America’s Torpedoes Didn’t Work — Until One Officer Proved It

Dawn, July 24th, 1943.

Beneath the Pacific swells, the USS Tinosa stalks its prey.

Through the periscope, Lieutenant Commander Lawrence Dan Daspit can scarcely believe his luck.

There, silhouetted on the horizon, steams one of the largest tankers in the Japanese fleet.

Tonan Maru number three.

19,000 tons of critical oil supply and all alone.

No escorts, no zigzagging evasive maneuvers.

It is a nearly perfect target, a fat sitting duck in submarine parliament.

At 0928 hours, Tinosa fires a spread of four Mark1 14 torpedoes from ideal attack position.

The crew tensely counts down the seconds.

Thump, thump, thump, thump.

Four dull impacts shudder through the hull, one after another.

In the conning tower, officers exchange baffled looks.

There are no explosions, no erupting columns of water, no ripping of steel.

Tone and Maru number three simply veers away and begins to accelerate, seemingly unharmed.

The tanker’s only response is to turn tail and run as if mocking the submarine strike.

Frustration surges on the Tenosa.

Daspit cannot comprehend what his eyes and ears are telling him.

Four direct hits and nothing.

Determined not to let the prize escape, he orders Tenosa to surface and give chase on diesel engines through the night.

Hour after hour, the American sub doggedly pursues the fleeing behemoth across the waves.

By the cover of darkness, Tinosa’s crew painstakingly checks every remaining torpedo, making sure each fish is in perfect working order.

They will not fail again, they vow.

After an allnight chase, the tanker finally falters.

By dawn, it slows, and Tinosa maneuvers into an ideal firing position off the enemy’s beam.

Daspit takes his time setting up a textbook attack from 1,000 yards at a 90° angle to the target’s hull.

This should guarantee maximum impact.

He gives the order.

Fire.

The torpedo streaks toward the now stationary tanker, its white wake arrow straight.

The crew holds its breath.

Wham! The torpedo strikes Tone and Maru number three amid ships and harmlessly bounces off with a muted clank.

A collective groan of disbelief echoes through Tinosa.

The warhead did not detonate.

It’s a dud.

Eyes wide.

Daspit fires again.

Another perfect hit.

Another dud.

He fires again and again.

Six torpedoes in a row slam into the giant tanker without a single explosion.

One torpedo’s impact is so blunt that it broaches out of the water after striking, bobbing up ineffectually before sinking away.

In the Tinosa’s control room, seasoned sailors stare at each other as the realization sets in.

Their most advanced weapon, the pride of the US Navy’s arsenal, has utterly failed them.

Suddenly, the hunter becomes the hunted.

A Japanese escort destroyer arrives on the scene, rushing to Tonan Maru’s defense.

With the sub’s position betrayed by all those torpedo hits, Tinosa has no choice but to break off and dive deep as the warship closes in.

In a parting gesture of defiance, Daspit launches two stern torpedoes at the destroyer as he dives, both of which hit and both of which also fail to explode.

The torpedoes were useless to the very end.

As depth charges begin to boom in the distance, Tinosa slips away.

Her frustrated crew alive, but empty-handed.

Hours later, Tinosa surfaces and limps back toward base at Pearl Harbor.

Her fuel running low and her torpedo rooms nearly empty.

In his patrol log, the furious Daspit writes the only words that make sense of the surreal encounter.

I find it hard to convince myself that I saw this.

15 torpedoes fired at a lone defenseless tanker.

13 hits recorded, yet only two exploded.

Those two being glancing shots at odd angles.

The gargantuan Tonan Maru number three still floats on the horizon, miraculously alive.

20,000 tons of vital enemy shipping should have been sent to the bottom of the Pacific.

But instead, Tinosa returns to port having nothing to show but bitter evidence of a mysterious deadly failure.

This haunting scene is no isolated incident.

