships in the fleet declined by just 127, from 658 to 531--a drop of just 20 per cent. That's because, by the time Carter became President, that huge block of obsolete warships had already been mostly retired.

It's worth noting that, in order to whip up hysteria about a "hollow military," President Reagan's first Secretary of the Navy, John F. Lehman Jr., changed the way that the fleet's active ships were counted in 1981, to make it appear as if there were just 479. But at the end of the Carter administration, shorn of its World War II-era deadweight, the USN, though smaller, was more modern, more powerful, and arguably readier for war than it was ten years previously.

Sources:

Baer, George W. One Hundred Years of Sea Power: The US Navy, 1890-1990. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994.

Kaufmann, William M. A Thoroughly Efficient Navy. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1987.

Kuzmack, Arnold M. Naval Force Levels and Modernization: An Analysis of Shipbuilding Requirements. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1971.

Kuzmack, Arnold M. Where Does the Navy Go From Here? Washington: The Brookings Institution, 1972.

 

[iguana_tonante]

^Pwned.

I always like the mythological streak of Italian Navy's corvettes: my favourites ones are Minerva, Urania, Chimera, Cassiopea, Vega, Sirio and Orione.

On the other hand, I found it hilariously funny that they called some units with the names of corps members and military positions, like Artigliere (Gunner), Aviere (Airman), Bersagliere (Marksman), Granatiere (Grenadier), Sentinella (Sentinel), Staffetta (Relay), Carabiniere (Rifleman).

 

[Goliath]

I always like the mythological streak of Italian Navy's corvettes: my favourites ones are Minerva, Urania, Chimera, Cassiopea, Vega, Sirio and Orione.

Personally, I think the best ship/name combinations in history belong to early-20th century British battleships and battle-cruisers.

Those were impressive-looking warships with impressive-sounding names.

Except, of course, for HMS Rodney, which makes me think of Sir Rodney the Chicken-Hearted from The Wizard of Id.

I mean, seriously--who builds an enormous battleship, and then calls it the "Rodney"?