In December 1941, American submarine commanders started filing reports saying their torpedoes didn’t work. The Bureau of Ordnance’s response was immediate and consistent: the torpedoes were fine. The problem was the commanders. Several were relieved of command for reporting, accurately, that their weapons were failing. That explanation held for twenty months.
There were three separate defects, none of them discovered through official testing, all of them worked out by the men being blamed for the failures. The depth mechanism ran eleven feet deeper than set because nobody had recalibrated it after increasing the warhead weight, and live-fire testing had been cancelled as too expensive. The magnetic exploder had been developed under such secrecy that the crews whose lives depended on it weren’t permitted to know how it worked. And the contact firing pin was too weak to survive a direct hit at the ideal angle, the better the shot, the more likely it was to be a dud. The weapon had been specifically designed to punish competence.
In 1942, with a torpedo that didn’t work, American submarines fired 1,442 torpedoes and sank 109 ships. In the last two years of the war, with one that did, they sank more than half of all Japanese shipping lost in the entire conflict. The Bureau of Ordnance never formally accepted responsibility for the twenty-one months.
This is the story of a weapon that failed three different ways, the commanders who proved it, and the institution that spent twenty months telling them they were wrong.
Credit to : Forgotten Arsenals