The Brits do have some good ship names. HMS Dauntless? HMS Invincible? That's pretty awesome.
Agreed that names like USS Saratoga and USS Enterprise sound a lot better than USS Gerald R. Ford and USS George H.W. Bush.
One of their toughest little ships had a very benign name: HMS Glowworm, a Destroyer that took on 2 German destroyers and a Heavy Cruiser....
From wikipedia:
"Although hopelessly outgunned,
Glowworm accepted the fight and, while receiving several heavy hits, fired torpedoes at the German cruiser. They missed and, in a final desperate effort to sink or at least seriously damage her opponent,
Glowworm then attempted to ram
Admiral Hipper. One of the
Hipper’s shells hit the
Glowworm’s mast. As this crashed down, it caused a short circuit of the wiring, causing the ship's siren to start a
banshee wail which nobody was able to stop. As the ships collided,
Admiral Hipper suffered major damage, with a large underwater gash in her bow. With the two ships locked together,
Glowworm fired one last shot at point-blank range into the
Hipper."
How often does this happen:
"The
Glowworm’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander
Gerard Broadmead Roope, killed when she sank, was posthumously awarded the
Victoria Cross, thus becoming the first VC recipient of the Second World War. The award was justified, in part, by the
recommendation of his opponent, Captain Hellmuth Heye of the Admiral Hipper, who wrote to the British authorities via the
Red Cross, giving a statement of the valiant courage Lt Cdr Roope had shown when engaging a much superior ship in close battle."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Glowworm_(H92)
