> Because of this logistics fiasco, veteran submariner and historian Paul Schratz said he ‘was only one of many frustrated submariners who thought it a violation of New Mexico scenery to test the A-bomb at Alamagordo when the naval torpedo station was available.’
LOL.
Another interesting fact about the US torpedoes is that they were slow by WWII standards, especially compared to the Japanese torpedoes. This is normally a fairly bad flaw because it gives the enemy ship more time to dodge the torpedo, however in the Battle off Samar it turned out to be an advantage as they allowed the torpedoes fired by a tiny destroyer managed to scare the mighty battleship Yamato away from the battle for quite a long time because the torpedoes took so long to arrive that the Yamato was well out of position once they finally missed.
It's important to note that the torpedoes Japanese generally used we powered by compressed pure oxygen, making them faster & giving them more range.
But it also turned them into even bigger explosion hazard than normal torpedoes when the ship caring them is hit. As a result many Japanese ships are documented going down after what would normally be minor hits due to their oxygen torpedoes exploding and causing massive damage.
IMO that really is the point of weapons at the end of the day: to scare your enemies into giving up some resource. Any damage caused is only to remind them that they should be scared.
I remember reading a similar side effect of slower technology during the sinking of the Bismark. The British were using older bi-plane torpedo planes, while the Bismark had the latest anti-aircraft, mechanized guns. The swiveling speed of these newer guns was too fast to accurately track to slow bi-planes. This made the Bismark's anti-aircraft less effective.
When I was a child, I played a DOS game called Silent Hunter I. Basically, it's a submarine warfare game which you play as a U.S. Navy submarine in World War II, cursing the Pacific Ocean and attacks Japanese warships. When playing the game, I was extremely frustrated about the Mark XIV torpedo onboard - After going through the painstaking process of calculating the projectile, hitting the fire button, I would watch the stopwatch and hoping for the best that the target won't change its course... finally it was the time... nothing! For every five fires or so, there would be one or two torpedoes that never explode - when you need it the most. I was not playing the "hard" mode, it happens even in a "moderate" difficulty setting.
I thought the game developers were making it unreasonable. And a few years later, I learned from a history book about the early unreliability of the torpedoes, and realized the torpedoes in the game were an accurate and realistic depiction of its historical performance. Kudos to the game developers.
Another tool in the game I felt strange was the "Torpedo Data Computer", which is something that you can simply enter the bearing, speed, etc., of your target via its tuning dials, and the machine automatically calculates the firing position for you. I thought it was just the hand-waving of the game developers to make the game more playable while making it unrealistic - why would a computer even exist in the 1940s? I believed it was all pencil-and-paper.
Later I learned it was real as well - totally mind-blowing. When I was a kid, I had no idea about the sophisticated historical mechanical fire control computers in the 1930s-1940s. There is a Hacker News submission of the documentation of the computer. [0]
Mechanical analog computers for fire control have been around since before WWI, from when the increasing range of big naval guns made any sort of point-and-shoot ineffective.
A lot of interesting material on British systems of that time can be found at the Dreadnought Project:
WASHINGTON, Dec. 1 — The Department of Energy said tonight that approximately three‐quarters of the A‐1 model Polaris nuclear warheads deployed on submarines in the mid‐1960's were probably “duds” because of mechanical defects.
To be fair, the Japanese had really good torpedos at the start of WWII, but there were other things which were just as unproven and wonky. For one, the proposed tactic of letting battleship shells fall short, to target enemy ships underwater, was pretty much useless.
(Come to think of it, the initial performance of Sidewinder missiles in Vietnam was another example of this sort of military equipment failure.)
It doesn't surprise me. I've seen WWII-era torpedoes and their innards at the Science of Museum and Industry in Chicago in the U-505 exhibit (seriously, if you're ever in Chicago to to the museum and pay the extra fee to go aboard U-505. Totally worth it) and there is a lot going on in one of those.
Sadly my photos from last year aren't any better, the cavern that U-505 is in has terrible lighting for photography.
I was quite surprised by the amount of gears, tubes, segments, weights, etc inside one. Even the amount of batteries initially caught me off guard because I'm used to thinking in modern lithium batteries and not lead acid.
If something is complicated, it probably needs more testing. Unfortunately, this was not done well for early US torpedos, mostly due to costs and overconfidence.
The WWII in Color series on Netflix has a Midway episode in which they indicate a 90% failure rate of the torpedoes to explode. The article says 70 percent rate but either way its pretty unreliable.
They talk about it in the movie "Midway" (2019). It's definitely one of those things a lot of people thought was embellished to make the incoming battle of Midway look more drastic. However it was absolutely true. Without the dive bombers and code breaking they were able to do in the lead up Midway would have been a disaster for the Americans.
