posted on Monday, June 12, 2006 3:07 AM
by
Endie
When Ship Naming Goes Wrong
Over at the War Room, Brad posts about the possible names for the Joint Strike Fighter. Some are good - Spitfire or Lightning are cracking names with great traditions - while others - "Black Mamba", anyone? - are decidely bad.
Brett at Airminded replies, pointing out the terrible, whimsical names that british pre-war planes had, and imagining going to war armed with craft called the Fawn, Flycatcher, or Tabloid. And he also says, in a reply at the War Room post:
>> Oh, I completely agree about Royal Navy ship names!
>> You just can’t beat names like Indomitable, Resolution,
>> Revenge, Dreadnought, Invincible …
I don't want to come across as some RAF-defending partisan, but, you have to remember that there have also been some pretty poor RN ship names. Given how long the senior service has been around, there are an awful lot of them. The Flower class corvettes in World War 2 are an example: who wants to go to war in the HMS Abelia? HMS Pink was put out of her misery in 44 by a U-Boat, as was the Bluebell in 45. I'm not sure which would have been worse: to serve on HMS Starwort, the Hyacinth, the Marigold or the Sunflower. Obviously there were more: there were a *lot* of Flower class corvettes. But the fact is that Airminded's nightmare scenario was real: we fought WW2 with a ship called the Rhododendron.
For every HMS Agamemnon there has been an "HMS Alice and Francis" or an "HMS Ann and Judith" (fireship). For every Repulse a Racoon. For every Prometheus there is a Postboy, a Popinjay, a Pilchard, a Pigmy, a Pantaloon or a Plumper.