American torpedoes during WWII

October 28, 2021 5:31 PM

"I still can't believe the U.S. entered a naval war in 1941-42 without working torpedoes, and didn't even realize that they didn't work until 1943." U. S. Torpedo Troubles During World War II, a 1998 article by Douglas Shireman. Via Noah Smith.
posted by russilwvong (35 comments total)

Also the subject of this Lions Led by Donkeys podcast, which I just happened to have listened to last week, entitled "The Mk 14 Torpedo, and how the US Hated Their Own Submariners."
posted by rp at 6:16 PM on October 28, 2021 [5 favorites]

"Where's the kaboom? There's supposed to be an Earth-shattering kaboom."
posted by kirkaracha at 6:36 PM on October 28, 2021 [3 favorites]

This is quite astonishing, thanks for posting.
posted by mollweide at 6:39 PM on October 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

Fascinating russilwvong, my grandfather built, and fought in UK submarines in WW1, and was designing magnetic switches (for anti shipping mines in WW2), in some adjunct position at Whitehead Torpedo, my dad remembered them being tested in the bath!. That article awakens many memories and associations for me.
posted by unearthed at 6:41 PM on October 28, 2021 [4 favorites]

Silent Service by Clair Brown is an excellent book on the U.S. Submarine Service in the Pacific in WWII. Covers this issue completely.
posted by TheOtherOne at 6:47 PM on October 28, 2021 [2 favorites]

My shop/mechanical drawing teacher in junior high (what you young people call Middle School) spent his war making torpedoes. He would circle any superfluous dots on your drawings and deduct points, never realizing that they were the result of his own spittle.

If there's a connection to WW2 torpedo production, that's more than I know. (NB He was always nice to me.)
posted by BWA at 6:53 PM on October 28, 2021 [7 favorites]

Naval History vlogger Drachinifel: The Mark 14 Torpedo - Failure is Like Onions (33min)
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 6:57 PM on October 28, 2021 [4 favorites]

Yeah, reading about the Battle of Midway (which pretty much decided the War in the Pacific in 1942) I was shocked by the description of the non-functioning torpedoes.

The US dispatched 41 torpedo bombers against the Japanese fleet, but none scored any hits due to their unreliable design, despite firing multiple torpedoes at point blank ranges. The fighter escorts for the bombers had low speed, poor manoeuvrability and lacked range, with less than 10% of them making it back to their carriers... in fact they were so outranged by Japanese fighters (the Zero had twice their range) that to fight on equal footing, they sometimes had to be launched at ranges which meant they would not make it back to their carrier.

Worse was the training deficit. Japanese doctrine allowed them to launch their entire air wing within 10 minutes for a devastating massed attack against an enemy target, overwhelming their defences. American naval and air crew took over an hour to launch their air wing.

Their squadrons could only trickle in one by one due to lack of fuel and range, in many cases the fighter escorts not even able to keep pace with the bombers, and they would get gunned down before even penetrating the carriers outer defence line - the cruisers / destroyers / fighter wings.

Basically, the US fed a steady stream of torpedo bombers and fighter escorts to their deaths against the Japanese fleet to keep them off balance long enough for the dive bombers to find them... by accident. The two dive bomber squadrons had got the coordinates wrong and had gotten lost... with several bombers already ditched into the ocean due to running out of fuel. Their unexpected arrival from a different direction caught the Japanese by surprise and won the battle.

Some might argue the Americans won by superior strategy rather than luck. But the technology deficit is undeniable, and it feels like some kind of collective generational trauma, where the US will spend trillions of dollars so they are NEVER caught in such a huge a technological deficit ever again.
posted by xdvesper at 7:43 PM on October 28, 2021 [14 favorites]

I heard an anecdote about this once, that American torpedoes were unreliable, and how a submarine captain became so angry this was being ignored and hushed up that, when he repeatedly hit a Japanese ship with duds that he went into port and torpedoed an American ship to make his point.

The last part was obviously false but the true story isn't that far off.
posted by mark k at 7:47 PM on October 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

The problems of the malfunctioning German Torpedoes in early WWII.

