The 10 best battleships of all time

No battleship was ever larger than Yamato: 71,659 tonnes at full load, nine 460 mm guns in three triple turrets. She sank on 7 April 1945 all the same. HMS Warspite, launched back in 1913, came through both world wars and ended with 15 battle honours, more than any other individual ship of the Royal Navy.

This list weighs what a ship achieved in battle and what mark it left on history; where records are close, sheer fighting power in calibre, armour and displacement decides. The table below sets class, displacement, main calibre and fate side by side.

What is a battleship, and how does it differ from a warship or frigate?

A battleship is a historical, heavily armoured capital ship whose main striking power comes from large-calibre guns. Warship is the broader term: it includes military vessels from minehunters to aircraft carriers. A frigate is therefore a warship, but not a battleship. In a historical U.S. Department of State treaty definition, a battleship is a warship above 10,000 tons standard displacement or carrying guns exceeding eight inches.

Modern frigates serve a very different purpose. Depending on their equipment, they conduct anti-submarine warfare, air defence, escort and surveillance. The Royal Navy has designed its new frigate class around those connected escort duties. Size alone does not make a battleship: era, protection scheme, main armament and operational role all matter.

Readers interested in radio controlled ship modelling can explore the RC military ships category.

What is the largest battleship in the world?

Historically, Yamato and Musashi were the largest and heaviest battleships in the world. The Yamato Museum gives a standard displacement of 65,000 tonnes and nine 46 cm guns; the U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command explicitly describes the ships, at about 72,000 tonnes fully loaded, as the largest battleships ever built.

Their size record is therefore a historical one: no battleship remains in active service today.

What are the 10 best battleships of all time?

From Yamato to Nagato, the field spans six nations and three decades of shipbuilding. At the top stands the largest battleship ever built. At the end stands Nagato, whose heavy 410 mm guns hardly ever fired at an enemy in twenty-four years of service.

The ship models category offers a broader selection of static ships.

1. Yamato

Yamato leads this list because no other ship combines size and historical impact like her. In 1944 she went into action off Samar against the US fleet. Her sinking in 1945 became a symbol of the end of the Japanese Empire. 71,659 tonnes at full load, 263 metres long, nine 460 mm guns in three triple turrets: the largest calibre ever mounted on a warship, with a range of 42 kilometres. The giant was built in strict secrecy, partly behind screens erected over the dry dock, and commissioned on 16 December 1941, just over a week after Pearl Harbor.

From February 1942 Admiral Yamamoto commanded the Combined Fleet from Yamato's bridge; at Midway, however, the flagship stayed beyond gun range. Her only surface action came on 25 October 1944 off Samar, where she helped sink the escort carrier Gambier Bay and two destroyers.

The end was a one-way order: in Operation Ten-Gō, Yamato was to beach herself off Okinawa and fight as a gun battery until destroyed, without air cover. On 7 April 1945 she sank after at least eleven torpedo and six bomb hits. Of her 3,332 men, 3,055 died, and fleet commander Vice Admiral Itō went down with the ship. The American carrier aviators lost ten aircraft. Today a 26-metre 1:10 model at the Yamato Museum commemorates the ship whose name became a metaphor for the end of the Japanese Empire.

2. Bismarck

Bismarck sank the HMS Hood on 24 May 1941 after just eight minutes of firing. Her own loss three days later hit the Kriegsmarine so hard that it never again sent its heavy surface ships on an Atlantic offensive. That strategic impact carries the ship to second place. At full load Bismarck displaced 50,300 tonnes and carried eight 380 mm guns. In 1942 US naval intelligence judged her as formidable as any battleship then in service. Her only operation was the commerce-raiding sortie "Rheinübung", which lasted just over a week.

In the Denmark Strait only three of Hood's 1,419 men survived, and the damaged Prince of Wales broke off. The Royal Navy's response was unprecedented: six battleships and battlecruisers, two aircraft carriers, thirteen cruisers and twenty-one destroyers hunted the single ship. A Swordfish torpedo from Ark Royal jammed her rudder at 12 degrees on 26 May. On the morning of 27 May, Rodney and King George V battered the unmanoeuvrable Bismarck into a wreck. She went under at 10:40; shellfire, torpedoes and scuttling all played a part. Of more than 2,200 men, only around 110 survived.