Ehhh. There's a lot of people that seem to think that Midway would have been a disaster for the US if they lost, but there's not much reason behind this. The only thing the US was really risking that had a significant strategic impact were the carriers - if the island of Midway fell it would have been essentially unsupportable by Japanese forces (being far past Japan's supply lines, when Japan was already facing logistical issues, and within B-17 range of bases in Hawaii) and even the carriers weren't absolutely critical must-not-lose assets for the US like they were for Japan. (The US commissioned 8 carriers in the year following Midway - four Essex class fleet carriers and four Independence class light carriers) Incidentally, this is part of why Midway was such a huge strategic blunder for the Japanese forces - it risked 2/3rds of their carriers for minimal gain.
If Midway fell, it would have extended the war another few months. But I'm not sure that that really qualifies as a disaster.
> Maneuvering as close to a 90-degree track as possible, the submarine fired three torpedoes against the rock cliffs. The first two exploded, but the third threw up the familiar geyser of compressed air and water. Divers carefully retrieved the activated yet unexploded torpedo. The valuable dud was then hauled back to Pearl Harbor for examination.
Damn, for me any person who deals with any kind of unexploded ordnance is (as well) a hero.
Previous HN discussion about a different article (focusing on politics and very superficial concerning the actual problems) about the same subject: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20665422
It’s very likely that the torpedoes did not work for the whole war really. It sometimes is scary to think about all the complaints sub commanders put in, only to be dismissed by the Department of the Navy as excuses for bad leadership or tactics. I get that you have to take this line sometimes but still...
That being said it should be noted US Naval strategy has never particularly relied on subs or been that great at it.
This has always fallen to the Eurasian powers such as Germany, Russia, and China/Japan.
Nothing has been downed by a torpedo in actual combat for the last 75 years, so realize that there are so many unknowns today in submarine warfare that you don’t see in say land warfare. That being said it looks like Underwater Unmanned Autonamous Drones is where sub warfare is heading. Supposedly China is way ahead of the pack here much like they are in the drone space (supposedly again) as well. The 2016 capture of a US Navy UUAV really was not good for the USA and marked a shift in the balance of power.
> It’s very likely that the torpedoes did not work for the whole war really.
The patrol reports of each sub detail pretty well what shots were taken and after the fixes in '42 and early '43, the hit percentages rose dramatically... 1944 and 1945 were very good hunting times for US subs in the Pacific. They sank an amazing number of targets in a very short time.
(Former US submariner and very amateur military historian.)
"That being said it should be noted US Naval strategy has never particularly relied on subs or been that great at it."
In WW2, the US used sub warfare to strangle Japan. It's arguable that this blockade was the most effective tactic pound for pound in the entire war.
And the US has relied upon subs to be the most survivable and effective nuclear deterrent in the Triad.
"This has always fallen to the Eurasian powers such as Germany, Russia, and China/Japan."
China? Seriously? Japan? No. And for all the fear we had of Soviet submarines during the Cold War, they definitely weren't great at it. They simply never had the resources for a blue-water fleet.
Basically nothing you've written is factually correct.
"Did not work for the whole war" is far too string. There were specific fixes to the torpedoes and also to the detonators; they were in place by September 1943. This is well documented.
Now: Did they work perfectly for the rest of the war? No. Nothing ever does. They worked a lot better, though.
Which is why the nuclear test ban is, IMHO, a bad idea. A nuclear deterrent must be credible to be effective. If an adversary comes to believe that, say, 80% of our warheads are duds and most of theirs work, the logic of retaliation may come to favor a first strike.
[+] [-] jandrese|6 years ago|reply
LOL.
Another interesting fact about the US torpedoes is that they were slow by WWII standards, especially compared to the Japanese torpedoes. This is normally a fairly bad flaw because it gives the enemy ship more time to dodge the torpedo, however in the Battle off Samar it turned out to be an advantage as they allowed the torpedoes fired by a tiny destroyer managed to scare the mighty battleship Yamato away from the battle for quite a long time because the torpedoes took so long to arrive that the Yamato was well out of position once they finally missed.
[+] [-] m4rtink|6 years ago|reply
But it also turned them into even bigger explosion hazard than normal torpedoes when the ship caring them is hit. As a result many Japanese ships are documented going down after what would normally be minor hits due to their oxygen torpedoes exploding and causing massive damage.
[+] [-] swiley|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gricardo99|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] segfaultbuserr|6 years ago|reply
I thought the game developers were making it unreasonable. And a few years later, I learned from a history book about the early unreliability of the torpedoes, and realized the torpedoes in the game were an accurate and realistic depiction of its historical performance. Kudos to the game developers.