It is a microcosm of a larger life and death mystery plaguing America’s Pacific submarine fleet in World War II.

Torpedoes that refuse to work.

The men of the silent service are hunting the enemy with their lives on the line only to find their shots impotent.

Something is terribly wrong beneath the waves, and the US Navy’s greatest undersea weapon, the Mark1 14 torpedo, has become a silent saboter.

Tinosa’s crew doesn’t know it yet.

But their nightmare encounter will prove to be the turning point.

Waiting anxiously at Pearl Harbor for Tinosa’s return is one determined admiral, who has heard far too many stories of torpedoes that clink instead of explode.

He has resolved to get to the bottom of this deadly mystery, no matter the resistance he faces.

As Daspit arrives at the pier and begins venting his frustration, Rear Admiral Charles, Uncle Charlie Lockwood, commander of the Pacific submarine fleet, listens in grim silence.

Lockwood expected an outburst of rage at this failure.

20,000 ton tankers don’t grow on trees, he sympathizes, knowing how precious such targets are.

But Daspit is beyond cursing.

He’s almost speechless with fury.

Together, they examine the one torpedo Daspit saved and brought home.

A perfect specimen of a dud.

In that unexloded torpedo lies the key to a scandal that has plagued the US Navy for 21 months.

This is the story of how Admiral Lockwood took on the Navy’s own bureaucracy to expose the fatal flaws in America’s torpedoes.

How he defied orders and orthodoxy to arm his submarsers with weapons that actually worked.

And how that breakthrough helped turn the tide of the Pacific War.

It is a saga of technical mystery, bureaucratic stubbornness, quiet heroism, and ultimate vindication.

It begins in the dark early days of World War II when American submarines went to war with defective torpedoes and paid the price in blood.

In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, the USPacific fleet was reeling.

Battleships lay on the harbor’s muddy bottom.

Aircraft carriers were urgently needed elsewhere, and American forces across Asia and the Pacific were on the defensive.

In those grim months of 1942, one of the few ways America could strike back at Japan was through its submarines, the submariners of the Silent Service put to sea with determination, eager to harass Japan supply lines and wartime commerce.

On paper, they had the tools to do it, most notably the Mark1 14 torpedo, a technologically advanced 21 ft steel shark touted as the most lethal undersea weapon in the world.

Crews had absolute faith in their fish.

Each Mark1 14 carried 668 lb of high explosive and could travel over 4,000 yd at high speed.

It featured an ingenious new detonator, the Mark 6 exploder.

Designed not just to hit a ship, but to sense its magnetic field and detonate beneath the keel, breaking a ship’s back in one catastrophic blow.

In theory, it was a war winner, a marvel of engineering that gave US submarines fangs to rival any navy in the world.

In practice, it was a nightmare.

From the very first weeks of the Pacific War, US submarine captains began reporting an alarming trend.

Their torpedoes were failing at an unprecedented rate.

As early as December 14th, 1941, just one week after Pearl Harbor, the submarine USS Seawolf emptied its tubes at a Japanese freighter, firing eight torpedoes.

Seven torpedoes missed, and the one that hit failed to explode.

It was an omen of things to come.

In the first 3 months of war, American subs fired 97 torpedoes and managed to sink only three ships.

By mid 1942, the statistics were appalling.

US subs had expended over 800 torpedoes for scant results.

Upwards of 80% of the torpedoes had either missed or malfunctioned.

Veteran skippers were left fuming and perplexed as one perfect firing solution after another yielded nothing but dud splashes or premature detonations in the distance.

The only reliable feature of the torpedo was its unreliability, one naval historian would remark Riley.

It soon became evident that something was fundamentally wrong with the Mark1 14 torpedo and its complex exploder system.

Torpedoes were running under targets and not exploding.

Others were exploding too early, lighting up the ocean before reaching their mark.

Still others struck targets with a solid metallic clunk and simply failed to detonate.

Submarine crews coined rofal phrases for these events.

