The Mark 14 Torpedo - Failure is Like Onions

Ah yes, the Mark 14

torpedo

. So many questions: who invented the Mark 14? What was the Mark 14? Why was it the Mark 14? Well, the origins of the Mark 14 for reading are actually relatively unre

mark

able. The US Navy had a perfectly serviceable

torpedo

in the shape of the Mark 10, dating back to World War I, but this weapon had a number of deficiencies in the early 1930s. Its nearly quarter-length warhead of ton was substantial, but newer capital ships had been designed to withstand worse. Its effective range and speed are now also better described. as uncomfortably close and pedestrian with a number of destroyers in many navies apparently entering service with top speeds that were entirely faster than the 10

mark

, meaning that a simple turn and run a few thousand yards would be a 100% guaranteed escape. .

Since these vessels and some cruisers were not much slower, the introduction of the new larger fleet submarines meant that, while the 21-inch diameter would be maintained, the torpedo tubes could be lengthened to accommodate a longer torpedo which would later It would have more fuel and a greater carrying capacity. Explosive design work would begin in 1931 and would eventually produce a weapon capable of traveling almost three times as far as the Mark 10 when going at similar speeds or about a thousand yards further than the older weapon at substantially higher speeds. Other work was being done to try to improve the speed at which the torpedo would actually level off at its design cruise depth, as well as additional work to ensure the gyroscope, which was a key part of keeping the torpedo operational. in a straight line remained powered throughout its voyage, while several ships in World War I had been sunk or sent packing by a single torpedo hit due to relatively or, in some cases, completely absent underwater involvement, now Neera's ships had a large number of torpedoes.

Defense systems and even older ships were being retrofitted with bulges, which in turn meant that torpedoes had to evolve. Of course, more boom could be included, which was always nice, but the gun itself had size restrictions even on newer subs, so I could give it a try. the new technique that had been derived from observations of underwater explosions in the First World War, especially those of the so-called German magnetic mines, which had been confirmed in subsequent tests in the early 1920s and which was to perform a detonation beneath The keel while this a fundamental part of modern torpedo design in the interwar period was new and also faced a rather considerable problem: all torpedoes at that time had used contact with detonators. a torpedo that slid deeper under the target's keel would of course hit nothing, so how would one activate in the right place? physical contact but rather the change in the magnetic field created by the ferrous metals that made up the hull and major internal systems of modern warships when the weapon passed through this magnetic disturbance would activate the detonator seemed like a perfect solution and other navies of In fact they were working on similar devices, the Germans had started the trend with the aforementioned mine, but the British were also working on a similar detonator.

It was at that point, however, that problems began to develop. Work on Mark 6 was paradoxically considered an absolutely secret technology. Although it was inspired by what at the time was a decade-old technology that had been used by another nation, this paranoia reached the point that once the manual was written describing how the new detonator worked, They kept it under lock and key. a safe where no one who could actually use the thing in service could access it, presumably in a basement behind a sign that said: beware of the leopard, more problems would arise during tests carried out by each nation on their own target devices magnetic. rich areas of the ocean they have access to, surprisingly, and this meant that the sensitivity of the detonator and the relative change in the magnetic field induced by the ship's hull was relevant only to that and some similar areas of the world. which was something that would come back to haunt all navies that attempted to use this technology in the early part of World War II.

This was because the Earth's magnetic field is not constant across the planet, it varies depending on location, especially depending on latitude. but the local geological composition and sometimes even the time of year can also affect the strength of this field, so it could result in a torpedo configured in one location but fired live in another location not working at all since a weaker magnetic field would not activate the detonator or it would explode too soon, as a stronger field would trigger the detonators almost the moment they were active. The first problem would largely affect the Germans and the second would largely affect the British until alternative solutions were established during World War II, but as this was not the case. however, it was a known factor and the US Navy happily gathered information based on testing conducted in the equatorial regions of the world and would develop the sensitivities of the Mark Six detonator based on this data.

Once these research tests were done, the new Mark 14 torpedo promised to be a deadly new addition to the US Navy's arsenal. With the first production torpedoes in use, all that was left was some complete testing. with live fire to determine that all the various systems that had been launched together were functioning as expected in synchronization with each other. but here came to the fore the determination of Congress to strangle the US Navy out of every loose penny and penny, as well as the somewhat disjointed relationship between various development boards, all of which were apparently working for the same target that the Navy itself offered an old destroyer that was intended for scrap as a target, but they did not want the additional expense of having to refloat it and the loss of value of the scrap that would be involved in blowing up large parts, so they insisted that the Ordnance Office will pay this cost. who were involved in testing what they saw as the Bureau of Ordinance torpedo, a board refused to pay, so the life tests were never performed, there was also the cost of the weapon itself, $10,000 per torpedo in money from the 1930s each.

