"Whoever rules the waves rules the world."
— Alfred T. Mahan
What's better than tanks slugging it out? How about a pair of warships duking it out? A tank can weigh up to about 70 tons at the most, but most warships can easily weigh thousands or tens of thousands of tons and require many dozens of people to operate normally, let alone actually fight.
This trope comes into effect whenever a pair of warships start fighting one another, and it doesn't matter if the ships are wooden, steel, or made of some alien material, once General Quarters sounds, this trope comes into play.
Since the introduction of the aircraft carrier, the radar, and ship-to-ship missiles capable of attacking beyond visual range between the 1930s and 1950s, this trope has become less and less common in Real Life. Still, fictional duels between aircraft carriers may combine this trope with Old-School Dogfighting. See Old-School Dogfighting for the air to air equivalent, Epic Tank-on-Tank Action for the ground equivalent, and Hot Sub-on-Sub Action for the submarine version of this trope. Any tale about Wooden Ships and Iron Men will feature this almost by definition. Video game examples often take the form of Waterfront Boss Battles. The defeated ship can experience a Sinking Ship Scenario.
Not to be confused with the other kind of Shipping, which is about characters in relationships. Also has nothing to do with Ship-to-Ship Combat, where fans get into arguments over which characters should be getting some action with which. This is about multi-thousand-ton warships slugging it out. Also note, that this is just for battles taking place at sea, on a planet. Not in Space. A Standard Starship Scuffle, on the other hand...
Example subpages:
Other examples:
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Anime
- Doraemon: Nobita's Great Adventure in the South Seas has a massive ship battle between Captain William Kidd's crew (yes, that William Kidd) and a group of hostile pirates. Doraemon, Nobita and the rest of their gang, having accidentally crossed a time portal, ends up in the middle of the chaos.
Comic Books
- Wonder Woman Vol 1: Capt. Storm's final battle against the Royal Navy is shown in a flashback, with his ship pulled up alongside a navy ship and each blasting away at each other with cannons until Storm's vessel starts to sink.
Films — Live-Action
- 300: Rise of an Empire has a humongous fleet of Persian ships commanded by Artemisia attempting to invade Greece. The only obstacle standing in their way is the small Athenian fleet of triremes commanded by the cunning Themistocles, which manages to destroy many Persian ships via clever maneuvering and ramming. Oh, and, there's also what looks like an oil tanker trying to set the Athenian ships on fire.
- Battleship (2012): The aliens are able to disable the high-tech radars and sensors that allow the USN/JMSDF ships to avoid this tropenote . Ultimately, the heroes are able to acquire the USS Missouri to destroy the last ship.
- 1959's Ben-Hur shows a fleet of Roman galleys going into battle against Macedonian ships. Since this was before guns were put on ships, the means of attack is to hurl flaming projectiles onto the enemy ship's deck, destroy their oars, and, of course, ramming. Then when the ships are close it's the Boarding Party.
- The climax of Captain Blood involves Peter Blood and his pirate ship, having agreed to fight on behalf of the British against the French, attacking the French warship and winning.
- Captain Horatio Hornblower, an adaptation of three of the Horatio Hornblower novels, features two major battles, one in which Hornblower's frigate HMS Lydia is pitted against the larger, more powerful Spanish ship Natividad, and a second in which Hornblower takes his ship of the line Sutherland into a fortified harbor to destroy a French squadron there.
- The Enemy Below is a case of epic ship on submarine action: a single US Navy destroyer-escort is pitted against a German U-boat, with no other ships or aircraft around to interfere.
- Gladiator II ups the spectacle ante of its predecessor with a naumachia
— a naval battle that's recreated inside the Colosseum in Rome for the sake of Gladiator Games. Earlier, the film opens an epic battle with Roman ships with built-in siege towers assaulting a coastal city's ramparts.
- H.M.S. Defiant has several such battles.
- In Harm's Way ends in a massive battle between American and Japanese naval forces.