One skipper, Lieutenant Commander Moikin of USS Thresher, quipped that when his torpedo hit a ship without exploding, “We clinkedked him with a clunk.” Gallows humor aside, the frustration was very real and mounting.

America’s submariners were literally staking their lives on these torpedoes, daring enemy escorts, diving under withering depth charge attacks, all to get that one perfect shot.

And far too often, the torpedo would let them down in the moment of truth.

As one submariner put it, they were risking their necks for nothing, watching valuable Japanese ships sail away unscathed.

What made this situation even more dire was that American war strategy depended on the silent service to exact a heavy toll on Japan’s maritime lifelines.

Japanese industry and military might relied on a vast flow of oil, iron, food, and troops across the seas.

US submarines were tasked with severing these links, starving Japan’s war machine.

But throughout 1942 and into 1943, results were dismal.

Critical convoys slipped through because the torpedoes failed to sink their targets.

In April 1943, for instance, Commander John Scott of USS Tunny caught a formation of three Japanese aircraft carriers and loose 10 torpedoes at them.

The Tunny’s crew heard seven distinct explosions.

It sounded like a spectacular success.

Yet, not one of those explosions struck the carriers.

They were all premature detonations well short of the targets.

The carriers steamed away unharmed, and an incredulous, tunny crew was left counting the wasted shots.

To the men on the front lines, it was as if their torpedoes were cursed or sabotaged by some invisible hand.

But what could they do? The Mark 14 torpedo and Mark 6 magnetic exploder were cuttingedge technology developed in secrecy by experts at the Navy’s Newport torpedo station.

These were the same weapons the Navy’s top brass had assured them would crush the enemy.

The submariners double-checked their calculations, their gyros, their maintenance protocols.

Was it their fault? Many began to doubt themselves.

After all, how could a $10,000 torpedo, a piece of machinery as costly as five new automobiles, be so consistently bad? Surely something else must be wrong.

The aim, the tactics, something.

That was exactly the official line from the Navy’s Bureau of Ordinance.

Buard, the department responsible for designing and supplying the Navy’s weapons.

Buard had poured years of effort into the Mark1 14 and Mark 6 explod.

To admit these torpedoes were faulty would not only be an embarrassment, it would mean acknowledging that years of peaceime development and millions of dollars had been mishandled.

So Buard dug in its heels.

“There is nothing wrong with the torpedo,” it insisted.

“The problem is with you.” Early complaints from the field were met with stony disbelief or outright dismissal.

One by one, submarine captains were subtly made to feel that their own incompetence was to blame for the duds.

Perhaps they had set the torpedo’s depth wrong.

Perhaps they had failed to maintain the delicate exploder mechanisms.

Perhaps they simply weren’t aiming well.

Board’s influence within the Navy hierarchy was immense.

These were the ordained experts, guardians of the Navy’s arsenal.

And in the rigid military culture of the day, even frontline officers were conditioned to accept that the bureau’s word was infallible in matters of ordinance.

Some in command positions went along with Bujord’s narrative.

Rear Admiral Robert H.

English, who commanded the Pacific submarine fleet, Comsubac through most of 1942, initially sided with the bureau.

He attributed the poor results to his captain’s lack of initiative, effectively blaming the warriors at sea for not pressing attacks hard enough.

This was a bitter pill for the men risking their lives on war patrols.

They knew they were doing everything they could, often to the point of recklessness, and yet fish after fish would fail.

Still, such was the chain of command that most suffered in silence, convinced that higherups would eventually see the truth.

But a few voices refused to stay quiet.

On the other side of the Pacific, in the Southwest Pacific submarine command, a certain rear admiral had begun to listen closely to his captain’s laments.

Unlike many staff officers, he had saltwater in his veins and a Submariner’s dolphins on his chest.

His name was Charles Lockwood, and he was about to become the torpedo scandal’s worst enemy and the submariner’s greatest ally.