The consequences reached far beyond the battle: from then on the Battle of the Atlantic belonged to the German U-boats, not to the big surface ships. Robert Ballard, the discoverer of the Titanic, found the wreck in 1989 at a depth of almost 4,800 metres.

3. HMS Warspite

No ship among these ten saw more combat than HMS Warspite. Across both world wars she earned 15 battle honours, more than any other ship of the Royal Navy. That earns her third place. The Queen Elizabeth-class battleship was launched at Devonport on 26 November 1913, commissioned on 8 March 1915 and carried eight 381 mm guns in four twin turrets. As built she displaced 33,790 tonnes at deep load; after her reconstruction of 1934 to 1937 the maximum figure rose to 37,030 tonnes.

At Jutland on 31 May 1916 Warspite took fifteen hits; 14 of her crew were killed. On 13 April 1940, as Vice-Admiral Whitworth's flagship, she led nine destroyers into Ofotfjord against eight German destroyers trapped there. Her floatplane sank the submarine U-64, the first U-boat sunk by an aircraft in the Second World War. Off Calabria on 9 July 1940 Warspite hit the Giulio Cesare at a range of about 24 kilometres. That was one of the longest gunnery hits in history, from a moving ship against a moving target. Sold for scrapping in 1947, the ship ran aground in a storm at Prussia Cove in Cornwall while under tow and was broken up there by 1955.

4. USS Iowa

USS Iowa projected power for longer than any other battleship among these ten. The fast Iowa class (around 33 knots) fought in the Second World War and Korea. In 1984 the ship returned to service a third time for the 600-ship Navy and stayed until 1990. That secures fourth place. USS Iowa was launched on 27 August 1942, displaced 58,460 tonnes at full load and mounted nine Mark 7 406 mm guns whose 1,200-kilogram armour-piercing shells flew 37 kilometres.

Responsibility came even before her combat debut: in November 1943 Iowa carried President Roosevelt across the Atlantic to North Africa on the way to the Tehran Conference. From January 1944 the Pacific campaigns followed, from the Marshalls to the bombardment of the Japanese home islands; on 29 August 1945 Iowa entered Tokyo Bay with the occupation forces. In the Korean War she spent six months of 1952 firing on coastal targets; in all the ship collected eleven battle stars.

Reactivated for the 600-ship Navy, Iowa carried 32 Tomahawk cruise missiles from 1984. In 1989 an explosion of undetermined origin wrecked her No. 2 turret and killed 47 men. She was decommissioned for the last time on 26 October 1990 and has been a museum ship in Los Angeles since July 2012.

5. USS North Carolina

USS North Carolina is regarded as the most decorated American battleship of the Second World War. The museum counts 15 battle stars; just ten of her crew died in the whole war. No other ship fought so steadily at the front. That earns her fifth place. As the first American battleship built after a sixteen-year pause, she opened the line of the US Navy's ten fast battleships. She drew so much attention during fitting-out and trials that the nickname "Showboat" stuck. Launched on 13 June 1940, she displaced 45,519 tonnes at full load and carried nine 406 mm guns.

At the Eastern Solomons on 24 August 1942, North Carolina showed what the fast battleships were built for: screening the carriers. Her anti-aircraft fire over Enterprise was so dense that observers thought the ship herself was ablaze. Three weeks later a torpedo from submarine I-19 struck her, from the same spread that also hit the carrier Wasp and the destroyer O'Brien. Five men died. The crew righted the list within minutes and held station in the formation. From then on North Carolina missed almost no major Pacific operation: the Gilberts, the Marshalls, the Marianas, Iwo Jima, Okinawa.

The ship survived the war and opened as a memorial at Wilmington on 29 April 1962; she has been a National Historic Landmark since 1982.

6. USS South Dakota

South Dakota's part in the night Battle of Guadalcanal was involuntary, and that is exactly what brings sixth place. An electrical failure left the ship defenceless. While the powerless South Dakota drew at least 26 hits and the fire of the Japanese line, Washington sank the Kirishima unseen. The lead ship was launched on 7 June 1941, displaced 45,233 tonnes at full load and mounted nine 406 mm guns.

The naval Battle of Guadalcanal on 14/15 November 1942 made her famous, yet the story is more honest than her fame. An electrical fault crippled the ship. According to the NHHC ship history, Admiral Lee called her "deaf, dumb, blind", and around 40 men died. The victory went to the unmolested USS Washington in the only one-on-one battleship duel of the Pacific War. The press nonetheless celebrated the ship known, for secrecy, only as "Battleship X".