- Master and Commander: Has two such fights on screen. The first time, HMS Surprise is forced to retreat, while in the second fight she is able to live up to her name and defeat the French Frigate Acheron.
- Pirates of the Caribbean:
- Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl: There's a shootout between the Black Pearl and the Interceptor as the pirates try to retrieve the gold coin Elizabeth took.
- Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End ends with the Black Pearl and Flying Dutchman both making a run on the Endeavour, the two of them turning her to splinters (and this is after a lengthy one-on-one duel between them over a maelstrom).
- Sink the Bismarck! has two. In the first, the titular German battleship notably engages and sinks the HMS Hood. In the second, Bismarck goes down after an epic Last Stand against the British battleships Rodney and King George V.
- The third Swordsman movie, The East Is Red, concludes with a major naval battle between the Portuguese, Japanese, and Ming navy, with the Villain Protagonist caught in-between.
Literature
- History of U.S. Naval Operations in World War II is chock full of these. Notable examples include the Battles of Guadalcanal and Leyte Gulf, which included the only two battleship-on-battleship engagements of the Pacific War.
- Destroyermen is packed with these, especially closer to the end of the series with larger warships duking it out. Although carriers and torpedoes do make a huge impact as well.
- Horatio Hornblower includes many battles, a few of which are genuinely epic:
- In Hornblower and the Hotspur, Hornblower takes his sloop HMS Hotspur into a single-ship duel with a large French frigate. In terms of combat capability this should be a Curb-Stomp Battle with Hornblower on the losing end, but a combination of circumstances make it a pretty even fight whose outcome is very much in doubt.
- In Beat to Quarters, Hornblower must take his frigate HMS Lydia into battle against El Supremo's flagship Natividad. Again, Natividad has the upper hand in terms of raw firepower, but circumstances even the odds a bit, leading to a battle that lasts two days.
- At the climax of Ship of the Line, Hornblower is ordered to confront four French ships of the line with his single ship HMS Sutherland. At four to one odds, the outcome really is pretty much guaranteed this time.
- Seas of Blood have the Anti-Hero protagonist, the Captain of a Pirate Ship called The Banshee, leading a legion of Barbarous Barbary Bandits, constantly leading his crew on sea battles, either against rival pirates, raiding merchant vessels, or battling imperial warships tasked with capturing The Banshee.
- The Tide Child features several ship-on-ship engagements, the first notable one being a battle between Tide Childs small convoy and a convoy from the Gaunt Isles of roughly equal strength. In this engagement Tide Child cuts through the enemy line and sinks Wavebreaker while defending against the boarding party of Sunfish Rising and Sea Louse. The climax of the first book is an engagement between Tide Child and Hag’s Hunter, which Hag’s Hunter wins with ease.
Live-Action TV
- Dogfights has two episodes focusing on the Bismarck and Yamato engaging against surface ships of the RN and USN, respectively. Both do not end well for them to differing degreesnote . In addition, the perspectives of their US and British opponents are also shown, ranging from crewmen of the HMS Hood and King George V to the destroyer crews of Taffy 3.
Music
- Sabaton's standalone single "Bismarck" chronicles the single deep-water voyage of the legendary German World War II battleship. The video, coproduced by World of Warships developer Wargaming, depicts both the Battle of the Denmark Strait (between Bismarck and Prinz Eugen and HMS Hood and Prince of Wales), and the Bismarck's Last Stand in the mid-Atlantic (against the battleships HMS Rodney and King George V and the heavy cruiser Dorsetshire), as well as the carrier attack from HMS Ark Royal that made the latter battle possible.
- Radio Tapok's "Tsushima" was co-produced with World of Warships and depicts the Last Stand of the Russian Baltic Fleet under Admiral Zinovy Rozhestvensky against Admiral Heihachiro Togo of the Imperial Japanese Navy during the 1904 Russo-Japanese War.
