U.S. Torpedo Troubles During World War II (1998) | Hacker News Reader

U.S. Torpedo Troubles During World War II (1998)

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132 pointsmmhsieh84 comments

> Because of this logistics fiasco, veteran submariner and historian Paul Schratz said he ‘was only one of many frustrated submariners who thought it a violation of New Mexico scenery to test the A-bomb at Alamagordo when the naval torpedo station was available.’

LOL.

Another interesting fact about the US torpedoes is that they were slow by WWII standards, especially compared to the Japanese torpedoes. This is normally a fairly bad flaw because it gives the enemy ship more time to dodge the torpedo, however in the Battle off Samar it turned out to be an advantage as they allowed the torpedoes fired by a tiny destroyer managed to scare the mighty battleship Yamato away from the battle for quite a long time because the torpedoes took so long to arrive that the Yamato was well out of position once they finally missed.

It's important to note that the torpedoes Japanese generally used we powered by compressed pure oxygen, making them faster & giving them more range.

But it also turned them into even bigger explosion hazard than normal torpedoes when the ship caring them is hit. As a result many Japanese ships are documented going down after what would normally be minor hits due to their oxygen torpedoes exploding and causing massive damage.

I wonder what the breakdown is on overall effectiveness, sometimes you can get some very perverse results. Kamikaze attacks for instance resulted in less pilots killed per damage dealt than traditional attacks even though attacks were 100% fatal, here's a good video breakdown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqwDvxLVZII

Why pure oxygen?

More energy stored in the same volume air tank. With normal air used by conventional torpedoes, you get just 20% oxygen and 80% nitrogen, which is not useful for combustion.

I think I might need to clarify - we are talking about a torpedo that is driven by combustion engine. It carries some sort of fuel and because it is under water, it needs to provide it's own oxidizer, which is where the high pressure pure oxygen comes in.

Also, unlike when using normal air, it should be possible for the combustion engine to be more powerful while being smaller, due to the more energetic reaction. Also the exhaust gasses don't contain nitrogen, which is apparently visible as a noticeable bubble trail, which might result in your target noticing the torpedo and dogging.

For more detail, see the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_93_torpedo

IMO that really is the point of weapons at the end of the day: to scare your enemies into giving up some resource. Any damage caused is only to remind them that they should be scared.

I remember reading a similar side effect of slower technology during the sinking of the Bismark. The British were using older bi-plane torpedo planes, while the Bismark had the latest anti-aircraft, mechanized guns. The swiveling speed of these newer guns was too fast to accurately track to slow bi-planes. This made the Bismark's anti-aircraft less effective.

Another big factor was that the contact-fused shells did not explode, because they felt no "contact" with the super lightweight construction of the Swordfish.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTO3JagV8gE

When I was a child, I played a DOS game called Silent Hunter I. Basically, it's a submarine warfare game which you play as a U.S. Navy submarine in World War II, cursing the Pacific Ocean and attacks Japanese warships. When playing the game, I was extremely frustrated about the Mark XIV torpedo onboard - After going through the painstaking process of calculating the projectile, hitting the fire button, I would watch the stopwatch and hoping for the best that the target won't change its course... finally it was the time... nothing! For every five fires or so, there would be one or two torpedoes that never explode - when you need it the most. I was not playing the "hard" mode, it happens even in a "moderate" difficulty setting.

I thought the game developers were making it unreasonable. And a few years later, I learned from a history book about the early unreliability of the torpedoes, and realized the torpedoes in the game were an accurate and realistic depiction of its historical performance. Kudos to the game developers.

Another tool in the game I felt strange was the "Torpedo Data Computer", which is something that you can simply enter the bearing, speed, etc., of your target via its tuning dials, and the machine automatically calculates the firing position for you. I thought it was just the hand-waving of the game developers to make the game more playable while making it unrealistic - why would a computer even exist in the 1940s? I believed it was all pencil-and-paper.

Later I learned it was real as well - totally mind-blowing. When I was a kid, I had no idea about the sophisticated historical mechanical fire control computers in the 1930s-1940s. There is a Hacker News submission of the documentation of the computer. [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12785113

Here are a few fun videos related to this.

