HISTORY'S GREATEST NAVAL BATTLES
EP.1: THE BATTLE OF SALAMIS, 480 BC
September 480 BC. Up to 500,000 Persians were rampaging through Greece, having overwhelmed Leonidas and his Spartans at Thermopylae the month before. Several major cities had been taken and destroyed, including - unthinkably - Athens.
The Greeks had just one chance left to save southern Greece. Hold the Isthmus of Corinth where the narrow neck of land connecting the Peloponnese offered the only hope of resisting the Persian horde.
But to do this, the Greek fleets had to stop the Persians simply sailing around them. Less than 400 Greek triremes met 800 Persian ships at Salamis, in perhaps the most history-changing naval battle of all time. The future of Western Civilisation as we know it would hang on its outcome.
EP.2: THE BATTLE OF CAPE ECNOMUS, 256 BC
The rising might of the Roman Republic was about to clash with the centuries-old power of Carthage, the greatest naval power the western Mediterranean had ever known.
The Battle of Cape Ecnomus in 256 BC remains the largest naval battle in history, by the number of men involved. 300,000 fought in 680 ships for dominance.
Part of the First Punic War, the battle would eventually lead to the rise of one of the world's greatest Empires, and the extinction of another.
EP.3: THE BATTLE OF LEPANTO, 1571
As the Ottoman Empire spread inexorably across Arabia, Persia, North Africa and the Levant, it seemed nothing could stop it. It even shook Europe to the core when Ottoman cannon blasted holes through Constantinople's previously impregnable walls, causing the final collapse of the 1000-year Byzantine Empire.
Now, in 1571, with Venetian Cyprus on the brink of falling, Pope Pius V calls together a Holy League to try to halt the Ottoman advance into the Mediterranean Sea. Fail, and all Christendom might fall.
At the Battle of Lepanto, a Christian alliance of Spain, Venice, the Italian States and the Knights of Malta and Hospitallers took on the might of the Ottoman Empire.
The outcome would decide the fate of Christian Europe, and by extension, the world.
EP.4: THE BATTLE OF TRAFALGAR, 1805
This is the battle more than any other which confirmed that Britannia rules the waves, and set in stone the reputation of Admiral Horatio Nelson, even at the moment of his own death.
In October 1805, 27 British ships of the line took on 33 of the French and Spanish Empires. Waiting for the outcome was Napoleon, desperate to be rid of the Royal Navy so he could invade Britain and take out the perennial thorn in his side, just out of reach across the waves.
The outcome of the battle would play a key role in the outcome of the Napoleonic Wars.
EP.5: THE BATTLE OF TSUSHIMA, 1905
If there was one battle the world might have wished had never happened, it might be Tsushima in 1905. This one clash set dominos falling which would see Russia become the Soviet Union, World War I erupt, and the Pacific theatre of World War 2 explode at Pearl Harbour in 1941.
In its own right it was a colossal clash of 16 battleships, 32 cruisers, 29 destroyers and multiple other warships. It announced to the globe that Japan was now a world power to be reckoned with, and its effects, already noted as global, would also have long lasting implications for Korea, China and the whole Asia-Pacific region. Implications that still exist today.
The story of how it unfolded deserves a grand plaque in history’s hall of fame.
EP.6: THE BATTLE OF JUTLAND, 1915
The Battle of Jutland was the shuddering earthquake that released the seismic tension of the Anglo-German naval arms race of the last decade.
What was at stake was the blockade and starvation of the vanquished. The German High Seas Fleet aimed to destroy a large enough part of the British Grand Fleet to allow it to break out to the Atlantic where it would effectively blockade the commerce and supplies Britain utterly relied on to survive, let alone fight. If that happened, Britain would be forced into submission.
No wonder then that Winston Churchill said of the commander of the British Grand Fleet, Admiral Jellicoe: “He is the only man on either side who could have lost the war in an afternoon.”
Churchill was right. This one battle, more than any other, would decide the outcome of World War One, and with it the likelihood of a World War Two. The future of the world rested on Jellicoe’s shoulders.
EP.7: THE BATTLE OF MIDWAY, 1944
6 months after the infamous Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, Admiral Yamamoto aimed to lure the American carriers to Midway and destroy them once and for all.
Midway would have been taken, and perhaps even Hawaii. Along with a string of other islands it would have created a Pacific wall over which the Americans would have to bloodily clamber if they ever wanted to win the war. But the repercussions of a Japanese victory would have had world-wide repercussions too.
The outcome of this battle would either see an American defeat even more devastating than Pearl Harbour, or cause a turn in the tide from which the Japanese would never recover.