*Following up on my recent brainstorm thread... the US fixes / improves its torpedoes before the beginning of the Pacific War.
[FONT="]Phoenix Beneath The Waves: The Mark 14 Torpedo, Part One[/FONT]
[FONT="]By William D. Baker, Commander, USN[/FONT]
[FONT="]Excerpted from Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute, December, 1981[/FONT]
[FONT="]No weapon of war was more maligned or doubted than the American Mark 14 torpedo during the two years before US entry into World War II. That the torpedo became a reliable, even formidable weapon, which in large measure was responsible for the destruction of the Japanese Empire, would have seemed fanciful, even fantastic, in the dark days of mid-1940.[/FONT]
[FONT="]But like the famed bird of mythology, the Mark 14 rose from its own ashes to become the backbone of the American submarine offensive during the early days of World War II.[/FONT]
[FONT="]The story of the Great US Torpedo Scandal of 1939-1941 is well known to most of our readers. Through financial penury, bureaucratic obstinacy and lack of political will, the US Navy had unwittingly produced a torpedo in the mid-1930s that was almost wholly unsatisfactory. Historians have often surmised that if events had unfolded differently, the Navy's great mistake might have caused many thousands of lives.[/FONT]
[FONT="]Thankfully, the Rhode Island Scandal of 1937-38 changed that.[/FONT]
[FONT="]The impeachment and removal from office of Senator Peter Gerry for influence peddling started a chain of events that blew the lid off years of political patronage and institutionalized incompetence at the Newport Torpedo Station (Wyatt, 1972).[/FONT]
[FONT="]When rumor first reached the White House in the spring of 1939 that all was not well in Newport, President Roosevelt asked for an investigation by the Navy. As Admiral Ernest King had been passed over for promotion to CINCUS or CNO that June, and relegated to the General board, FDR suggested that he head the investigation.[/FONT]
[FONT="]Probably Roosevelt had no idea of the firestorm he would unleash. King, who was as brilliant as he was irascible, quickly tired of the double talk and circled wagons of the Newport cabal. In an extraordinary showdown, he sought and obtained Roosevelt's blessing in widening the investigation to include all aspects of the Station's performance.[/FONT]
[FONT="]What he found was startling.[/FONT]
[FONT="]The Torpedo Station had long fought to maintain it's monopolistic stranglehold on American torpedo production. But King found the Station was wholly unable to produce torpedoes in quantity. Furthermore, much of its emphasis in the 1930s had been given to a new influence Exploder, which had never been thoroughly tested in live fire exercises.[/FONT]
[FONT="]King's initial report in September 1939 raised concern at the White House, and Roosevelt used his own influence to provide funding for a series of tests, to be carried out under combat conditions. King insisted these must be done not at Newport, but in Hawaii, in Pacific waters.[/FONT]
[FONT="]On November 18th, with war in Europe a reality, the first test was held. Two Mark 14s were fired at the hulk of the Gwin, formerly DD-71. With King and much of the opposed torpedo community in attendance, the test proved a disaster. Both torpedoes missed the target, passing harmlessly underneath without exploding. Subsequently, the attacking sub, the Porpoise, fired a Mark 14 with conventional contact exploder, set for a depth of 8 feet. This also passed under the target. Finally, King had Porpoise fire a torpedo set to run at just 3 feet. Finally, the Porpoise achieved a hit - but the torpedo lodged in the Gwin's hull without exploding.[/FONT]
[FONT="]A highly risky disarming and disassembly of the last torpedo revealed that the contact exploder had failed because it was too lightly built. This was soon connected with the increase in speed from 31 to 46 knots associated with the introduction of the Mark 14.[/FONT]
[FONT="]Clearly, a number of problems afflicted the Mark 14: the contact exploder was faulty, the magnetic exploder had not functioned, and the torpedoes appeared to run deeper than they were set for - about ten feet, judging from the lodged torpedo's position.[/FONT]
[FONT="]1939-1940 proved a winter of discontent, as Newport fought a desperate rear guard action, denying that any significant problems existed despite the evidence. But the die had been cast. King received authority to bring selected technical experts in from outside the navy, particularly Westinghouse Corporation.[/FONT]