A 1943 USAF documentary about ground-based anti-aircraft fire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8zPNMqVi2E

A short YouTube documentary about the failure of the German super-battleship Bismarck's anti-aircraft gunnery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTO3JagV8gE

In fact the Germans had been working quite seriously on guided surface-to-air missiles during WWII: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cx_lsh0BJGs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7Q92V5hK-c

Mechanical analog computers for fire control have been around since before WWI, from when the increasing range of big naval guns made any sort of point-and-shoot ineffective.

A lot of interesting material on British systems of that time can be found at the Dreadnought Project:

http://www.dreadnoughtproject.org/tfs/index.php/Category:Fir...

http://www.jutland1916.com/tactics-and-technologies-4/range-...

WASHINGTON, Dec. 1 — The Department of Energy said tonight that approximately three‐quarters of the A‐1 model Polaris nuclear warheads deployed on submarines in the mid‐1960's were probably “duds” because of mechanical defects.

https://www.nytimes.com/1978/12/02/archives/early-polaris-mi...

To be fair, the Japanese had really good torpedos at the start of WWII, but there were other things which were just as unproven and wonky. For one, the proposed tactic of letting battleship shells fall short, to target enemy ships underwater, was pretty much useless.

(Come to think of it, the initial performance of Sidewinder missiles in Vietnam was another example of this sort of military equipment failure.)

Another example is when the M16 rifle was first introduced in the Vietnam War, it was unreliable due to fouling.

This was prominently shown in the first Vietkong game, including having to use just 20 round clips when using it to reduce the chance of fouling happening. Quite a nice touch.

I don't think that 20 round magazines were used to reduce fouling and the chance of misfires.

It was just the standard magazine capacity of the time.

That was the Army's fault. They changed the powder from the one specified by Colt and the Air Force. They didn't require the troops to clean their weapons (wtf?), and the Ordnance Corps desperately wanted the M-16 to be a lighter M-14.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1981/06/m-16-a-...

The Ordnance Corps has a lot to answer for.

One of the major issues with early versions of the M16 was that they used a different propellant for the ammunition than what it was designed with. This propellant caused increased fouling.

They were also initially issued without cleaning kits, because they were apparently "self cleaning", which is patent bullshit.

iirc the barrel linings also were not chromed for the first few years, which caused corrosion (half-remembered from chivers' the gun)

To be rather pedantic, the very first AR-15 rifles in the Vietnam theater worked very well. It was after the Army Ordnance Corps removed the chrome lining from the spec and changed the ammo from stick to ball powder that the rifles failed in the field. (the story is more complicated than that)

Skip to 46:30 for summary

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYar4Zf8jH8

The japanese 25 mm AA gun seems to be considered pretty bad as well, at least by western WWII historians.

It doesn't surprise me. I've seen WWII-era torpedoes and their innards at the Science of Museum and Industry in Chicago in the U-505 exhibit (seriously, if you're ever in Chicago to to the museum and pay the extra fee to go aboard U-505. Totally worth it) and there is a lot going on in one of those.

Here's a low-ish quality photo of the innars of a torpedo in the exhibit (not mine) https://www.reddit.com/r/ThingsCutInHalfPorn/comments/1jxk7k...

Specifically in that thread these photos https://imgur.com/a/zNry7

Sadly my photos from last year aren't any better, the cavern that U-505 is in has terrible lighting for photography.

I was quite surprised by the amount of gears, tubes, segments, weights, etc inside one. Even the amount of batteries initially caught me off guard because I'm used to thinking in modern lithium batteries and not lead acid.

I think that is a G7e torpedo above. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G7e_torpedo

Wow, that is incredible. I had no idea they were that complex, or even that big.

The length was a bit hard to accept. Later I started looking into torpedoes and there are some real monsters that have existed, the Japanese Type 93 used in WWII is almost 30 feet long https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_93_torpedo .

The more modern Russian Type 65 is roughly the same size as the Type 93 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_65_torpedo

Russia also has that 'Poseidon' unmanned mini sub that's basically the nuclear powered sub version of a UAV that's something like 65 feet long and is believed to be able to be launched from another sub like a torpedo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status-6_Oceanic_Multipurpose_...