Another tool in the game I felt strange was the "Torpedo Data Computer", which is something that you can simply enter the bearing, speed, etc., of your target via its tuning dials, and the machine automatically calculates the firing position for you. I thought it was just the hand-waving of the game developers to make the game more playable while making it unrealistic - why would a computer even exist in the 1940s? I believed it was all pencil-and-paper.
Later I learned it was real as well - totally mind-blowing. When I was a kid, I had no idea about the sophisticated historical mechanical fire control computers in the 1930s-1940s. There is a Hacker News submission of the documentation of the computer. [0]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12785113
[+] [-] leoc|6 years ago|reply
A 1943 USAF documentary about ground-based anti-aircraft fire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8zPNMqVi2E
A short YouTube documentary about the failure of the German super-battleship Bismarck's anti-aircraft gunnery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTO3JagV8gE
In fact the Germans had been working quite seriously on guided surface-to-air missiles during WWII: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cx_lsh0BJGs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7Q92V5hK-c
[+] [-] mannykannot|6 years ago|reply
A lot of interesting material on British systems of that time can be found at the Dreadnought Project:
http://www.dreadnoughtproject.org/tfs/index.php/Category:Fir...
http://www.jutland1916.com/tactics-and-technologies-4/range-...
[+] [-] stcredzero|6 years ago|reply
https://www.nytimes.com/1978/12/02/archives/early-polaris-mi...
To be fair, the Japanese had really good torpedos at the start of WWII, but there were other things which were just as unproven and wonky. For one, the proposed tactic of letting battleship shells fall short, to target enemy ships underwater, was pretty much useless.
(Come to think of it, the initial performance of Sidewinder missiles in Vietnam was another example of this sort of military equipment failure.)
[+] [-] Smoosh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m4rtink|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryanmercer|6 years ago|reply
Here's a low-ish quality photo of the innars of a torpedo in the exhibit (not mine) https://www.reddit.com/r/ThingsCutInHalfPorn/comments/1jxk7k...
Specifically in that thread these photos https://imgur.com/a/zNry7
Sadly my photos from last year aren't any better, the cavern that U-505 is in has terrible lighting for photography.
I was quite surprised by the amount of gears, tubes, segments, weights, etc inside one. Even the amount of batteries initially caught me off guard because I'm used to thinking in modern lithium batteries and not lead acid.
I think that is a G7e torpedo above. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G7e_torpedo
[+] [-] csours|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MrZander|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coachtrotz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rocketpastsix|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DuskStar|6 years ago|reply
If Midway fell, it would have extended the war another few months. But I'm not sure that that really qualifies as a disaster.
[+] [-] InTheArena|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zepearl|6 years ago|reply
Damn, for me any person who deals with any kind of unexploded ordnance is (as well) a hero.
[+] [-] brazzy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gadders|6 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destroyermen
[+] [-] rshnotsecure|6 years ago|reply
That being said it should be noted US Naval strategy has never particularly relied on subs or been that great at it.
This has always fallen to the Eurasian powers such as Germany, Russia, and China/Japan.
Nothing has been downed by a torpedo in actual combat for the last 75 years, so realize that there are so many unknowns today in submarine warfare that you don’t see in say land warfare. That being said it looks like Underwater Unmanned Autonamous Drones is where sub warfare is heading. Supposedly China is way ahead of the pack here much like they are in the drone space (supposedly again) as well. The 2016 capture of a US Navy UUAV really was not good for the USA and marked a shift in the balance of power.
[+] [-] zentiggr|6 years ago|reply
The patrol reports of each sub detail pretty well what shots were taken and after the fixes in '42 and early '43, the hit percentages rose dramatically... 1944 and 1945 were very good hunting times for US subs in the Pacific. They sank an amazing number of targets in a very short time.
(Former US submariner and very amateur military historian.)
[+] [-] greedo|6 years ago|reply
In WW2, the US used sub warfare to strangle Japan. It's arguable that this blockade was the most effective tactic pound for pound in the entire war.
And the US has relied upon subs to be the most survivable and effective nuclear deterrent in the Triad.
"This has always fallen to the Eurasian powers such as Germany, Russia, and China/Japan."
China? Seriously? Japan? No. And for all the fear we had of Soviet submarines during the Cold War, they definitely weren't great at it. They simply never had the resources for a blue-water fleet.
Basically nothing you've written is factually correct.
[+] [-] matthewmorgan|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AnimalMuppet|6 years ago|reply
Now: Did they work perfectly for the rest of the war? No. Nothing ever does. They worked a lot better, though.
[+] [-] cameldrv|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wayanon|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] president|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quotemstr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 3fe9a03ccd14ca5|6 years ago|reply
Happens frequently. “The tests are broken but I’m positive the software is correct so I’m going to fix the tests”
[+] [-] VBprogrammer|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Armisael16|6 years ago|reply