Top 5 Admirals

Wiglaf

Wiglaf

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Forget generals for a second, who are the greatest admirals?
Say top 5 after the advent of sail and gunpowder until the present.
I will post my list after some more research.
Some names outside of American Commodores, British Admirals, and WWII American Admirals would be nice such as, DeRuyter.
 
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Horatio Nelson, Maarten Tromp, Robert Blake, David Farragut, Chester Nimitz.

Nelson hardly needs an explanation - probably the greatest nautical military genius of all time. Tromp and Blake due to their brilliant pioneering naval tactics during the Anglo-Dutch War. Farragut for his creation of the first real American navy during the US Civil War. Nimitz for the development of carrier tactics and strategies against the Japanese during World War II.
 
Nelson, Collingwood, Hood, Nimitz, Tōgō Heihachirō (He was commander of the Japanese force at the battle of Tsushima) And often described as the Nelson of the East
 
Duncan, despite being born in Dundee, in 1797, he put down a mutiny with minimal force before leading the Royal Navy to victory at Camperdown, where he first tried out tactics later used by Nelson.

The Batavian Republic (Modern Netherlands) was allied to Napoleon and had sent an invasion fleet against the UK. If Camperdown had gone the other way, there wouldn't have been a Trafalgar.

Nelson considered Duncan the greatest Admiral he'd ever known.
 
I have a question about Nimitz, how much do you credit him and how much goes to his under Admirals. Mitscher has a street named after him just like Nimitz. Halsey and Spruance had notable success.
Several other Admirals and Commodores have the same issues; who gets the credit.

So far I am leaning towards (in no particular order) Nelson, Nimitz, Farragut, DeRuyter, and the mysterious Adm. ? .

 
Hmm Donitz is an interesting choice, given the low regard for the Navy he really didn't get to show his value. Then again an Admiral with nothing, that still manages to impact on a war is a reasonable criteria
 
I was thinking more of his being possibly the only foreign admiral that came close to beating the UK and its navy, when in charge of the U-boats at the start of the war.
 
I have seen Donitz in many lists. However, no German admiral was very effective due to Prussian thinking about naval warfare. Without the need seen for repeatedly expending effort until success was achieved in freeing the surface fleet, no German admiral was allowed to attempt to succeed. In WWII more ships were needed and more had to sail on the open seas. In WWI Germany had the best shot. With a surface fleet rivaling Britain's and succeeding where Napoleon and later Hitler failed in defeating Russia, Germany well could have won the war with either a slightly better blockade of Britain and/or a significant delay in the arrival of American reinforcements. While a strategic failure at freeing the High Seas Fleet, Jutland was a tactical draw. With Germany's industrial might an attempt could have been made at out building the Royal Navy in a war of attrition. If Germany had any concept of naval warfare, there would have been a Second Battle of Jutland and possibly a third if necessisary.
 
Wiglaf said:
While a strategic failure at freeing the High Seas Fleet, Jutland was a tactical draw.
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Tactical draw, maybe, but strategically it was an overwhelming victory for the British forces....the High Seas Fleet were back exercising in the North Sea shortly after the battle, whereas the Grand Fleet never sailed out of Keil en masse again, until their surrender in 1918.

Jellicoe would be sixth on my list...in spite of never winning a major engagement, and not really deserving of the tag of "great", he was nontheless one of the most effective admirals in history.
As Winston Churchill correctly observed, he was 'the only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon...', and he achieved his objective of stifling the German fleet, well, admirably.
 
Wiglaf said:
I have seen Donitz in many lists. However, no German admiral was very effective due to Prussian thinking about naval warfare. Without the need seen for repeatedly expending effort until success was achieved in freeing the surface fleet, no German admiral was allowed to attempt to succeed. In WWII more ships were needed and more had to sail on the open seas. In WWI Germany had the best shot. With a surface fleet rivaling Britain's and succeeding where Napoleon and later Hitler failed in defeating Russia, Germany well could have won the war with either a slightly better blockade of Britain and/or a significant delay in the arrival of American reinforcements. While a strategic failure at freeing the High Seas Fleet, Jutland was a tactical draw. With Germany's industrial might an attempt could have been made at out building the Royal Navy in a war of attrition. If Germany had any concept of naval warfare, there would have been a Second Battle of Jutland and possibly a third if necessisary.
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There is another way of looking at the German High Seas fleet during World War I and that is that it was a monumental waste of men and money. I believe that it was Barbara Tuchman (although I am not absolutely certain) who estimated that if Germany had devoted the resources it used on developing its navy to putting another few hundred thousand men into its army, the Schlieffen Plan might have succeeded. As it was, Germany's surface fleet was used so sparingly it did not justify the resources used to build it. AS for putting even more resources into it, that could only have been done at even greater cost to the army and greatly weakening Germany's efforts on the Eastern and Western fronts.
 
Britain's strategic victory at Jutland was only short term since tactically the engagement was a draw. The lasting success came when the Germans did something neither the Americans nor the British would consider thinkable; they just gave up. If put in Germany's situation and given one of the world's two most powerful navies which had fought the other most powerful navy to a tactical draw, a lot of other countries would have had another go. There was no Second Battle of Jutland, but if Germany persisted, they stood a strong chance of eventually winning a war of attrition.
 
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