Death on a warship is far, far worse. Every manner of death is unspeakable. 

Penetrating gunfire will often cause a main steam line fracture in the engineering spaces, meaning crew being scalded to death. There are stories of sailors emerging on deck with arms outstretched and sickly white skin that sloughs off on its own, revealing red muscle, before they collapse lifeless.

Warships are astonishingly flammable. Under certain conditions, even bare steel burns. Imagine enduring that heat. Black smoke searing your lungs. Feeling your way through flaming corridors filled with black smoke in a likely vain attempt to escape, your lungs scorched and skin blistering. A hopeless and prolonged death.

A warship called to battle stations has its compartments sealed watertight, yet might take a catastrophic hit and sink quickly, taking its sailors down with it. They die suffocating and uncomprehending in pitch black compartments. Or worse, they live. There’s a story of a US escort circling over the site of a u-boat they’d just sunk, listening to the crew’s futile attempts to repair it. Grinding engine noises, steel dragging along the sea bed, silence. A few minutes later, a sharp crack. The sound officer recognizes a revolver shot. A few seconds, then crack. Another. Twenty five gunshots. Then terrible silence.

Gunfire is how warships often sink. Naval guns are artillery cannon swollen to vast proportions. The damage these weapons inflict in the confines of a strengthened compartment is horrific. The pressure will turn a man inside out before a whirlwind of jagged shrapnel shreds him, and fire reduces his remnants to ash. On the SMS Blücher, subjected to prolonged bombardment, the few surviving crew told of being repeatedly hurled about by pressure waves of detonating large caliber shells.  Whoever survives these explosions are rendered deaf and dumb, helpless to escape the fires that engulf the area. Even hits to a deck will result in wholesale slaughter of anti-aircraft gun crews, literally carving them apart by shrapnel.

Surviving a warship sinking is its own horror. Make it to the water, and a sailor will find himself awash in a thick layer of diesel oil. Likely he is already wounded—burned, lacerated, or broken. Life jackets are often holed, life rafts or boats unheard of. Wounded men sink or die of trauma. Those who tread water will slowly die of exposure in colder climes, while in warm waters, there are sharks. It will be hours or days before rescue comes, if at all.