The weapon cost almost as much as a then-new F2F fighter and once delivered, the USN was somewhat reluctant to ruin such an investment unless absolutely necessary, so it was ordered that any tests that might be conducted in the future would not use it. installed not a live warhead, but a dummy warhead made of balance weights simply to ensure that the torpedo remained balanced in its stroke and did not act like a gigantic exploding porpoise. Added to this, there were problems related to getting enough torpedoes for the fleet in the first place, while they were ammunition, a torpedo is much more complex and took much longer to build than a projectile for a naval weapon, even a battleship projectile, torpedoes.

Remember that they are effectively small self-guided kamikaze submarines, unless you have a large factory. and an extensive production line in place, will only see a few handfuls produced each year after experiencing serious problems in World War I, having received over the course of the entire war only enough torpedoes for a couple of major engagements and the US Navy. The US had invested heavily in expanding torpedo production, especially in anticipation of the large number of torpedoes the Clemson swarm and its leaders, the Omaha-class cruisers, would need, but the Washington Naval Treaty had seen most of that particular fleet sent into reserve, all to the scrapyard, as well as the generals.

Funding virtually collapsed and thus several million dollars of investment in torpedo production disappeared almost as quickly as the factory was built. All of this meant that in the 1930s there was precisely one factory capable of designing, building and testing torpedoes, which also meant that no one could verify the Mark 14's claimed performance despite the fairly obvious bias the manufacturer would have in to report, meaning that of course everything was absolutely perfect. The small budgets available also meant small orders, which would mean fewer machines and fewer workers and so, even as the US Navy began to accelerate the pace of construction as the 1930s progressed and began ordering more and more torpedoes and the bewildered factory found itself struggling to keep up with growing demand and expand at the same time.

With orders arriving for submarine torpedoes, destroyer torpedoes, aerial torpedoes, and torpedoes suitable for PT boats, a fairly large backlog began to build up, with torpedo production averaging just over half a dozen types combined each week, and even in the late 1930s when the factory had reached its peak. expansion limits was opening up a backlog of hundreds and then thousands of torpedoes and this in turn left the US Navy even more hesitant than ever about the risk of losing even one of the precious stocks of Mark 14s in any type of test with real fire. Emergency measures were taken to prevent it.

By the end of the decade, the former factory that the US Navy had briefly run during and shortly after World War I and which had been closed was reopened after some pretty clever political maneuvering by the US Navy. the US, as the first attempt to do so was blocked by politicians who were more concerned with their re-election than the national interest and who were therefore determined to maintain torpedo production in their particular state. In the end, the opening of the factory managed to raise production levels to no less than three torpedoes per day against an American government.

The Navy's target of 50 units per day as Europe plunged into war more money was unlocked and 24/7 production was unlocked, but the production rate would still remain at less than half the target rate. In desperation, the US Navy began subcontracting to several other companies, including the automobile manufacturer Pontiac. the American can company that really missed a trick building frigates, as well as a combine manufacturer and a series of other companies with increasingly implausible titles, Edge Ames; well, weapons of war, then of course war came to American soil in the form of Kido butas. An early morning wake-up call to Pearl Harbor and, rather inconsiderately, managing to blow up over 200 of the carefully managed brand for teenagers in the process, all this meant that as American submarines emerged from various ports towards their first major battle. which was to save or at least stop the imperial Japanese assault on the Philippines and they were using a weapon that had never actually been tested with live fire, something that they had very valuable to you in the first place and for which the instruction manual of the Most The sensitive and technically advanced part of the device was slowly being collected in a safe on the other side of the Pacific, but with an all-out assault by the Japanese underway, shortage or not, US Navy submariners The US was going to fire its torpedoes at any target.

They were able to discover that this was basically the first real firing cycle for the Mark 14 when problems began to appear within weeks of the start of operations. Reports started coming in and they were not good and torpedoes were being fired, but the ships were quite inconvenient. Floating torpedoes had been observed sailing beneath ships without exploding, other times they exploded too soon, and others crashed headlong into their targets with the crash of more than a ton of metal hitting a ship. The speed of the highway echoed across the ocean and back to The hydrophone operators aboard the U.S. submarines, but few, if any, were actually doing their job of exploding on the target, more worryingly, a number of submarines were simply disappearing without any sign or report of engagement either from them or the enemy, as It turned out that the Mark 14 had more than one problem, but they were stacking on top of each other, which initially masked the extent of the problem.