Charles Andrews Lockwood was not your typical armchair admiral.

Born in 1890 and raised in rural Missouri, Lockwood had salt of the earth origins and a lifelong affinity for life beneath the waves.

As a Naval Academy graduate, class of 1912, he dove headlong into the naent submarine service.

By World War I, Lockwood was commanding a division of submarines in the remote Philippines.

Over the interwar years, he skippered numerous subs, even an old captured German Yubot at one point, and served in nearly every corner of the submarine force.

In short, he was a submariner through and through, a dieselboat man who understood the boats and the men who sailed them.

By temperament, he was pragmatic, unpretentious, and fiercely loyal to his crews.

These traits earned him the enduring nickname Uncle Charlie among the officers and sailors who served under him.

He wasn’t above bending a rule to take care of his men.

During long submarine patrols, for example, he worked to improve the poor quality rations that crews subsisted on at sea, making sure his submariners were fed as well as conditions allowed.

He knew that well-fed, confident crews made better fighters.

In early 1942, as the war exploded across the Pacific, Rear Admiral Lockwood was in London as a naval atache, but he was urgently needed back in the fight.

In May 1942, after the US Asiatic Fleet surviving subs had retreated from the Philippines and Dutch East Indies, Lockwood was sent to Perth, Western Australia, to take command of submarine force southwest Pacific, Comub Sao Spack.

His new command consisted of the battleworn boats that had escaped the fall of the Philippines and Java, and they were immediately engaged in a desperate holding action against Japan’s advance.

Lockwood found that his submarines operating from bases at Fremantle and Brisbane were indeed striking at Japanese shipping, but he also started hearing the same disturbing reports.

Torpedoes that ran deep, torpedoes that exploded too early, torpedoes that hit with a thud and no bang.

By the time he’d compiled a few months of patrol reports, Loach would realize these dud torpedo stories were not isolated flukes.

They were systemic and they were crippling the submarines effectiveness at the very moment their country needed them to be battle winners.

Lockwood was well aware that challenging the Bureau of Ordinance was risky.

Bour was a powerful bureaucracy within the Navy, virtually an untouchable thief of technical experts.

Even Admiral Ernest J.

King, the crusty, all powerful chief of naval operations in Washington, lacked direct control over the semi-autonomous bureaus like Bujord.

But Lockwood also knew that continuing to lose opportunities and lives to bad torpedoes was unacceptable.

The pragmatic commander in him decided that if the bureau wouldn’t thoroughly investigate, then he would.

And so in June 1942, Rear Admiral Lockwood carried out a bold experiment, one that Buard itself had astonishingly never done with a live torpedo.

Lockwood and a handful of handpicked officers, his amateur scientists, as he joked, procured 500 ft of heavy fishing net from a local Australian fisherman.

They quietly took this net out to a deep channel off Albany on the southwest Australian coast at Frenchman’s Bay.

Late one night, they strung the net vertically in the water, suspended from floats, creating a makeshift target to catch torpedoes.

If the Mark1 14 torpedoes were running at the depths they were set to, they would punch through the net roughly at the expected depth.

If not, the net would tell the tale from a cooperating submarine, the USS Skipjack, which had just returned from a patrol and was more than happy to lend one of its troublesome torpedoes.

Lockwood ordered a series of test shots.

In each, the torpedo’s live warhead was replaced by an exercise head of equal weight, using a calcium chloride solution to get the weight just right.

That way, the torpedo would not explode upon hitting the net, but its trajectory could be recorded.

The first torpedo was set to run at 10 ft depth.

It was fired from about 900 yd out straight at the floating net target.

When divers later examined the net, their findings were jaw-dropping.

The torpedo had torn through the net 25 ft below the surface, more than twice as deep as it was supposed to run.

If that torpedo had been named at a ship’s hull expecting a 10-ft depth, it would have gone completely under the keel and never hit anything.