If you're into this stuff and ever in the Seattle area I recommend visiting the Naval Undersea Museum in Keyport. They have a good collection of torpedoes on display, including a Japanese Kaiten manned torpedo.

http://www.navalunderseamuseum.org

If something is complicated, it probably needs more testing. Unfortunately, this was not done well for early US torpedos, mostly due to costs and overconfidence.

The WWII in Color series on Netflix has a Midway episode in which they indicate a 90% failure rate of the torpedoes to explode. The article says 70 percent rate but either way its pretty unreliable.

They talk about it in the movie "Midway" (2019). It's definitely one of those things a lot of people thought was embellished to make the incoming battle of Midway look more drastic. However it was absolutely true. Without the dive bombers and code breaking they were able to do in the lead up Midway would have been a disaster for the Americans.

Ehhh. There's a lot of people that seem to think that Midway would have been a disaster for the US if they lost, but there's not much reason behind this. The only thing the US was really risking that had a significant strategic impact were the carriers - if the island of Midway fell it would have been essentially unsupportable by Japanese forces (being far past Japan's supply lines, when Japan was already facing logistical issues, and within B-17 range of bases in Hawaii) and even the carriers weren't absolutely critical must-not-lose assets for the US like they were for Japan. (The US commissioned 8 carriers in the year following Midway - four Essex class fleet carriers and four Independence class light carriers) Incidentally, this is part of why Midway was such a huge strategic blunder for the Japanese forces - it risked 2/3rds of their carriers for minimal gain.

If Midway fell, it would have extended the war another few months. But I'm not sure that that really qualifies as a disaster.

> The only thing the US was really risking that had a significant strategic impact were the carriers

Yeah, that thing Japan bombed Pearl Harbor over....

They bombed Pearl Harbor knowing that no carriers were docked there at the time. American carriers were not the main objective of the attack. You have to realize carriers were relatively new and not a known commodity like they are today.

And at the same time, carriers were counted as powerful enough to make the opening moves of the war.

I don't think Japan was happy to discover that they'd missed all of the US's carriers. I think I've read that Yamato was furious, in fact.

The strike Pearl Harbor did achieve all of Japan's objectives: it prevented the US Navy from rushing to the Philippines' defense or otherwise thwarting their 1941-1942 conquests in Australasia. The IJN was still planning on having their decisive battle strategy, in which the US Navy would be decisively defeated in a pitched battleship battle, where carriers would not matter because carriers are not effective ships of the line, instead being good for scouting missions or harassing of incoming forces.

Ironically, they still held to this strategy in 1944, and attacked the US Navy in the Battle of Leyte Gulf to force their missing decisive battle, using their carrier fleet entirely as a decoy force. Even after there had been only one battleship action in the entirety of the Pacific war to this point, with all other major naval battles involving only the carriers on one or both sides.

6-12 months of Japanese free reign in the Pacific might've led to conditions in which the US would've pursued a negotiated peace, though.

6-12 years of Japanese total domination in the Pacific would have led to their eventual defeat. Their probability of victory was zero from day one of the war.

I'd say it was zero as soon as they gave the US such a large piece of internal propaganda (the attack on Pearl Harbor). Without that, and without a declaration of war, Japan might have been able to ignore US forces in the Pacific. Getting the US to attack Japan in response to attacks on countries full of lesser peoples would have been a difficult proposition, and the willingness to fight on through the slog that the South Pacific became might not have been there.

But after Pearl Harbor...

The Japanese wouldn’t be able to sustain a US invasion, but they would have conquered Australia and would probably have forced the US out of the Pacific war.

That was the gamble. Success in 1942 meant Japanese domination of the entire Pacific, including areas of the Soviet Union.

Ironically, if Japan had committed all 6 fleet carriers to the South Pacific in early 1942, they might have been able to conquer Australia. Instead they split them - two to the South Pacific, to be damaged in the Battle of the Coral Sea, and then the four remaining operational carriers to Midway. Had all 6 shown up at Midway... Things probably would have gone differently.

The things that show up in hindsight, of course.