Furthermore, the ordnance office steadfastly refused to accept growing criticism and growing anger from the U.S. Submarine captains insisted that their wonder weaponIt was absolutely perfect and that, in fact, it was the fault of the submariners, they were simply incompetent, they were amazed and said that they were not using the torpedo correctly. They also reiterated that no, there would be no proof, especially now that the torpedoes were expending faster than they could be produced, this was despite the fact that the captains of both the USS Sargo and the USS Seadragon, stuttering, even went so far as to break radio silence in the middle of an operation after having fired dozens of torpedoes in textbook attacks only to watch the Imperial Japanese Navy warships and transports they were targeting sail serenely into the sunset with barely a scratch of paint on their hulls to demonstrate that the first suspect was not actually the Mark 6 detonator but rather the depth adjustment of the Mark fourteen torpedo although the field repairs had still yielded little in terms of results these weapons that had been repaired by the crews aboard the submarines at least scraping the paint off the targets instead of moving far below annoying the local fisheries artillery office their first reaction when they found out The main thing about this was to recommend disciplinary measures against any officer of the The US Navy having made modifications apparently due to improper maintenance of Mark 14, which made you agree to insist was absolutely fine, meanwhile, in the real world, the newly promoted Rear Admiral Lockwood had taken over. command of us submarine efforts in the most active part of the Pacific campaign, with the summer of 1942 approaching, his forces had fired more than a year's worth of teenage brand production in about six months and had very little to show for it, he decided. whether the awards were declared or not.

I was going to run some tests and get to the bottom of this USS ship. Jack was cornered for the task and a torpedo with a dummy warhead was obediently fired at a torpedo net placed at a depth of 10 feet with the idea that the torpedo would make a hole in the net as it passed, showing where it was really running. the torpedo while winding the net in 10 feet, they showed no hole, then came 15 feet and then 20 feet, finally after 25 feet of net had reached a hole. It was revealed that at that depth only a heavily laden battleship would have been hit and even then a lucky swell could well carry anything but the Yamato away from such a torpedo.

Additional testing the next day showed similar results with the average difference between the depth The position of the torpedo and the actual depth it traveled being around 11 feet on board was absolutely furious that her instructions not to test the torpedo had been ignored, but Unfortunately for them and fortunately for the U.S. submariners, news of the tests also reached Admiral King who was chief of naval operations at the time and yes, that Admiral King and if there is anything King hated more than the enemies of the US Navy or the British, which in his opinion were sometimes synonymous.

These were people who let their sailors down within weeks of testing, shortly after a series of visits and letters from Admiral King B. Ward's tone suddenly changed, now admitting that yes, in fact, the torpedo was coming deep and soon after you imagine Admiral King standing behind the officer and twisting his arm a little more and they admitted that no, they had not actually done any proper design or testing of the depth-keeping device. The reasons for this

failure

were multiple, but mainly related to the few tests that had been carried out before. On these, a dummy warhead was fitted as described above, but this warhead was deliberately lighter than the real one, this was so that the torpedo would float to the surface once it ran out of fuel and could therefore be easily recovered. .

This in turn meant that to run to the desired depth the torpedo had to correct considerably further down than it would have had to do if the actually heavier warhead had been on board, thus with the heavier explosive in its First, the torpedo would force itself deeper than desired. Compounded by a number of other factors, the warhead size had increased slightly since the Mark 14 was first put into service, making it even heavier and thus dragging it down even further. Additionally, the device is used to measure the depth of a test torpedo. on the ground and the recorder built into the weapon had errors in its design that led to an artificially shallow result being recorded.

The onboard depth sensor feeding the control fins was also compromised by its position before such pressure measuring devices had been mounted along the body of a torpedo, but the fourteenth mark was installed on the tail in cone-shaped, in this area where the water flowed around the torpedo and was also close to the propeller, the local water pressure was somewhat lower than the average for the given depth, therefore Since by giving the control device depth a falsely superficial reading, the door fart went even deeper. The latter was an especially wonderful thing since this problem would only appear when the torpedo was actually moving if you simply placed a gun on a tank at a certain time.

Depth of course would give the correct reading as the water around it was relatively static, only a live fire test with a fast moving torpedo would generate the low pressure bubble and therefore indicate the real problem to some extent. measure, although it may have been due to all the other errors in the recording device even with this problem now identified in some American submarines, the captain simply marked the depth setting practically nothing, the torpedoes would now at least reach a depth at which they should reach The permanent solution that moved the depth sensor port back to the center of the torpedo body could be implemented on newly built weapons.

