WW1 & WW2 Torpedos - most effective/least effective?

Driftless

Driftless

Donor
Open ended questions:

At the START of WW1 & WW2: who had the most effective torpedos and who had the least effective and why?

My definition for effective is: they had a serviceable range & speed, and exploded when they were supposed to (either on contact or proximity. Also, I'm hoping for evaluation of what the starting point was, as improvements came along at variable intervals.

Was there a significant running performance difference between a countries air launched vs ship launced torpedos?
 

Crowbar Six

I think the Japanese win WW2 with the Long Lance torpedo, they certainly win the prize for the most determined development program.
 
marathag

marathag

Banned
The only countries to start the war with decent air dropped and ship Torpedoes was the Royal Navy, Regia Marina and the IJN. French air dropped torpedoes were tiny, warhead wise, but worked well

Long Lance was nice, but were dangerous, storage wise

USA and Germany both had problems at the start
 
Driftless

Driftless

Donor
Crowbar Six said:
I think the Japanese win WW2 with the Long Lance torpedo, they certainly win the prize for the most determined development program.
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The propulsion unit was innovative (and it worked as intended), correct? Did they also explode when intended, within acceptable levels of expectation?

Who had the worst performance in their respective initial combat experience? I've read that some of the US Navy ship launched torpedos both ran at wrong depths and too often did not explode, even on direct contact. Was their experience unique?
 

Matt Wiser

The Mark-14 submarine torpedo and the Mark-13 air-dropped weapon (USN) were atrocious. It took nearly two years of work, mostly in the field, before the weapons became reliable. Always over the objections of the Navy's Bureau of Ordnance.

The Japanese had the most reliable weapons overall. The Type-91 aerial torpedo, Type 93 (Long Lance) and Type 95 (submarine version of Long Lance) could always be counted on to work.
 

Gudestein

Germany from 1942'ish and onwards. When they solved the pistol and depth set problem they were pretty good and later acoustic homing torpedoes?
 

Riain

Banned
The RN had the of the rest, after the freakish IJN oxygen torpedoes. They had the best warhead, range and reliability of all the conventional torpedoes at the start of ww2.
 

zoomar

Probably the only "problem" with the WW2 Long Lance is not the torpedo itself (it was a superior weapon in all resepcts) but its highly explosive oxygen propulsion and the fact that so many torpedo mounts were on Japanese heavy cruisers where they were very subject to catastropic explosions if hit my shellfire or bombs. This didn't matter so much early in the Pacific War, when the IJN owned the air and night. CAs could launch torpedo salvos at US ships in night actions well before the US thought they might be in torpedo range and score decisive victories before they even received return fire. But later, when the tables were turned with improved USN radar and loss of air Japanese air superiority, many Japanese cruisers were lost or wrecked when loaded torpedo mounts or spares exploded when hit by gunfire or bombs.
 
marathag

marathag

Banned
When one of the first things to do in air attack, is to jettison the weapon overboard, it's too dangerous to have aboard in the first place
 
Shadow Hawk

Shadow Hawk

zoomar said:
Probably the only "problem" with the WW2 Long Lance is not the torpedo itself (it was a superior weapon in all resepcts) but its highly explosive oxygen propulsion and the fact that so many torpedo mounts were on Japanese heavy cruisers where they were very subject to catastropic explosions if hit my shellfire or bombs. This didn't matter so much early in the Pacific War, when the IJN owned the air and night. CAs could launch torpedo salvos at US ships in night actions well before the US thought they might be in torpedo range and score decisive victories before they even received return fire. But later, when the tables were turned with improved USN radar and loss of air Japanese air superiority, many Japanese cruisers were lost or wrecked when loaded torpedo mounts or spares exploded when hit by gunfire or bombs.
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HIJMS Suzuya was sunk when a near miss by a 500lb he bomb cause a sympathetic detonation of one of her long lances. They were deadly, but sensitive.
 

zoomar

marathag said:
When one of the first things to do in air attack, is to jettison the weapon overboard, it's too dangerous to have aboard in the first place
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Probably, and during the design of the Myoko and Takao class CA's, there was substantial sentiment among several of the ships' designers NOT to include torpedos among their armament.

But all torpedos are dangerous in this way, which is one of the reasons the USN removed torps from its CAs well before WW2. In the Long Lance, the IJN had a weapon that was so significantly better than other torps that it was seen as a potential game-changer that was worth the risk. And it probably was. Without the Long Lance, Japan might not have won a single surface engagement in the Solomons and probably lost a bunch of cruisers to gunfire then rather than later losing them to exploding torpedos. All told, it was probably a risk the IJN needed to take.
 

Carl Schwamberger

Everyone had trouble with their prewar magnetic detonator designs. A large part of Japans success is they did not try to use it much in combat in 1941-42. Germany and Britain had better magnetic trigger designs than the US, but still discarded them before 1941 ran out, perhaps earlier. discounting the magnetic triggers Britain probably had submarine torpedos equal or better than Japans (the Long Lance was not used on submarines). I am uncertain about Britains other torpedos.
 
Driftless

Driftless

Donor
Zulufoxtrot said:
Italy had some great successes with its torpedo boats using an 18 inch design. Google fu is failing me in finding specifics on the torpedo itself beyond that however.
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One of my personal favorite POD's: Instead of bartering dried Codfish for Caproni Ca.310's in 1939, as Norway did OTL; they trade the cod for a few surplus Itallian MAS boats. Those boats, with good torpedos may have been very useful on April 9, 1940 - more so than the Caproni bombers....
 

gladiator8085

The Mark-14 submarine torpedo and the Mark-13 air-dropped weapon (USN) were atrocious. It took nearly two years of work, mostly in the field, before the weapons became reliable. Always over the objections of the Navy's Bureau of Ordnance.
Click to expand...

There were numerous cases during the first couple of years of the war when US sub captains saw the torpedoes splash against the sides of Japanese vessels without exploding. IIRC there was even one case of a Japanese sailor whose ship was sunk using the oxygen tank from a unexploded US torpedo as a floatation device.
 

Matt Wiser

The incident described above was at Midway. The sailor involved was from the carrier Kaga.

Clay Blair's book Silent Victory goes into detail about the Mark-14 fiasco. It didn't help matters any having several key sub force commanders (RADM Ralph Christie in Fremantle, RADM Bob English at Pearl Harbor, and CAPT James Fife in Brisbane) all being heavily involved in developing the Mark-14 in the 1930s. It took RADM Charlie Lockwood in Fremantle (Christie's predecessor) to fix the deep-running problem, then when Lockwood went to Pearl Harbor after English died in a plane crash, he deactivated the magnetic exploder, then the U.S.S. Tinosa's experience of shooting 19 fish at a large Japanese tanker (a converted whale factory ship) and only getting two hits for damage (the rest were duds!) that convinced Lockwood that the contact exploder was also faulty. Only when VADM Thomas Kinkaid took over as Com7thFleet in Australia and ordered Christie to deactivate the magnetic exploder did things finally get better. This was November, '43, nearly two years after that Sunday Morning in December.....
 
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