Fire One, Fire Ten: Implications of the Torpedo Scandal of World War II (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Fire One, Fire Ten: Implications of the Torpedo Scandal of World War II (2018)

thestrategybridge.org

53 pointssmacktoward31 comments

One of my favorite piece of WWII trivia is that Albert Einstein actually worked on fixing the Mark 6 exploder of the Mark 14 torpedo.

Back then, Einstein was not employed by the military at all; he was an academic at the Institute for Advanced Study[0] in Princeton. Lt. Stephen Brunauer from the Bureau of Ordnance sent an unsolicited letter to Einstein basically saying: “Hey Einstein, can you help us with our torpedo problem?” and Einstein happily obliged[1]. Their entire correspondence is in the national archives; here’s an example: [2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Advanced_Study

[1] https://mathscinotes.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/torpedoesan...

[2] https://catalog.archives.gov/id/305254

This is a great read.

If you study the Pacific carrier battles carefully, you'll notice that the Americans sank no Japanese carriers with torpedos for 2 years, while the Japanese had great success.

So all of the US torpedo planes and pilots were sent fruitlessly for that period of time. Usually the performance of their obsolete planes was blamed, but that doesn't matter when you're dropping duds.

In later wars, the US repeated similar disasters ...

The F-4 didn't have a gun, early air-air missiles either didn't work or were sensitive to carrier landings and stopped working, the Zuni rocket had electrical issues, the F-14A had the wrong (bomber) engine, carriers were loaded with tons of "expired" bombs to reduce costs which contributed to the USS Forrestal inferno, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_USS_Forrestal_fire

The USA has always taken a while to spool up for war, but has then been unstoppable. It would be nice to break the pattern of early failures though.

The F-14 also was the platform for the Phoenix missile, which the US Navy fired three times in combat, with zero hits.

However, the missile was used to great effect by the Iranians in the Iran-Iraq war.

Part of the reason the US only got to fire it 3 times was probably just how effective it was in Iranian hands. Because when Iraqi MiGs detected the radar of the F-14, they always immediately fled. The Iranians still field the old missiles in active service, and have recently publicized that they are manufacturing a domestically produced clone of it, called the Fakour-90.

>Part of the reason the US only got to fire it 3 times was probably just how effective it was in Iranian hands

Not to mention that the Navy generally preferred not to fly the tomcat if there was anything else that was available to do the job (for good reasons) so that greatly limited the AIM-54's exposure to potential targets. It's a good missile but it's fundamentally old technology and fielding it is resource intensive compared to newer tech. It's also heavy, no reason to strap that thing to your plane unless you expect to need to blow a bomber out of the sky or you're gonna be going up against someone with similar long range capability.

The Iranians made heavy use of it because they had no better options and they clearly like it enough that they built a clone (probably modernized with digital electronics and a more modern warhead) to replace it.

The Phoenix missile was designed primarily to counter massed formations of Tu-16 and Tu-22 bombers before said bombers could get within missile range of the carrier group. It obviously never got the chance to do that.

I seem to remember that the F-14 had an optic system for the same purpose.

A good companion to this story is that of the Tang, which benefited from more reliable torpedoes later in the war and racked up an extremely impressive kill record.

Unfortunately, while the improved torpedoes were great at exploding, they still had some guidance-system issues:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Tang_(SS-306)

    Nine survivors, including (Capt.) O'Kane, 
    were picked up the next morning by 
    Japanese frigate CD-34. Survivors 
    of Tang's previous sinkings were on board, 
    and they beat the men from Tang. O'Kane 
    stated, "When we realized that our clubbing 
    and kickings were being administered by 
    the burned, mutilated survivors of our 
    handiwork, we found we could take it 
    with less prejudice."

Wow, what word smithing. Goosebumps.

Regression test: “torpedo explodes when it hits stuff” feels like the constructor test that everyone writes and never expects to fail.

> The Mark 14 torpedo cost more than $10,000 in an era when a new car cost $700.

It was too expensive for live testing.

Seems to me, if you put a dummy warhead in it of the correct weight you could test it over and over again until the mechanisms worked correctly.

It's not necessary to actually blow up a ship in testing, just that the torpedo hit where it was aimed, and the firing mechanism fired.

They did use dummy warheads and that was part of the problem. The dummies didn't match the weight of live warheads exactly.

Getting the weight wrong doesn't seem to be an expense issue.

As compared to a Battleship or A Carrier

It wasn't just cost. The USN considered the magnetic influence detonator to be such a potential difference-maker that it didn't want potential adversaries to know it even existed. That feature was not adequately tested because the USN felt testing would reveal it.