As the summer of 1942 arrived, mark 14 now had at least approximately the depth correct, however, more and more reports arrived. of weapons that simply crashed into a target without exploding or exploded very briefly, something that had previously been present in small quantities but would now explain the majority of

failure

s. The Imperial Japanese kept irritatingly afloat and most successes to date are attributed to the Dutch flotilla with occasional input from the few British and other Allied Imperial submarines that were still in the operational area over the next few months, the lucky Americans launched multiple attacks against the Japanese aircraft carriers. submarines with over a dozen torpedoes that had the potential to sink several aircraft carriers and ended up simply detonating in open water along with several others that would hit but not explode and a couple that by some miracle actually did their job and damaged their targets as they went.

In that particular case, it was the aircraft carrier Geo, but the ship survived, as other torpedoes in the salvo, which would likely have finished off, failed completely once again. The initial belief behind the lines was that although there was no problem, sir, the super secret magnetic detonator. It must be working perfectly after all, we invented it, but this was not the case, the magnetic field near the area where the initial development tests had been carried out was somewhat weaker than the magnetic field in the area where the devices were actually being used. torpedoes, so what was happening?

Now, with this much stronger magnetic field, the torpedoes were detonating when they detected a disturbance in line with their calibration, except this disturbance occurred long before the target and with the stronger fields activating the detonator too early when they were working, the torpedo would simply spray the target ship with seawater, making the torpedo go a little deeper would theoretically allow it to get closer as the overall field strength of the ship would decrease with depth, but no one was going to set a mark 14 to return to delve deeper for a while. After earlier incidents in the war, a year and a half into the conflict and with little to show for their efforts, United States Submariners, we are deactivating the detonators on our own against orders, and Bureau experts are leaving and they issue reports that once again blame the crews for not using their weapons correctly and even though these same experts make constant mistakes when setting up the torpedoes they were supposed to. know everything to the point that the submarine crews had to correct the experts' work to prevent the subsequent launch from finally causing something to sink, specifically the Submariner that had just launched at Mach 14, this despite the fact that in premature explosions had actually occurred.

It had been a known problem on board for about three years at this point, but of course they couldn't be seen losing face. Finally, almost two years into the war, reality began to sink in once again and orders leaked out to across the fleet to deactivate mark six. Magnetic explosion with a final resistance reaction. Christie was eventually overruled by higher-ranking officers. The reason for Christie's refusal. Well, he had been on the team that had helped develop the Mark Six and would previously believe that his entire command was the American submarine based in Australia. units was full of outright qualification competence rather than admitting that somehow he might have made a mistake two decades earlier and thus, with the primary detonator deactivated and the depth control problem on its way to being solved, the problem In fact, several torpedoes were now hitting their targets, but they did not detonate at all.

This made little sense at first because, well, the Mark 14 had a backup contact detonator. Surely this system couldn't be malfunctioning. That question could be answered in the extreme. detailed and with lots of colorful language by the crew of the USS tin OSA who had encountered a Japanese whaling ship and unleashed no less than 15 torpedoes on it, scoring 13 hits enough to put any ship on the bottom of the ocean let alone Instead, a relatively small 19,000-ton civilian whaling ship, which had only one torpedo left to its name, the crew simply heard one clang after another, following a crash, as the rags made small holes in their prey.

The last weapon on board was taken back to port, where the board obediently reported that, of course, there was absolutely nothing wrong, however, the US Navy officers were becoming less and less intimidated by the bluster of the boards of directors and soon after further tests were carried out at Pearl Harbor that involved firing torpedoes at nearby cliffs and dropping torpedo warheads from a gantry to the ground with only the contact detonator enabled and no warhead, obviously what they found was that in almost three quarters of the cases the impact hits perpendicular to the target, the ideal angle that their sub commanders were trying to aim at did not explode, however, they also found that an angled impacts tended to work with a little more frequently, so immediate orders were issued to go against pre-war training and attempt to aim torpedoes to attack targets at an angle.

This saw some improvements right away, but crashes were still a major issue and back to earth. The investigation continued and what they found was that the contact detonator was a descendant of an older unit that had shown similar problems but at a somewhat lower level and this was because, while you would imagine that a detonator pin would have to be aligned with the torpedo's direction of travel in the case of this particular lineage of contact detonators, the board in its infinite wisdom had decided to align the pin at 90 degrees to the torpedo's line of travel so that when the torpedo impacted against a target, the deceleration would force the passer to one side. against its mounting, friction slowed it down or prevented it from fully activating until the deceleration ended.