"One of the lesser known reasons for the Allies winning the Battle of the Atlantic is what became known to the Germans as "Die Torpedokrise" or "Torpedo crisis" during the first year or so of the war. It was the time when the German U-boat (submarine) arm experienced technical malfunctions with the torpedoes. The time this problem took to resolve proved to be a break in which the Allies managed to improve their anti-submarine measures. By the time the Kriegsmarine (German Navy) finally succeeded in eradicating the problems Allied technology had advanced significantly and it was the Germans that were always having to catch up"
posted by clavdivs at 7:50 PM on October 28, 2021 [3 favorites]

When I opened the article I assumed it would be about exactly what xdvesper described: the colossal failure of the US Navy's aerial torpedoes and torpedo bombers. Turns out (unsurprisingly) that the aerial torpedo was actually the Mark 13, which had its own set of problems compounded by an attack doctrine for torpedo bombers that actually made the torpedoes less effective, while also making the bombers more vulnerable to attack.

A hell of a thing for the U.S. to have not one but two incredibly unreliable torpedo designs at the start of a heavily naval conflict.
posted by chrominance at 9:01 PM on October 28, 2021 [3 favorites]

I can heartily recommend reading the book The Devil's Device if you want more stories of how convoluted and crazy the history of the torpedo is.
posted by amcewen at 1:00 AM on October 29, 2021 [3 favorites]

> The last part was obviously false but the true story isn't that far off.

For a moment I thought we had an explanation for the whole William D Porter debacle, but the dates don't quite pan out.
posted by memetoclast at 1:59 AM on October 29, 2021

I met someone who worked at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Keyport Wa. There are two NUWC locations, the one in Washington and another in Newport, Rhode Island. He said that the Navy had two distinct competing centers working in the same area as a direct result of the terrible failure of the Mark 14 torpedo during WW2. They realized having a single location made it far to likely for institutional complacency problems.
I am also under the impression that this is also the reasoning behind having two centers for nuclear bomb design: the Los Alamos and Lawrence-Livermore National Laboratories.
posted by Metacircular at 2:20 AM on October 29, 2021

We also did pretty much nothing for coastal defense on the East coast, in the early part of the war. When the U-boats arrived, their commanders were astounded to see the ports all lit up like Christmas, with unescorted tankers just setting off to sea.
posted by thelonius at 4:37 AM on October 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

(I learned this from Silent Hunter 2, but I also read it in a book. When you got done blowing up undefended ships in the first SH2 mission, you could drive your U-boat around and explore. I took mine up to NYC; later, I found out that this had been done in real life, as well.)
posted by thelonius at 4:39 AM on October 29, 2021 [3 favorites]

I don't have the exact numbers handy, but I seem to recall reading that the US Submarine force employed about 10% of the total personnel in the US Navy for this time period. They accounted for approximately 40% of all Japanese naval tonnage sunk, and approximately 60% of all Japanese Merchant tonnage sunk. Imagine what would have happened with functional torpedoes.
posted by Barticus at 6:08 AM on October 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

So, like many, I dismissed Roland Emmerich's Midway film as some piece of blockbuster trash on the same level as Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor. I mean, this is the guy who created 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow, and treated cold as a monster that you could hold off by closing a door. However, while visiting my parents, my dad happened to have it on and it was surprisingly historically detailed! The failure of the torpedoes, and the shift to emphasizing dive bombing is actually a significant part of the film.
posted by bl1nk at 6:22 AM on October 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

It seems that the lore of every coastal town includes the claim that the U-boat crews visited the local movie theater.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 6:50 AM on October 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

The US dispatched 41 torpedo bombers against the Japanese fleet, but none scored any hits due to their unreliable design, despite firing multiple torpedoes at point blank ranges. The fighter escorts for the bombers had low speed, poor manoeuvrability and lacked range, with less than 10% of them making it back to their carriers... in fact they were so outranged by Japanese fighters (the Zero had twice their range) that to fight on equal footing, they sometimes had to be launched at ranges which meant they would not make it back to their carrier.


My understanding is that only one of VT-8's torpedo places launched on Soryu, which was promptly dodged. VT-6 launched at maximum range (1000 m) after an attack from fighters and missed. VT-3 launched on Hiryu from 600 - 800 meters at a bad angle and missed. Fighters were often out of position to cover the torpedo bombers, resulting in high casualties among the torpedo bombers, which were slow and carrying a one ton torpedo. VT-6 later declined to attack Mikuma and Mogami after seeing the heavy AA fire being thrown up (and the success of the dive-bombers).

TBF's from Midway, from Japanese eyes, launched from too far away, and Nagara and Hiryu dodged all torpedoes launched.

Japanese doctrine allowed them to launch their entire air wing within 10 minutes for a devastating massed attack against an enemy target, overwhelming their defences. American naval and air crew took over an hour to launch their air wing.