Yet somehow the Japanese tested the far superior "Long Lance".

I think the Germans and the Americans both looked at the question "How do you get a torpedo to sink a boat when they put armor on the sides where the torpedo will strike?" and came up with answer: Have it explode under the boat not on the side.

The Japanese just said - have a larger warhead. The problem for them was that you then need a more powerful motor to drive that larger warhead but they didn't screw that up.

The odd thing is that the Germans and Americans (but not the Japanese) mainly used submarines to sink lightly armored commerce ships not heavily armored warships.

You don't really want to "hit" anything directly. You want the torpedo to pass and explode underneath the target.

> The design for the Mark 6 exploder used in the Mark 14 torpedo had started at the Naval Torpedo Station (NTS), Newport, in 1922. Ship's armor was improving with innovations such as torpedo belts and torpedo blisters (bulges). To circumvent these measures, torpedoes needed larger warheads or new technology. One option would use a fairly small warhead but was intended to explode beneath the keel where there was no armor. This technology required the sophisticated new Mark 6 magnetic influence exploder, which was similar to the British Duplex and German models, all inspired by German magnetic mines of World War I. The Mark 14 shared this exploder with the concurrently-designed surface ship Mark 15 torpedo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_14_torpedo

> This is a great read.

It is not. I found it maddeningly superficial.

It talks about "crippling flaws in all three control mechanisms." but fails to provide any information whatsoever about what those flaws were and what effects they had.

The story about how the flaws were isolated and fixed is confined to a single sentence.

It is completely unclear how "Lesson 1: Indecision can thicken the fog of war" has anything at all to do with the faulty torpedoes. Why and how did "operational consequences of this startling strategic decision masked the true nature of the torpedo problem"?

The wikipedia article cites three problems: wrong depth setting (caused by the test warheads being lighter than the real ones); over-sensitive magnetic detonators and under-sensitive contact detonators.

It also cites inadequate testing because the torpedoes were too expensive.

The article posted cites them and doesn't even discuss them. Furthermore it doesn't even go into any deep discussion as to why the navy couldn't figure it out. It's just hand waving about money and organizational politics. There is no depth or breadth of subject matter in this article. I think that makes "maddeningly superficial" an accurate description.

Edit: If you're going to edit your comment to change the subject of your comment from "it" (referring to the posted article the GP is talking about) to "the Wikipedia article" thereby totally changing what you are discussing do us all a favor and mention it.

It's not a technical article about torpedo design. From that perspective, it is superficial but that's not what it's about. You can easily research the torpedo design if you want.

The article is actually about the organizational and strategic failures that led to and exacerbated the problem. From that perspective, it has plenty to offer.

Even from that perspective, it has very little to offer because it completely fails to explain how those "organizational and strategic failures" actually had anything to do with the torpedoes.

I had a chuckle while reading this: Switzerland is currently starting an evaluation of a new ground-to-air missile defense system.

The Swiss military decided that due to the enormous cost of the missiles, the evaluation will not include a firing test, but rely on a big questionnaire for the manufacturers of said system.

If you're buying a weapons system for deterrence then it doesn't actually have to work reliably. It just has to present a credible appearance of possibly working some of the time in order to complicate an adversary's plans.

Plus, it’s Switzerland. They’re surrounded by friendly NATO countries. Their Air Force has office hours and relies on France/Italy outside them.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2014/feb/19/swis...

For a worse screw-up read about the bureaucratic slug fights around the M14 rifle (the shortest-serving US standard issue rifle), and the M16 (substandard ammo, etc) in Vietnam that needlessly cost American lives. There are good reasons the Springfield Armory was closed down by McNamara in '68.

In such stories there’s always a group or person that remains in denial long enough to frustrate the overall objective.

I see it in tech when developers often try to tell me there’s no problem until weeks later admitting there is one.

Why not spend the time investigating instead of denying?

The USS Barb's story is amazing. It is detailed in the book Thunder Below! The USS Barb Revolutionizes Submarine Warfare in World War II by Eugene B. Fluckey who was the commanding officer for 5 deployments. Another good book is Sink ‘Em All Submarine Warfare in the Pacific by Vice Admiral Charles A. Lockwood who was the US Navy commander of the Pacific submarine fleet during World War II.

Both discuss the torpedo problem and are available as Audiobooks. Fluckey says in his book that they installed stiffer springs in all torpedoes before sailing on his first deployment as Barb's captain.

> As a result, the Bureau of Ordnance developed highly artificial testing procedures that were designed, in part, to safeguard their practice torpedoes so they could be used for multiple tests.

Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon_Wars

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