By the war's end South Dakota had collected 13 battle stars. On 14 July 1945 she joined the force whose bombardment of Kamaishi brought the first capital-ship shells down on the Japanese home islands. She lay in Tokyo Bay at the surrender. The ship was broken up in 1962. Her anchor, a gun barrel and other relics have stood since 1969 in a Sioux Falls memorial that traces the ship's outline at full scale.

7. Vittorio Veneto

No Italian battleship was more active in the war than Vittorio Veneto: 56 wartime missions, eleven of them offensive sorties. A British Malta convoy turned back solely under the threat posed by her and her sister ship. That is enough for seventh place. The Littorio class was regarded by the Italian Navy itself as the best in service, balanced in firepower, protection and speed. Vittorio Veneto was launched on 25 July 1937, carried nine 381 mm guns in three triple turrets and displaced 45,963 tonnes at full load.

Her baptism of fire came off Cape Teulada on 27 November 1940. Nineteen rounds at an extreme 27 kilometres were enough to make the British cruisers turn away. At Cape Matapan in March 1941 an aerial torpedo from HMS Formidable struck her stern. Some 4,000 tonnes of water flooded in, yet Vittorio Veneto escaped to Taranto at 20 knots. The escort left behind to protect her was destroyed in the night action. She survived a submarine torpedo from HMS Urge in December 1941: her Pugliese system contained the blast, and the ship reached port under her own power.

After the armistice her crew brought the ship to Malta in September 1943; her sister Roma was sunk on that passage, while Vittorio Veneto came through unscathed. After years interned in the Bitter Lakes of the Suez Canal, she was struck from the register on 1 February 1948 and broken up at La Spezia.

8. Richelieu

Richelieu's impact lay more in politics than in gunfire. In 1940 she escaped German occupation with the gold reserves of the Banque de France. In 1943 she changed sides and then fought Japan with the British Eastern Fleet. Two theatres of war bring her eighth place. In mid-June 1940, days after completion, Richelieu left Brest for Dakar as German troops approached the city. Her design took its own path: all eight 380 mm guns stood in two quadruple turrets ahead of the superstructure. That shortened the armour belt and kept the weight within the treaty limit. In her original configuration the lead ship displaced 44,698 tonnes at full load.

At Dakar, Richelieu survived a British torpedo hit in July 1940 and in September helped repel Operation Menace, scoring a hit on HMS Barham. After a five-month refit in New York, with around 2,000 workers in three shifts, she sailed with the British Eastern Fleet against Japan. Bombarding Sabang in July 1944, she fired 81 heavy shells, a salvo every 50 seconds and nearly twice as fast as the British battleships in company.

After taking part in the liberation of Singapore and years as flagship off Indochina, Richelieu was decommissioned in 1967 and broken up from 1968. One of her 380 mm barrels stands in Brest today.

9. HMS King George V

King George V fought only one big action in 1941: the hunt for Bismarck, whose final battle she led. After that came escort and bombardment duties, and her own record stayed modest. She ranks above Nagato only because she took part in decisive actions at all: ninth place. HMS King George V, lead ship of the last class of British battleships built in numbers, was launched on 21 February 1939. Her ten 356 mm guns were arranged in an unusual layout of one quadruple, one twin and a second quadruple turret. The calibre was imposed by the Second London Naval Treaty. A deep-load displacement of 42,237 British long tons converts to roughly 42,900 metric tonnes.

From April 1941 King George V was flagship of the Home Fleet under Admiral Sir John Tovey, the ship from which the hunt for Bismarck was directed. On the morning of 27 May 1941 she led the final battle, firing more than 330 main-battery shells. In 1945 she bombarded the Japanese home islands with the British Pacific Fleet (267 rounds on the industrial plants at Hitachi alone) and lay in Tokyo Bay at the surrender.

In 1950 King George V became the first capital ship preserved in this fashion and mothballed. The decision to scrap her came in 1957, and breaking-up began in 1958.