To be sure, Lockwood’s team fired two more test torpedoes on the following day.

One was set for a shallow depth, the other a bit deeper.

The results came back similarly skewed.

One cut the net 8 ft deeper than set, the other 11 ft deeper.

The evidence was irrefutable.

The Mark1 14 torpedoes were running significantly deeper than the depth setting indicated.

often by as much as 10 to 15 feet.

This alone could explain many of the misses where torpedoes seemed to pass harmlessly under enemy ships.

They were literally running too deep to hit their targets.

Lockwood immediately took action.

In the field, he ordered all his sub captains to compensate by setting their torpedoes shallower.

Many skippers, taking no chances, set their fish to run at 0 ft, the minimum, so that they would hopefully hit something rather than gliding under the hull.

But while this juryririgged solution might improve their odds, Lockwood was not satisfied.

The underlying flaw had to be fixed, not merely worked around.

So he compiled his net test results and forwarded a detailed report up the chain to the Bureau of Ordinance.

Expecting that surely, now that hard data existed, Bour would recognize and correct the problem.

Board’s reaction was anything but contrite.

The bureau’s experts in Washington bristled at the notion that a forward area commander with a fishing net could have discovered a flaw they had missed.

They claimed Lockwood’s tests were flawed and not conclusive.

The Bujord engineers argued that because Lowood’s team had used a shortened exercise head in place of the full warhead, the weight distribution of the torpedo might have been altered, affecting its trim and depthing.

In essence, they tried to invalidate the results on a technicality.

It was classic bureaucratic defensiveness, and Lockwood was undaunted.

If Buard wanted to quibble over the test setup, he’d answer the quibble.

His team promptly devised a longer makeshift exercise head that matched the warhead length exactly.

They reran the depth tests.

The results came back the same.

The torpedoes were running much deeper than set.

There was no escaping the truth.

Embarrassed into action, the Bureau of the Ordinance finally responded.

They recalled an old torpedo expert, Commander James Jimmy King, no relation to Admiral Ernest King, who’d been involved in Mark 14 development and was actually responsible for one key change.

Years earlier, Commander King had increased the warhead size of the Mark1 14 by packing in additional explosives, making it deadlier, but potentially upsetting its balance.

Now back from retirement to head Bujord’s R&D, King conducted his own trials stateside, firing torpedoes through nets from real submarines, not just static barges, as previous tests had been.

Not surprisingly, he confirmed exactly what Lockwood had found.

On August 1st, 1942, Bour notified the fleet that the Mark 14 ran about 10 to 12 ft deeper than set.

At long last, 8 months into the war, one of the torpedoes fatal flaws was officially acknowledged.

The culprit was traced to an interplay of factors in the depth control mechanism.

The torpedo’s hydrostatic valve, the depth sensor, had been repositioned during design to accommodate more gear and had ended up in a spot where water flow and pressure fooled it into thinking it was shallower than it really was.

Moreover, a testing device used at Newport had been miscalibrated in such a way that it also understated depth, a bizarre coincidence that meant both the torpedo and the testing instrument aired in the same direction.

This very peculiar and costly twist of fate, as one analysis later put it, explained why Newport’s own limited peacetime testing hadn’t caught the error.

When the Mark 14 was set for, say, 10 ft, it would actually run around 20 ft deep.

But both the torpedoes mechanism and the yards tester thought everything was fine.

It was a double whammy of misfortune, and it had cost the lives of many sailors and the loss of many ships that escaped.

board moved to fix the depth problem by late 1942.

They recalibrated depth gauges and distributed kits to modify the torpedo’s depth control valves, correcting the design floor so new Mark 14 ears would run at true depths.

At last, one might think the submarines would have a reliable weapon.

However, though the depth issue was now recognized, two even more sinister problems still lurked within the Mark1 14 torpedo.

The next one to rear its head was the Mark 6 magnetic exploder.

the component meant to detonate beneath an enemy ship.