This seems like an exaggeration. Japanese carriers were crowded, and for the 0430 strike on Midway, the mechanics were woken up at 230 to start preparing the launch. Many of the aircraft had folding wings which could only be unfolded manually on the elevator, and with internal elevators, engines could only be warmed up on deck. The claim that the Japanese were 10 minutes from launching a strike that would have crushed the US carriers when suddenly divebombers ... is disputed.

Japanese doctrine changed in the aftermath of Midway, and Kusaka noted that there were situations where speed of reaction was more important than an escorted strike. By 1944, the Americans had gained enough expertise with carrier operations that the Battle of the Philippine Sea was nicknamed "The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot".
posted by Comrade_robot at 7:12 AM on October 29, 2021 [4 favorites]

Torpedo failure was a central occurrence in the novel "Run Silent, Run Deep", which was written about the submarine war in the Pacific by a former submarine captain. In the novels (there is a sequel), the character goes to work on solving the torpedo problem was well.
posted by procrastination at 7:28 AM on October 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

Does this mean that there's probably a quite a few unexploded torpedoes out there on the ocean floor?
posted by Catblack at 7:50 AM on October 29, 2021

The Military History not Visualized channel has a fairly succinct explanation of the problems (there were more than one.) First, the torpedoes were going deeper than they were supposed to. This was because the torpedoes were tested with dummy heads rather than explosive heads, and the two types behaved differently. The speed of the torpedoes increased over time, which is good, but it had complex side effects, both with depth and the function of the fuses that exploded the device. The two types of fuses, magnetic and contact, did not work reliably. Before the war, the Navy did not have enough budget to do much testing.

He says that he doesn't think it really had that much effect on the war effort, because it took the Navy a long time to figure out how to best use submarines, and by the time they did, the torpedoes were working.
posted by Bee'sWing at 7:51 AM on October 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

Further complicating the problem, it was later found that the depth-recording instrument used by the bureau to check the reliability of all hydrostatic valves was miscalibrated. Years later, technicians discovered that the recording instrument and the misplaced valves erred in the same direction and amount.

That's a detail I hadn't read before and is co-incidentally one of my biggest work related anxieties.
posted by Dr. Twist at 9:14 AM on October 29, 2021 [4 favorites]

I learned all about the US torpedo problems in WW2 when playing the original Sid Meier's Silent Service (which predated even Silent Hunter) and even played GATO for a while (though it has fictional islands). I read basically every book there is on the subject, and even checked out a 1000 page book from the library. There is plenty of blame to go around... but the main problem is denial... BuOrd simply denied there is a problem and barely investigated the concerns, forcing the sub crews to modify the torpedo detonators themselves (deactivating the Mk 6 magnetic exploder), and to fire them all if necessary as they don't want to "restore" the torpedoes before their return.
posted by kschang at 11:00 AM on October 29, 2021 [4 favorites]

Many years ago, I took a stained-glass class at The Torpedo Factory in Alexandria VA, which used to make torpedoes, but now has working-artists’ open studios. They have a Mark XIV in the lobby.
posted by MtDewd at 2:43 PM on October 29, 2021 [4 favorites]

Torpedo Juice not meant for drinking but referred to in 'The Master' (which is not on the Wikipedia list of Submarine Films).
posted by ovvl at 6:11 PM on October 29, 2021

Potatoes on the other hand seemed to work OK .....
posted by mbo at 6:36 PM on October 29, 2021

Pearl Harbor: Thunderfish in the Sky – Japan’s Type 91 Modification 2 Torpedo Fins at Pearl Harbor, Ray Panko, Pearl Harbor Aviation Museum, December 28, 2015:

…When an aerial torpedo weighing almost two tons slams into the water at 200 mph, it barely slows down. In the open sea, Japan’s aerial torpedoes plunged 150 feet before climbing back to attack depth.[1] Pearl Harbor was only about 40 feet deep,[2] so Japan needed to modify its tactics and torpedoes to attack successfully.
…
On Dec. 7, 1941, Japan proved that it had mastered shallow-water torpedo strikes. After the attack, a shocked U.S. Navy examined the remnants of Japanese torpedoes. They saw that the dropped torpedoes had big wooden fins at the back of their tail cones. These big wooden fins, which were fitted over smaller metal fins, broke off when the torpedo hit the water. The Navy also saw that there were two smaller fins near the front of the tail cones. These were again made of metal covered with wooden gloves that snapped off at water entry.