I don't know that conquering Australia would have done them much good, though. It would have been hard for them to hang on to it. They might have stood a better chance of they'd concentrated on their original plan to grab oil in the Dutch Easy Indies.

> Success in 1942 meant Japanese domination of the entire Pacific, including areas of the Soviet Union.

Japan and the Soviet Union did not go to war with each other until August 1945.

Sure, because "Success in 1942" didn't happen.

It might've happened if Midway had gone differently.

I'm still dubious. Adding a new theater to the war when your other theaters are already stalling without a decisive victory is generally not a winning measure. The naval victory is only at best a temporary reprieve: the US is going to replace all its lost carriers within a year, and is similarly going to replace all the capital units [1] it lost at Pearl Harbor by that time. The Japanese didn't think themselves capable of mounting an invasion of the USSR before about mid-1943, by which point it was beginning to feel pressure on other fronts, and the IJA would start raiding the Manchurian army groups for manpower to keep from losing on the fronts they were already engaged in.

[1] Again, recall that to Japanese strategic thinking at this time, it's the battleship strength that matters. Carriers are just a sideshow.

They'd had some border skirmishes before WWII even started, with tens of thousands of casualties on each side. The 1941 neutrality pact was a result of a combined Soviet/Mongolian force defeating and removing the Japanese from Mongolia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Japanese_border...

Strategically crucial in a Pacific that had seen most everything the Japan side of Midway fall. If Midway had fallen, New Guinea, Coral Sea and Fiji were next in line, putting Australia and New Zealand at risk. What you call minimal gain would, had Yamamoto's plan come off, have put over 60% of the Pacific under Imperial Japanese control.

US would have been fighting their way across the Pacific, island to island at a range that no longer permitted bombing the mainland of Japan. Which, as seen at the end of the war, was subject to colossal losses.

You're assuming that Japan could have kept Midway resupplied, let alone defended it. From what I understand, that's very questionable.

Midway wasn't keeping Japan contained in the South Pacific - the two were as militarily separated as Midway and the Aleutians. Japan probably could have taken the South Pacific in early 1942, in fact - but instead divided her fleet carriers up piecemeal, available to be defeated in detail.

No it wasn't keeping them contained, but it was an attempt to draw out the US carriers. Had the US lost Midway and Japan not got bogged down in the endless, unwinnable campaign in the Solomons that absorbed endless Japanese resources, Yamamoto's plan may have worked as his stepping stone to Hawaii. Only Midway and they probably couldn't have kept it... Had they got to Hawaii, I'm not sure Japan would have cared much about the atoll.

As it was, with help in the Solomons, Midway turned the war in the Pacific. Least that's how I understand it, though I've certainly read more of the war in Europe. :)

My understanding is that while the US losing her carriers at Midway would have allowed Japan free reign in the South Pacific for a few months, that was already the case for anywhere that all 6 fleet carriers showed up. Nothing the US had - combined, worldwide - could match those 6. Killing the US carriers at Midway was just to turn it from a 6v3 to a 6v0 - instead it ended up 2v2, but so goes war.

Japan invading Hawaii would have caused a famine if they succeeded - it'd be even harder to keep supplied than Midway, but with dozens of times the population.

In my opinion Midway marked the turning point of the war in the Pacific, but that turning point was inevitable as long as the US could credibly say "we're going to commission 6 fleet carriers with a full suite of aircraft over a 12 month period". There's a great video here [0] that illustrates the differences in production over the course of the war. For instance, the US commissioned 17 fleet carriers and 9 light carriers from 1941 on - Japan commissioned 7 and 1, respectively.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ag2x3CS9M

You are right of the unarguability of US manufacturing against Imperial Japan's, but that inevitability still doesn't eliminate the time recapturing territory that had Japanese presence. Their no surrender policy made island recaptures slow, brutal and ugly. Even with carrier provided air superiority.

Had they got to Hawaii, I imagine the experience would have been similar to all Japanese occupied territories -- famine, brutality, extensive forced labour and systemic murder. So long as the troops are fed, and enough comfort women can be found, nothing much else mattered...

