[Sailor Steve]

I've seen many such lists over the years, and in my own opinion it really comes down to nothing more than opinion.

How do you rate them? Looks? Power? Fulfillment of intended purpose? People have been arguing about this for more than seventy years, and nothing ever comes of it because as always everyone has what they think are good reasons for their picks, and the more the discussion goes on the more they are convinced they are right.

The same applies to questions of who had the best aircraft, the best submarines, the best tanks. The only reason battleships are different is that the groups tend to be very small. I used to compare ships to ancient Greek stories. The destroyers are like the common soldiers, there being many of them and while one or another sometimes stands out on the whole they are looked at as a group. The cruisers are the commanders. They end up being nameless in the stories but without them there would be no stories. The battleships are the heroes: Achilles, Hector, Odysseus, Paris. They are the big names, the men of prowess, the ones who when they win are heaped with glory and when they die their deaths are also big news. All that said, their only real purpose is to be the biggest and the best. They don't really further the outcome of the war and they aren't nearly as important as the news and the storytellers would make them out to be. That said, we're all suckers for the big story.

But that's just my opinion.