It was proving far too sensitive for its own good.

The concept of the magnetic influence exploder in the Mark 6 was cuttingedge 1930s technology and that was part of the problem.

It was based on principles used in magnetic mines developed by the British and Germans where a changing magnetic field triggers detonation.

In theory, when a torpedo with a magnetic exploder passed directly under a ship’s steel hull, the ship’s magnetic field would set off the torpedo’s charge at the optimal moment, breaking the keel in two.

This under the keel explosion was considered far more lethal than a side hit.

It sounded great on paper, and Bujord was so confident in it that they made the magnetic exploder a secret weapon.

Project G53, as it was codenamed, was classified at the highest levels.

So much so that many submarine crews didn’t even fully understand how it worked.

They were simply told it would do the job if a torpedo passed under the target.

What Bour hadn’t anticipated was that the Earth’s own magnetic field, combined with the quirks of the device, could cause torpedoes to detonate too early, well before reaching the target.

As reports of prematures grew, torpedoes blowing up halfway to the target or just as they neared the enemy, it became clear that something was arry.

The magnetic exploder was essentially too sensitive in the real world.

Factors like variations in the Earth’s magnetic field at different latitudes, the transition from water to a ship’s magnetic mass, or even the proximity of the torpedo to the seafloor could trigger it at the wrong time.

Dozens of precious torpedoes were simply exploding in open water, doing nothing except alerting the Japanese that a submarine was nearby.

By early 1943, many submarine skippers had completely lost faith in the magnetic exploder feature.

Some quietly attempted to disable the magnetic detonator, preferring to rely on direct contact hits, but officially board still clung to it.

Even after the depth fiasco, the bureau insisted that the Mark 6 exploder was sound.

If torpedoes exploded prematurely, they insinuated perhaps the crews had not set the exploders correctly.

Or maybe rough seas had caused the detonations.

Again, the blame was shifted away from the device and onto the operators.

The Navy’s Ordinance Bureau had a huge investment, both monetary and reputational, in these torpedoes, and it defended them almost as a matter of pride.

Rear Admiral Lockwood, now in charge of all Pacific Fleet submarines.

He had taken over as conservac in February 1943 after Admiral English’s tragic death in a plane crash.

Was by this time deeply skeptical of Bour’s assurances.

He had won the battle over the depth setting, but torpedoes were still not hitting targets reliably.

In war correspondents and diary entries, Lockwood’s frustration grew.

One of quoted remark he made around this time was, “If the Bureau of Ordinance can’t provide us with torpedoes that will hit and explode, then for God’s sake, get the Bureau of Ships to design a boat hook with which we can rip the plates off a target’s side.” That costic quip delivered at a submarine officers conference in mid 1943 perfectly captured the exasperation of the fleet.

Low was essentially saying he’d rather have a primitive weapon that worked than a high-tech torpedo that didn’t.

By the summer of 1943, Lockwood had had enough.

He prepared to go to Washington in person to make his case, essentially to go to war against his own bureaucracy on behalf of his submarine crews.

It was a risky move for a rear admiral to directly confront Bujord’s leadership.

But Lockwood wasn’t one to shy away from a fight when sailors lives were at stake.

In June 1943, he flew to Washington DC and secured meetings with Admiral Ernest King, the CNO, and also with Rear Admiral William Spike Bland, the chief of the Bureau of Ordinance.

The face-to-face meeting between Lowood and Blandy was tense and historic.

“Bland, normally a calm ordinance man, blew up at Lockwood.

I don’t know whether it’s part of your mission to discredit the Bureau of Ordinance,” Blandy growled.

But you seem to be doing a pretty good job of it.

Lockwood, never one to be easily intimidated, shot right back.

Well, Spike, if anything I have said will get the bureau off its duff and get some action, I will feel that my trip has not been wasted.

It was an extraordinarily bold retort within Navy halls.