The Japanese probably never had the logistical capacity to actually capture Hawaii. Hawaii is a supply chain 4000 miles away, and is not exactly rich in natural or industrial resources that can sustain itself. Getting a major fleet to Hawaii would eat up most of the IJN's support ships, and if someone at Pearl Harbor had the presence of mind to destroy the fuel tanks there before retreating, the IJN would have its fleet stuck there without any means of resupply, which would be easy pickings for the USN to recapture.

You're also assuming that Midway would have fallen. Japanese amphibious doctrine frankly wasn't up to the task of taking a properly fortified Midway.

Granted, Yamamoto himself had no illusions re: a protracted struggle between Japanese industry, vs. American industry of the '30's/'40's era.

Assuming no loss of political will, I suspect even in a worse case scenario where the US lost all its 3 carriers, it would still have eventually produced enough to win the war. Just maybe it would have taken several years longer...

In 1943, the US was commissioning an Essex-class carrier more or less every month, so the extra time would have been closer to "several months longer" instead.

Yeah - the US commissioned 17 fleet carriers, 9 light carriers and a whopping 76 escort carriers over the course of the war. Japan? 7, 1 and 4.

That's roughly my interpretation too -- there's no way Japan could out-manufacture US industry, and the difference in materiel, ship building and aircraft production wins out, even if Midway had been a catastrophic US loss.

I suspect a couple of years longer is much nearer the mark than a few months as the Japanese dug to never surrender, but second guessing history is a no cost game... Who knows what other dominoes would have fallen, and where, in the extra time.

Yeah, the US GDP was 4x Japans at the start of the war and 7x bigger at the end. Japans fate was sealed on Dec 7th, 1941.

But would a Midway disaster have extended the war 2 years? The US would become the worlds only nuclear power in 1945 and start cranking out atomic bombs no matter what happened at Midway.

I think you're ignoring the Soviet Unions contribution to the war. Even if America lost all 3 carriers you'd still have Manchuria and Korea failing to the soviets and the imminent threat of an invasion to the home islands, which even in our time line forced the surrender of Japan. Japan might have had more resources and industry to combat this but they'd still at least lose at roughly the same time on continental Asia.

https://youtu.be/l9ag2x3CS9M

One of the best visualizations I've come across of just how dominant the US industrial base was in the 1940s under full mobilization.

> There's a lot of people that seem to think that Midway would have been a disaster for the US if they lost, but there's not much reason behind this. The only thing the US was really risking that had a significant strategic impact were the carriers - if the island of Midway fell it would have been essentially unsupportable by Japanese forces (being far past Japan's supply lines, when Japan was already facing logistical issues, and within B-17 range of bases in Hawaii) and even the carriers weren't absolutely critical must-not-lose assets for the US like they were for Japan.

The Japanese were well aware of this.

The Battle of Midway was not an attempt by the Japanese to capture Midway but rather to lure the American Pacific Fleet into a trap and to destroy its carriers. Ironically the direct reverse of that happened.

Oh, of course - that's why the Pacific fleet not taking the battle would have left Midway as a minor loss for Japan.

I agree about the material (and materiel, heh) impact, but I wonder about the psychological impact. The US could absolutely outproduce and eventually outfight the Japanese, but how would the populace react to the loss of 3 carriers?

Yeah, it's easy to forget now how demoralized the US was for the first six months or so. Japan was really kicking ass at first.

Midway was surprisingly accurate.

> Maneuvering as close to a 90-degree track as possible, the submarine fired three torpedoes against the rock cliffs. The first two exploded, but the third threw up the familiar geyser of compressed air and water. Divers carefully retrieved the activated yet unexploded torpedo. The valuable dud was then hauled back to Pearl Harbor for examination.

Damn, for me any person who deals with any kind of unexploded ordnance is (as well) a hero.

Previous HN discussion about a different article (focusing on politics and very superficial concerning the actual problems) about the same subject: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20665422

If you're fans of alternative history fiction, the Destroyermen [1] series touches on the torpedo issues as well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destroyermen

It’s very likely that the torpedoes did not work for the whole war really. It sometimes is scary to think about all the complaints sub commanders put in, only to be dismissed by the Department of the Navy as excuses for bad leadership or tactics. I get that you have to take this line sometimes but still...