[FONT="]Even as the contact exploder was improved by the simple expedient of strengthening the guides for the firing pin by making them thicker, using aluminum, more serious problems came into focus.[/FONT]
[FONT="]The first of these was the whole depth keeping apparatus on the Mark 14. It soon became clear that the understanding of hydrodynamic pressures by the designers had been insufficient. More testing, carried out in the waters of Hampton Roads, involved firing torpedoes into nets and recording the actual running depth. In seven trials, the Mark 14 again ran from 9 to 16 feet deeper than its setting. [/FONT]
[FONT="]It was discovered that the problem had gone undetected because Newport had used practice torpedoes with warheads of different weight than the warload. The Mark 14 had been modified with a warhead of heavier weight, but the practice torpedo had not. Also, the placement of the water pressure sensor was problematic.[/FONT]
[FONT="]The last of the major issues was with the secret Mark 6 Influence Exploder. Newport proved most uncooperative in resolving this problem. However King's outside experts soon discovered that Newport's approach was unsatisfactory, and by relying on the shape of the target's magnetic field, fatally flawed.[/FONT]
[FONT="]The direction of the earth's geomagnetic field lines change from pole to equator, becoming more progressively parallel. Thus a system calibrated to work at one latitude would be quite likely to fail at a different one. Further testing, in April 1940, confirmed that the Mark 6 was unreliable outside of waters near New England.[/FONT]
[FONT="]In May 1940, the first prototype Mark 14 with redesigned depth-keeping mechanism was tested at the new Keyport Torpedo Facility, in Washington State. Testing and refinement of the design would last much of the year.[/FONT]
[FONT="]In March 1941, the design was finally approved for production. By now, torpedoes could be manufactured not only at Newport, but also at Alexandria and Keyport, with two more facilities under construction. Initial work consisted largely of rebuilding existing Mark 14s to the Mark 14 mod 3A standard. This would first progress at a rate of just thirty a month, but this rapidly improved. By December 7, 1941, the US Navy had over 800 mod -3As in service.[/FONT]
[FONT="]Meanwhile, a parallel effort was being made with the Navy's Mark 15 destroyer torpedoes, which shared much of the Mark 14's development and flaws. The new Mark 15s began to reach the fleet in October of 1941, but would not equip a majority of the Navy's destroyers until late in 1942.[/FONT]
[FONT="]The Mark 13 air-dropped torpedo was also tested. This torpedo was found to be more reliable than the others, though some improvements were made that led to increased reliability. As information came in from Europe about the war there, some concern began to be evinced about the engagement envelope of the Mark 13, however. In needing to be dropped at very low altitude and very low speed (110 knots at 50 feet), a torpedo attack against a well-defended vessel might prove extremely costly.[/FONT]
[FONT="]Prewar modifications improved the Mark 13's performance as well, enabling it to be dropped from as high as 200 feet and at 190 knots by December of 1941. Occasional tendency to break up or run on the surface was almost entirely remediated. Wartime improvements would go even further: by the beginning of 1943, the figures were 400 feet and 300 knots. By 1944, it was 2,000 feet and 440 knots.[/FONT]
[FONT="]The Mark 6 Influence (Magnetic) Exploder was abandoned by late 1940, thoroughly discredited at last in the eyes of the navy. However, the influence exploder story did not end there. Westinghouse engineers soon conceived a new system, using metal detecting coils, which did not depend on magnetism of the ship's hull. It also was oriented, looking upwards, which was useful for getting under the keel explosions, and avoiding having torpedoes sink their own submarines (which could always submerge in the event of a 'circling' torpedo).[/FONT]
[FONT="]It was, in fact, the same arrangement that the Germans would eventually independently adopt on their late war torpedoes, after their own initial failures with a system more like the Mark 6.[/FONT]
[FONT="]The new exploder was exactingly tested, meeting much skepticism in the submarine community, but by late August of 1941 the Exploder, Mark 7 had satisfied its critics and entered production. The first of these were to equip the new Mark 18 torpedo, but by early 1942, the new Mark 14 mod 4, with additional improvements, began to be provided with the Mark 7 as well.[/FONT]
[FONT="]The results would be lethal for the ships of the Japanese Empire...[/FONT]