Essentially telling the ordinance chief to get off his backside and fix the problem.

Admiral King, for his part, had a reputation for being gruff but resultsoriented.

Hearing Lockwood’s plea and likely influenced by mounting evidence and complaints beyond just Lockwoods, King finally authorized a drastic measure.

The magnetic influence exploders were to be deactivated across the fleet.

In other words, Admiral King ordered that all US torpedoes be stripped of their magnetic trickery and used only as straight contact torpedoes.

This was effectively an admission that the fancy magnetic feature was doing more harm than good.

Back in Pearl Harbor, even before the official green light, Lockwood had already quietly encouraged his skippers to disable the magnetic exploders if they had doubts.

Many had done so on their own initiative.

Sailors are nothing if not resourceful, and some torpedo men had taken to surreptitiously removing exploder components, or at least nullifying them.

A cloak and dagger anecdote from this period describes how Bujord, to enforce its rules, had sent orders that all explod mechanism screws be sealed with special lacquer paint to detect tampering.

In response, some inventive torpedo men in the fleet obtained matching paint so they could disable the magnetic exploder, then repaint the screws covering their tracks.

It was a quiet form of mutiny.

Mechanics fighting back against a piece of equipment that they knew was faulty, even if the top brass wouldn’t admit it.

By mid 1943, the US submarine force was largely using its Mark1 14 torpedoes on contact exploder mode only.

The magnetic portion was essentially dead.

Lockwood’s push in Washington ensured that this was now sanctioned up the chain of command.

The silent service collectively breathed a sigh of relief.

Surely, now that depth was fixed and the magnetic feature was turned off, the torpedo troubles would be over.

Then came the Tenosa patrol and the rude awakening that one critical problem still remained.

When USS Tanosa limped back to Pearl Harbor after her ordeal with the Tonan Maru number three, Admiral Lockwood met Captain Daspit on the pier.

He personally escorted the still fuming skipper to his office.

Lowood later wrote that he fully expected Daspit to unleash a torrent of cuss words at everyone from Lockwood himself to Bor and the Newport torpedo station.

After all, Daspit had done everything by the book, even disabling the magnetic exploders, and still his torpedoes had failed spectacularly.

Instead of exploding in the enemy, they had nearly gotten Tinosa sunk.

But Daspit was beyond swearing.

His quiet, seething account of the patrol said it all.

Lockwood listened intently as Daspit described each torpedo hit and each failure.

The methodical steps he took to eliminate all variables and how he had saved the last torpedo as pristine evidence.

When ordinance officers examined that dud torpedo in Pearl Harbor’s torpedo shop, they found it in perfect mechanical order.

In other words, nothing had malfunctioned.

The exploder had simply not fired the warhead despite a direct hit.

This wasn’t user error or bad luck.

It was a design flaw.

The third and final floor of the Mark1 14 torpedo lurking in the contact exploder mechanism itself.

It was now painfully clear.

Even with the magnetic feature disabled, even running at correct depth, the Mark1 14 torpedo could still hit a target with a hearty thud and fail to detonate.

Daspit’s Tonan Maru encounter was the proof in black and white, and he was not alone.

Many other skippers had reported duds on seemingly perfect shots.

In fact, as one torpedo man noted, it seemed that the more perfect the shot, the less likely the torpedo would explode.

Direct 90° pointblank hits often yielded duds, whereas glancing blows might work.

This paradox had been hinted at in various patrols, but no one had systematically proven it.

Now, Lockwood intended to do just that.

Realizing that Bour might still try to blame something else, Loach decided to preempt any excuses.

He organized a new series of field tests, the most daring yet, to get to the root of the contact exploder problem once and for all.

This time, he had the advantage of an exceptionally skilled and creative officer by his side, Commander Charles Swedson.

Mson was already a legend in the submarine community.

A few years earlier in 1939, he had led the dramatic rescue of the crew of USS Squalas after that submarine sank using a diving bell and techniques he himself helped develop.

