Matt Wiser said:
Both unavailable for Midway-with well-known consequences.
Fact is, their presence made little difference. Could they've cost Fletcher another CV? Maybe. Would they've prevented Fletcher from hammering Nagumo? No. Fletcher had PBYs & good intel, so he knew Nagumo was coming; Yamamoto's dispositions were criminal.
Dathi THorfinnsson said:
?...may simply mean that they didn't name it Wildcat until then
I take that to mean they didn't accept the -3 for service til Oct '41.
Matt Wiser said:
most of the subs are American. With those wretched Mark-14 torpedoes.
A fair number from the Asiatic Fleet, which would be the main striking force, were Sugar boats with Mark Xs, which worked just fine.

A fair number (IDK how many...) were Brit, Oz, & Dutch, which had torpedoes with perfectly good contact exploders, at least...
Most of the OTL failure was in poor deployments & less than competent leadership. Not, at this time, due to Fife being a nitwit; that was later.
You do know the history of that fiasco, don't you? BuOrd (the USN's Bureau of Ordnance) blamed the sub skippers. The Skippers blamed BuOrd for saddling them with a weapon nearly useless. The fixes that were made were well after the NEI campaign ended (running too deep, crappy magnetic exploder, poorly designed contact exploder).....It took no less than Admiral King himself to light a fire under BuOrd's rear end to get them to admit the weapon was faulty: all fixes were ID'd and made in the field, it should be pointed out. Having several guys who worked on the Mark-14 be in senior leadership positions in the sub force didn't help any-not to mention their stubborn refusal to listen to their skippers, being reluctant to admit their work may have been faulty.
All true.


To be clear, tho, it's not all the fault of the Mk 14. It ran deep, & BuOrd didn't know it, but it was easily & readily fixed. The real problem was in the Mk 6 exploder. The magnetic feature didn't work for shat,

& the contact pistol was too delicate, too.


These problems weren't corrected until Sept '43,


over the active resistance of BuOrd all the way along,

including at least one case of an "inspector" who actually tampered with a torpedo so it wouldn't have run correctly.


(Recorded in Blair for those who can't imagine it.

) Christie, who was project officer on the Mk 6, was SWPA's senior sub officer (ComSubSoWesPac).
IMO, Christie deserved court martial, both for design of the Mk 6 & for refusing to believe his skippers. English, too, for refusing to believe. I call that dereliction. Jimmy Fife deserved a bullet in the back of the head.

His screwing about with subs got at least two sunk.

And IDK who to blame for basing in Oz in the first place, Nimitz or King; it was
stupid.

It probably lengthened the war 6mo or a year.
