Top 10 Naval Battles That Ruled the Waves

Why naval battles matter

Control of the sea has shaped politics for three thousand years. A power that ruled the water could move armies across continents, protect its trade and starve its enemies. Many of the most consequential battles in history were fought on water, where weather, seamanship and technology decided the fate of whole civilizations. Alfred Thayer Mahan argued in The Influence of Sea Power upon History that naval supremacy was the single most important factor in which nations rose to global power, and the list below is a fair test of his claim.

1. Salamis, 480 BCE

Weeks after Thermopylae, Themistocles lured the Persian fleet into the narrow strait between Salamis and the Attic coast, where its numbers became a liability and the heavier Greek triremes could ram at will. Xerxes watched the defeat from a throne on the shore and took most of his army home. The Greek city-states survived, and with them the culture that Rome later inherited.

2. Actium, 31 BCE

Off the west coast of Greece, Agrippa's fleet for Octavian met the combined fleets of Mark Antony and Cleopatra at Actium. Cleopatra's squadron broke out and Antony followed, abandoning his army. Octavian became Augustus, the first Roman emperor, and Egypt became a Roman province. The Roman Empire, in the form the world remembers, begins here.

3. Lepanto, 1571

Lepanto was the last great battle fought mainly by oared galleys. A Holy League fleet under Don John of Austria destroyed the Ottoman fleet in the Gulf of Patras, killing perhaps 30,000 and freeing thousands of Christian galley slaves. The Ottomans rebuilt within a year, but the belief that they were unbeatable at sea never recovered, and the western Mediterranean stayed in Christian hands.

4. The Spanish Armada, 1588

Philip II sent 130 ships to escort an invasion army from Flanders to England. English gunnery, fireships at Calais and then a long storm-driven voyage around Scotland and Ireland wrecked the Armada. England was not yet a naval superpower, but the failure ended Spain's chance of crushing Protestant England and began the long rise of English sea power.

5. The Nile, 1798

Nelson found the French fleet anchored in Aboukir Bay and attacked at dusk, sending ships between the French line and the shore where their guns were not manned. The Battle of the Nile destroyed eleven of thirteen French ships of the line and the flagship L'Orient blew up. Napoleon's army was stranded in Egypt and his eastern ambitions died with the fleet.

6. Trafalgar, 1805

At Trafalgar Nelson broke the Franco-Spanish line in two columns instead of fighting in parallel, accepted a battering on the approach, and then destroyed the enemy centre and rear at close range. Twenty-two enemy ships were taken or sunk and not one British ship was lost, though Nelson died on the deck of Victory. Britain's navy was unchallenged for the rest of the century.

7. Tsushima, 1905

Russia's Baltic Fleet sailed 18,000 miles to reach the Far East and was annihilated in two days at Tsushima by Admiral Togo. It was the first decisive fleet action between modern steel battleships, it made Japan a great power, and it convinced every navy that long-range gunnery from big-gun ships was the future, which produced the Dreadnought and the arms race before 1914.

8. Jutland, 1916

The only full clash of the British and German battle fleets in the First World War, Jutland, was tactically inconclusive. Britain lost more ships and men; Germany fled back to port and never seriously challenged the blockade again. Command of the North Sea, and the slow strangulation of Germany's economy, stayed with Britain, which is why a drawn battle counts as a decisive one.

9. Midway, 1942

American codebreakers read enough of the Japanese naval cipher to tell Nimitz where and when the attack on Midway would come. Dive bombers caught the Japanese carriers with their decks full of armed aircraft and sank four of them in a morning. Japan never recovered the initiative, and the battle settled that naval war was now fought by aircraft rather than guns.

10. Leyte Gulf, 1944

Leyte Gulf was the largest naval battle in history, four engagements fought over three days across the Philippine archipelago. The Japanese navy staked its remaining strength on breaking up the American landings and lost most of it, including the giant battleship Musashi. It also saw the first organised kamikaze attacks, a measure of how completely Japanese naval aviation had collapsed.

The technology behind the fleets

Each battle on the list sits at a turning point in ship design. The trireme of Salamis and the galleys of Lepanto were rowed and fought by ramming and boarding. The Armada and Trafalgar were fought by sailing ships whose broadsides made the gun, not the soldier, the decisive weapon. Steam, armour and explosive shells produced the steel fleets of Tsushima and Jutland. The carrier duels of Midway and Leyte Gulf were fought by aircraft, with the opposing fleets often never in sight of each other. In every case the navy that understood the new technology first held the advantage.

Logistics behind the fleet

Naval victories are decided long before the first shot. Every warship needs timber, canvas, powder, food and fresh water, and later coal, oil and munitions, and the nation that masters supply usually wins the long war. The Royal Navy's dockyards at Portsmouth and Plymouth and its bases at Gibraltar and Malta were a greater strategic asset than any single ship, because they let British fleets stay on station while rivals rotted in port. In the Pacific War the American fleet train of oilers, ammunition ships and repair vessels made it possible to follow Midway with Leyte Gulf rather than a pause.

• •Timber shortages shaped eighteenth-century strategy; Britain imported Baltic masts for decades
• •Coaling stations dictated where nineteenth-century empires needed colonies
• •Underway replenishment let American carrier groups stay at sea for months in 1944 and 1945

Wrecks, archaeology and sources

Much of what we know about sea battles comes from the seabed. The raising of the Mary Rose, Henry VIII's flagship, in 1982 rewrote the understanding of Tudor gunnery and shipboard life. Surveys of Armada wrecks on the Irish coast and of the carriers sunk at Midway have confirmed, and sometimes corrected, the written accounts. Those accounts still matter: Herodotus on Salamis, the dispatches of Nelson's captains, and the action reports and radio intercepts of the Second World War remain the backbone of naval history.

Test your naval knowledge

Naval battles have a distinctive look in the game: triremes in a strait, ships of the line wreathed in gun smoke, or aircraft diving on a carrier. All ten battles here are in the Naval Battles collection, which is the best place to learn them before you try to name them from the picture.