Malaya What If
- Thread starter Fatboy Coxy
- Start date
They are Mk XIIIs; if dropped low enough, @75 foot, slow enough @100 mph<, far enough out to level off @500 yards, and lucky enough, contact exploder @50%.
Note that at OTL Coral Sea, VT-2 hit Shoho with 5 torpedoes and VT-3 with somewhere between 2 (IJN accounts) and 10 (USN accounts) more, so it can be done.
On the other hand, the following day, the same squadrons went 0 for 21 against Shokaku, so it's not easy by any means.
Errolwi
Monthly Donor
While there are possibly a handful of US torpedoes available, remember that at Singapore the trained, equipped and ready torpedo strike force is...
If your aircraft is slow and fragile, paint it black and take off to attack during the early morning hours so that you won't run out of fuel until past dawn. You're got nothing to lose...you're dead if you attack during the day...and you might get lucky about spotting the target, get lucky about hitting it, and get lucky about getting back on the carrier.
I'm sure that everyone already knows about this. However, if not, this is an interesting
article from today's Las Vegas Sun. The last survivor of the USS Arizona, Lt. Cdr. Lou Conter
passed today. He was a QM aboard the Arizona. He later earned his Naval Aviator wings
and was a "Black Cat" pilot.
lasvegassun.com
article from today's Las Vegas Sun. The last survivor of the USS Arizona, Lt. Cdr. Lou Conter
passed today. He was a QM aboard the Arizona. He later earned his Naval Aviator wings
and was a "Black Cat" pilot.
Lou Conter, last survivor of USS Arizona from Pearl Harbor attack, dies at 102
Lou Conter, the last living survivor of the USS Arizona battleship that exploded and sank during the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, has died. He was 102. Conter passed away on Monday at his home in Grass Valley, California, following congestive heart failure, his daughter, Louann Daley said...
lasvegassun.com
The US achieved a single air dropped torpedo hit all battle and that was by a PBY against the Transport/occupation fleet
With Lieutenant William L. Richards (chap standing in the below photo) PBY from VP-24 hitting and damaging Japanese oil tanker Akebono Maru on the night of 3-4 June 1942
The issue was the torpedoes themselves. The Mark 13 was a substandard weapon.
Torpedoes should be viewed as the Smart weapons of their day and in the 30s were very complicated and expensive weapons.
A lot of nations when testing due to the complexity and expense have a dedicated testing range and area of water where the weapons could be tested 'and recovered'.
Often the testing regime was conducted under ideal conditions - bit like testing a rifle for infantry use on a nice clean firing range.
The torpedo used was often the same one and would have been reconditioned after each test and provided with a lot of TLC in comparison to those in service and the testing was setup to 'not fail' with little or no consideration to actual combat use.
OTL only the UK, Italy and Japan entered WW2 with robust airdropped torpedoes (and everyone had some issues) and so it proved with the Mk 13 and Mk 14 torpedoes in the first 18 months of the USAs war.
Later in the war the Mk 14 had become very reliable and the MK 13 had transitioned from a weapon that required a very tight drop envelope - very slow and very low and only in certain wave states to one that was massive - literally could be dropped from a relatively very high altitude at much higher speeds.
But it all took time, war experience and a lot effort and money to get to that state.
As of 30 Nov 41:
As of 31 Dec 41:
ONI estimate 5 Dec 41:
Torpedo plane and torpedo issues Dec 41:
A brief History of American Naval weapons. Mk I Mod 0 suspect; Mk I Mod 4 very capable; Mk I Mod 8 outstanding for the next 50 years.
I'm being facetious, of course. Some systems should never go into service. Some seem like duds into and morph into a premiere system.
Did you locate the Asiatic Fleet info at NHHC? Or elsewhere? One of the irritants is that NHHC
begins their tables in Feb 42. I 've hoped to locate 1 DEC 41!
I like the BuOrd and BuAir info. I think that I followed links from a VP site and eventually
Bureau numbers, contracts locations and loss dates a while back.
Aerial torpedo training early in the war didn't explicitly include the fast mental footwork needed to calculate by how much, during the time between your drop (or when you're spotted, if that differs) and when the torpedo and present target paths converge, the target might be able to be at a different location as of that intended convergence time than where you expect them to be; and how short you need to make that time-between-drop-and-convergence (i.e. how close to the intended convergence point, but of course always farther away than the minimum depth-stabilization-and-fuze-arming run distance) so that the target is hit even if they maximally change their course and/or speed.
You also evaluate where you are, and the water depth. All aerial and surface-fired torpedoes usually dived to a considerable depth, then rose to their set depth. That might take multiple hundreds of yards. A torpedo dropped in too-shallow water would hit the bottom and be thrown off course, or damaged, or just stick in the bottom and be lost. A torpedo dropped too close to the target likely would run under it, because it wouldn't have risen to set depth yet.
This illustration shows an attack by a motor torpedo boat, but exactly the same techniques were used by torpedo planes. You estimate the target's speed, you know what your minimum run is (which depends partly on the sea state), you know what run depth and speed your torpedo(es) are set for, and you judge how much defensive fire there is already or is about to begin in regard to how close you can get before releasing your (first, if multiple) fish. Given those parameters and the angle between your attack course and the target's present course, you do a mental calculation of the offset angle that defines your firing point, and you continually measure (or mentally judge, but measurement is more accurate) that angle as you rapidly close on your drop point.
If you have time and knowledge, you identify the target ship and mentally recall its propulsion capabilities and rudder authority, and calculate whether your attack will be defeatable if the captain / helm is maximally aware and the engine room and rudder crews are sharp.
What the target should do upon seeing that a torpedo attack is coming is change its speed and course. Almost all ships slow down much more readily than speed up, so what most ships should do is command their engine room to do an all stop and then emergency astern, plus a rudder command for full rudder to turn toward you (because a turn toward the incoming torpedo is more likely to cause a miss than a turn away).
(The reason why torpedo bombers and MTBs usually didn't try attacking destroyers is because destroyers' tactical radius...their tightest turn...is likely to be shorter than your torpedo's minimum arming and stabilization distance. So, if they were paying attention and not stopped or for some reason at very slow speed, you couldn't possibly hit them because they easily could be nowhere near your intended convergence point.)
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The 31 December 1941 Aircraft list for the Asiatic Fleet is off. The Cavite SOCs under repair were lost, in the Cavite bombing on the 10th the remainder had been moved to Mariveles on Bataan . All Utility aviation assets had moved to Mariveles, or Los Banos on Laguna de Bay by the 17th, which served as a temporary base for PBYs after Subic Bay became unsafe. Only the J2Fs were able to evacuate South with only 2 making it eventually to Australia. By 28 December PatWing 10 had moved to Ambon. My sources are Histories of the Asiatic Fleet and a Biography of a member of PatWing 10 who escaped the P.I..
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RE; the Bu Ord Letter about aerial Torpedoes and Issues with Newport. This is an issue that earlier in his career , when Thomas Hart was Commanding Newport torpedo Station he crossed swords with FDR, then Asst. Secretary of the Navy over his positions with poor quality and slow production at Newport. A problem not solved until early 1943.
I just add on that the USN's Mk 15 torpedo (the standard destroyer torpedo) was also initially very unreliable. As it was developed alongside the Mk 13 and 14 by mostly the same people it had the same problems, though at least one major fault was apparently all it's own.
The older destroyers had small tubes so had to use the old torpedoes, but any newer USN destroyer will be effectively firing blanks out of it's torpedo tubes.