With no evidence or aerodynamic analysis, the Navy guessed that the big tail fins had been the key to the Japanese torpedo attack. Again with no evidence or aerodynamic analysis, they guessed that the big tail fins had pulled the torpedo’s nose up so that it would not dive so deeply. In Congressional hearings on Pearl Harbor, Adm. Kimmel called the big fins “a device which all the brains in our own Navy Department, who had been seeking such a solution, had been unable to arrive at.”[5] Neither these guesses nor Kimmel was correct….

Technical details, photos, and diagrams in the article. More about Japan’s Type 91 torpedo (WP).
posted by cenoxo at 8:08 AM on October 30, 2021

The Submarine Force Museum (Groton, CT) has a series on their YouTube channel about the MK 14.

In MK 14 torpedo they mention it saw service up until 1980!

In MK 14 torpedo - Design & Production Problems they state that the MK VI exploder only had one (1) manual, that was locked in a safe to prevent theft. (This is reminiscent of the Sherman gun stabilizer, albeit even more extreme.)

In MK 14 Torpedo - Operational Issues they mention sub commanders started removing the magnetic exploders in the field. (This jibes with a story I heard of a commander doing just that, although the story made it sound like he was exceptional.) Since you need a larger spread of torpedos without a magnetic detonator (since you won't break the keel) sub commanders inflated the size of their targets in their reports to justify the increased expenditure.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 1:39 PM on October 30, 2021

I think I read in one of the novels or history books that the quartermasters were trying to "catch" the sub crews messing with "their" torpedoes by adding a drop or two of lacquer on critical nuts and bolts to make "tamper marks" but the sub crews caught wise to that and obtained lacquer of their own to reproduce the marks when they reassemble the detonator on their way back to port.
posted by kschang at 8:11 PM on October 30, 2021

By a strange coincidence I just finished reading "Pacific Crucible" by Ian Toll. It details the attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent battles of Wake, Coral Sea and Midway.

Parts of it read like a Tom Clancy novel, with the sobering realization that this happened to real people.

The poor performance of US torpedoes is documented but the book does not delve into the reasons, so this post is a great follow-up.

I also seem to remember a John Wayne war movie where the Duke is involved with improving torpedo accuracy.
posted by mmrtnt at 11:18 PM on October 30, 2021

>a John Wayne war movie where the Duke is involved with improving torpedo accuracy.

Probably Operation Pacific where the Duke plays the XO of the sub USS Thunderfish.

>>>Working with the sub base's torpedo specialists, Duke and the crew of the Thunderfish undertake an investigation to find out why the torpedoes are not exploding.
posted by kschang at 5:35 AM on November 2, 2021

Death of a Battleship: The Loss of HMS Prince of Wales, December 10, 1941 – A Marine Forensics Analysis of the Sinking, Garzke-Dulin-Denlay, 2012 Revision [80pp PDF, PacificWrecks.com]:

Abstract

This marine forensics analysis of the loss of HMS Prince of Wales is based on a series of survey dives conducted on the wreck during Expedition ‘Job 74’ in May 2007, two follow-up survey-dives in June 2008 and September 2009, and the monograph and reflections of one surviving officer from the Engineering Department of that battleship. Vice Admiral D.B.H. Wildish (a lieutenant at the time) was the engineering officer in charge of “B” Engine Room during the Japanese assault on his ship. He had previously served as the Damage Control Officer during the Bismarck Engagement in May of 1941.

Expedition ‘Job 74’, which carried Explorers Club Flag #118 and was led by Kevin Denlay and Dr. Andrew Fock, made a comprehensive survey of the exterior hull, which included video imagery and measurements of the torpedo holes and damaged hull sections, expanding considerably on a survey done by a Royal Navy Diving Team in 1966. Mr. Denlay also had two of his colleagues return in 2008 to take measurements of the outer port propeller shaft. Subsequently, in 2009, one of those divers returned again to the wreck on his own initiative and took detailed photographs of the outer port propeller shaft.

Historical Background

The loss at sea of one of Great Britain’s newest battleships on 10 December 1941 [*] was a profound shock to the navies of the world, whether friend or foe. This was the first time a modern capital ship maneuvering at high speed in the open sea was sunk solely due to air attack. Designed to withstand the latest ordnance, Prince of Wales was sunk by a Japanese force of 85 twin-engine bombers1 operating from air bases in Indo-China (now Vietnam)….

*Only three days after Japan’s aerial torpedo attack on Pearl Harbor. Extensive analysis, details, photographs, and illustrations follow in the report. See also HMS Prince of Wales (53) at Wikipedia.
posted by cenoxo at 2:42 AM on November 12, 2021

More about HMS Prince of Wales (53) at PacificWrecks.com.
posted by cenoxo at 3:08 AM on November 12, 2021