Unfortunately, the end of the deceleration usually corresponds to the entire mechanism being destroyed by the torpedo head crashing headlong into the ship's hull. The angled approach had some success due to impact. extended over a slightly longer period and the direction of travel was now slightly closer to the line of travel of the firing pins, which reduced the level of friction on the mount and gave a slightly higher probability that the device actually worked, although this had been a problem. As mentioned above in Torpedo Thirtyolder, not dial ten, the Ordnance Bureau had simply assumed that by using the same slightly stronger mounting spring that they eventually used to solve the problem on the older gun, the detonator would work absolutely fine at a much higher velocity. impact speed of forty-six points that the mark fourteen was capable of when fired at close range, the idea was that with a more powerful spring the pin would travel and detonate before deceleration could pin it against the side of its mount, It goes without saying and quite surprisingly.

They were wrong and needless to say, if they had done some real testing before the war, this problem, along with all the others, would have been solved as well. The Pearl Harbor machinists devised a short-term solution by replacing the firing pin and other related parts with copies that were made of aluminum, the lighter parts having less inertia and therefore somewhat less resistance to the lateral movement of the springs, Even as they were experiencing high-speed deceleration in newly built weapons, the order would reluctantly adopt an electric detonator activated with a simple ball switch, but the winter of 1943 was already approaching, almost two years into the war. and the Mark 14 was finally working primarily with several thousand torpedoes and dozens of missed targets.

Later, there was still a problem of defective gyros. sometimes sending the torpedo spiraling towards the ships that had launched them and this appears to have been responsible for at least two American missile losses. submarines, as well as a number of pretty nasty close calls and scares, but to be fair, this was an issue that played into more than just Mark 14 and would, in fact, appear on occasion in many other navies during the war and so Therefore, while this particular failure was especially surely deadly and even more so once the Mark 14 actually began to explode, it was not a particular failure of the Mark 14, now surprisingly once a torpedo traveled to something resembling the correct depth with a detonator that actually worked with the number of vessels that were sent. by us Submarines suddenly began to rise helped by the introduction of the torpedo in 1942, a new form of explosive that was called torpex rather ingeniously because it was the torpedo explosive that gave the torpedo a hit about 50% greater than the one that had possessed its original TNT warhead.

In fact, these Mark 4 fixed teenagers would become the largest warship ever sunk by a submarine when the USS Archerfish sent the aircraft carrier Shinano to the bottom later in the war. These arrangements would also extend to other weapons, the Mark 13 aerial torpedo, the Mark 15 aboard the US. Destroyers and the Mark 18 aboard PT boats would benefit to varying degrees from these solutions that had been arrived at with the Mark 14, as their own problems arose from similar design flaws aboard. Ironically, the US Navy managed to overcome its torpedo production bottleneck around the same time it overcame most of the problems with Mach 14, so by the end of the war, huge reserves of perhaps The most reworked torpedo in existence were sitting around while the Mach 14 was upgraded to the Mark 16.

Post-war using a number of features borrowed from German torpedoes, so many Mark Fourteens remained in stock that they did not actually leave US Navy service. US until the early 1980s, although at that time they were largely a second line weapon, leading to this complete disaster. from a B-prize project was eventually transformed into what was actually the longest-lasting torpedo in US Navy history, the Mark 14, and its questionable capabilities in the early years of the war remain one of the largest, although somewhat less known, in the world. World War II, which has a relatively plausible turning point (you see), even a small live-fire test program in the early 1930s could have resulted in the US Navy entering the war with a torpedo that actually works rather than the best option after sailing toward a target and raising a flag with the word bang written on it mounted on a periscope if this live-fire test program had been carried out and corrections implemented and the Navy Japanese might have encountered quite a few short ships even before the battles of Coral Sea and Midway and even if that somehow did not change the forces available for those two battles, the Mark 13 aerial torpedo that was equally affected by the Curse of the Prizes B and therefore the ineffective Devastator attack using the Mark 13 at the beginning at Midway, as well as the submarine attack on the battlecruiser Kirishima by a submarine, could have borne fruit and, while it may seem easy to dismiss the conduct of the junta as a simple money-saver in the interwar period, its continued obstruction of any and all attempts.

Resolving the problems once the war began likely delayed the design and implementation of solutions for a considerable amount of time, depending on the source. Myths are categorized into at least months, possibly even up to a year or so. The cost in time, effort and, of course, lives. of soldiers failed by their weapons, all caused by this practically unforgivable behavior of beraud cannot be overlooked and should definitely not be forgotten, that's all for this video, thanks for watching. If you have any comments or suggestions for reviewing a boat, let us know in the comments. Next, don't forget to comment on the pin post for questions about dry docking.