10. Nagato

Nowhere do fame and achievement fall further apart than with Nagato. In 1941 she transmitted, as a flagship, the signal to attack Pearl Harbor. Yet her guns, the second-largest calibre of these ten (410 mm), first fired at an enemy only in 1944. So much fame, so little fire: that leaves last place. Her true 26.7 knots stayed hidden for so long that the US Navy believed in 23 knots until about 1937. After her great reconstruction in the thirties (pagoda mast, lengthened stern, turret elevation raised to 43 degrees for a range of 37.9 kilometres) her deep displacement stood at 46,690 tonnes.

As Admiral Yamamoto's flagship, Nagato transmitted the order that started the Pacific War on 2 December 1941: "Niitaka yama nobore", the signal to attack Pearl Harbor. Her own guns waited twenty-four years since her 1920 commissioning for their first shot at an enemy ship. Not until October 1944, off Samar, did her main battery fire at hostile vessels.

At the war's end Nagato was the only one of twelve Japanese battleships still afloat. According to the U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command, a bomb in July 1945 struck the very spot on her bridge from which Yamamoto had given the Pearl Harbor order. As a target ship in the Crossroads nuclear tests she survived the first blast in July 1946 and capsized after the second. The wreck lies off Bikini today; in 2007 The Times ranked it among the ten best wreck dive sites in the world.

Displacement, main calibre and fate compared

Often confused with Bismarck: Tirpitz, Scharnhorst and Prinz Eugen

Anyone searching for Bismarck will almost always run into these three names. None of them belongs in the top 10, for three different reasons.

Tirpitz: Bismarck's sister ship

Tirpitz was the second battleship of the Bismarck class. She was launched on 1 April 1939, displaced 52,600 tonnes at full load and carried eight 380 mm guns, the same main battery as Bismarck. Tirpitz sank after a British air attack on 12 November 1944.

Scharnhorst: battleship or battlecruiser?

Scharnhorst belonged to the Scharnhorst class and is usually called a battleship in German writing but often a battlecruiser in British tradition. She was launched on 3 October 1936, displaced 38,700 tonnes at full load and mounted nine 280 mm guns. Scharnhorst sank in the Battle of the North Cape on 26 December 1943. The different classifications follow the two naval traditions, as Roskill's official British naval history explains.

Prinz Eugen: a heavy cruiser, not a battleship

Prinz Eugen was not a battleship but an Admiral Hipper-class heavy cruiser. She was launched on 22 August 1938, displaced 19,050 tonnes at full load and carried eight 203 mm guns. Transferred to the United States in 1945, Prinz Eugen survived two Crossroads tests but capsized on 22 December 1946.

Why are there no active battleships today?

The battleship lost its role because long-range striking power no longer came from heavy guns alone. Carrier aircraft attacked beyond artillery range; submarines, guided missiles and later satellite-supported, networked reconnaissance expanded the threat. Armour, large crews and massive gun turrets also consumed enormous resources in upkeep.

The last American battleships left service in 1992, according to the NHHC; none remains in service or reserve anywhere in the world. Museum ships preserve engineering history but do not replace a modern frigate, destroyer or aircraft carrier. The rise of air power can also be traced through the development of fighter aircraft.

The same industrial change shaped the land war, from the first tanks in World War I to the great tank battles of the Second World War.

What did Churchill actually say about Bismarck?

Original quotation: I have just received news that the "Bismarck" is sunk.

The Hansard record of the House of Commons debate on 27 May 1941, volume 371, columns 1714–18, gives the exact sentence with which Winston Churchill interrupted his war statement. The popular phrase “Sink the Bismarck!” is not documented as a Churchill quotation.

Frequently asked questions about battleships

Sources

• Museums and official bodies: Yamato Museum, U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command, Royal Navy, Marina Militare, the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, and Battleship North Carolina.
• Individual ship data: most ships are linked directly to their profile in the text; the rest are covered by NHHC, RMG and the museum pages listed above.
• Standard works (no online edition, therefore no link): Garzke and Dulin, Battleships: Axis and Neutral Battleships in World War II; Burt, British Battleships 1919–1945; Jordan and Dumas, French Battleships 1922–1956; Conway's All the World's Fighting Ships 1922–1946.
• Quotation: Hansard, House of Commons debate of 27 May 1941 as the verbatim parliamentary primary source.
• Image credits: USS Iowa, U.S. Navy/NARA, public domain; Bundesarchiv, Bild 193-04-1-26, licence CC BY-SA 3.0; USS Missouri, U.S. Navy, public domain.