That being said it should be noted US Naval strategy has never particularly relied on subs or been that great at it.

This has always fallen to the Eurasian powers such as Germany, Russia, and China/Japan.

Nothing has been downed by a torpedo in actual combat for the last 75 years, so realize that there are so many unknowns today in submarine warfare that you don’t see in say land warfare. That being said it looks like Underwater Unmanned Autonamous Drones is where sub warfare is heading. Supposedly China is way ahead of the pack here much like they are in the drone space (supposedly again) as well. The 2016 capture of a US Navy UUAV really was not good for the USA and marked a shift in the balance of power.

Belgrano?

HMS Conqueror sank the Argentine cruiser Belgrano with torpedoes

With a torpedo introduced to service in 1927, though. She avoided using her homing torpedoes (the Mark 24 Tigerfish) due to fears that they were unreliable.

> It’s very likely that the torpedoes did not work for the whole war really.

The patrol reports of each sub detail pretty well what shots were taken and after the fixes in '42 and early '43, the hit percentages rose dramatically... 1944 and 1945 were very good hunting times for US subs in the Pacific. They sank an amazing number of targets in a very short time.

(Former US submariner and very amateur military historian.)

"Did not work for the whole war" is far too string. There were specific fixes to the torpedoes and also to the detonators; they were in place by September 1943. This is well documented.

Now: Did they work perfectly for the rest of the war? No. Nothing ever does. They worked a lot better, though.

As others have said, the Belgrano, but also the Cheonan, and the Khukri have all been sunk by torpedos since WWII.

"That being said it should be noted US Naval strategy has never particularly relied on subs or been that great at it."

In WW2, the US used sub warfare to strangle Japan. It's arguable that this blockade was the most effective tactic pound for pound in the entire war.

And the US has relied upon subs to be the most survivable and effective nuclear deterrent in the Triad.

"This has always fallen to the Eurasian powers such as Germany, Russia, and China/Japan."

China? Seriously? Japan? No. And for all the fear we had of Soviet submarines during the Cold War, they definitely weren't great at it. They simply never had the resources for a blue-water fleet.

Basically nothing you've written is factually correct.

There have been similar concerns about the US nuclear arsenal which are decades old and aging.

Which is why the nuclear test ban is, IMHO, a bad idea. A nuclear deterrent must be credible to be effective. If an adversary comes to believe that, say, 80% of our warheads are duds and most of theirs work, the logic of retaliation may come to favor a first strike.

The logic behind test bans (in conjunction with numerical caps on warheads) is to create uncertainty in the reliability of one's own arsenal to discourage either side from contemplating a first-strike.

I'm not sure about that. What if you're convinced that your brilliant scientists have created working warheads while you think the enemy's dolts haven't been able to keep their arsenal working? What if your enemy thinks the same thing in reverse? I think there's always a temptation to overestimate one's own capability and underestimate the sophistication of others.

> Two completely different devices, each responsible for checking the other, deviated identically for vastly different reasons.

Happens frequently. “The tests are broken but I’m positive the software is correct so I’m going to fix the tests”

That isn’t at all what happened.

That's one reason I hate complexity in tests. Your tests have to be dumb enough that you are 99% sure the code under test is at fault.

By definition, tests have to be more complex than the underlying code. The test have to setup the conditions, execute the action and validate it. Don't confuse complexity with shitty unreliable tests (timing-based tests)

Depends on the type of test. What you guys are talking about are unit tests, and are designed to test individual methods/functions. You write a separate test for each one.

There's other types of testing, integration tests sound like what you are both complaining about. Integration tests test the interaction between components of a system, and are thus far more complex and likely to break as you're developing (which is a huge pain).

However integration tests have their place - just because the function works doesn't mean it's being called from the web client correctly.

But you also have to test the whole system.

For sure. There's dozens of types of tests (although many don't apply to certain use cases). In a healthy system you should be using a lot of them. And they don't stop at deployment, you need to be tracking exceptions (after all, production is the final, and best test environment).

This article has some nice diagrams of the different kinds of tests https://medium.com/@copyconstruct/testing-in-production-the-...

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