He was also a brilliant engineer who had invented an underwater breathing device, the Mson lung, and was known for out of the box thinking.

However, Mson’s tendency to speak his mind had not always endeared him to Navy higherups.

So, he was not sitting in some Washington office.

He was under Lockwood’s command leading Submarine Squadron 2 in Hawaii.

Low pulled Mson into the effort and essentially gave him a mission.

Find out why our torpedoes aren’t exploding.

With the magnetic side out of the picture, all eyes were on the contact pistol.

The mechanical firing pin and detonator that was supposed to ignite the warhead when a torpedo actually struck a ship.

Mumsson threw himself into the task like a man possessed.

Scouring charts of the Hawaiian Islands, he found a unique testing site.

the small uninhabited island of Cahor Lawe, which had sheer vertical cliffs plummeting into deep water.

It was perfect, a natural wall against which torpedoes could be fired, and if they failed to explode, could be recovered from the shallow sandy bottom below.

On August 31st, 1943, the test began.

Mumson and Lockwood’s ordinance specialist, Commander Art Taylor, took the submarine USS Muscalongj, SS262, out off Cahula’s coast.

Armed with live warhead Mark1 14 torpedoes, no dummy heads this time.

They needed to test real explosions.

Muscalong fired the first torpedo at the cliff.

Boom! It detonated properly against the rock.

The second torpedo, boom! Also exploded as designed.

Then came the third shot.

The torpedo streaked toward the cliff and struck, but no explosion followed.

The dud torpedo bounced off the undersea cliff and broke in two, its warhead section splitting open, but miraculously not detonating.

Here it was, a perfect dud captured in the wild, so to speak.

Without hesitation, Charles Mson did something that can only be described as a moment of quiet heroism and scientific zeal.

He dawned diving gear and personally went into the water to inspect the unexloded torpedo.

Imagine the scene.

The Pacific waters lapping at the rocky shore of Cahoo Law.

The tall, lanky figure of Momson descending beneath the waves, approaching a 3,000lb torpedo that could still be live.

It was essentially a massive bomb that had failed to go off, but might decide to at any moment.

Mson’s heart must have been pounding, but he carefully noted the condition of the torpedo and guided the recovery team.

With great caution, the Muskalong crew and support personnel hoisted the broken, unexloded torpedo onto a barge.

One can only imagine the tension as this potentially lethal fish was brought aboard.

They transported it back to Pearl Harbor for analysis.

The team didn’t stop there.

Mson and Taylor also rigged a secondary test to simulate various impact angles and speeds, a drop test from a height.

At the Navy’s Westlock facility, they set up a 90 ft tower and ran a steel cable down to the ground.

They took torpedo warheads filled with inert sand for weight, but equipped with live exploder mechanisms, hauled them up the tower, and then slid them down the cable into a hardened steel plate.

This dramatic setup mimicked a torpedo hitting a ship’s hull at different angles.

The results were shocking.

70% of these dropped exploder tests failed to detonate.

In test after test, the firing pins did not set off the charge on a direct impact.

Instead, they often bent or jammed.

By combining data from the recovered Dud torpedo and the drop tests, Mson and Taylor finally pieced the puzzle together.

The Mark 6 exploders contact firing mechanism had a fatal flaw.

When a torpedo hit a target at a perfect 90° angle, the ideal most forceful impact, the abrupt deceleration was so violent that it deformed the firing pin and slowed its travel, preventing it from striking the primer hard enough.

Essentially, a head-on collision would crush or bind the firing pin assembly before it could ignite the explosive train.

The firing pin’s dent on the primer was there in the retrieved dude, but it was faint, not nearly enough to set off the explosion.

To put it simply, the harder the hit, the more likely the torpedo was to be a dud.

Conversely, a glancing blow, say a strike at a 30° or 45° angle, put less stress on the firing pin, which then could move freely and pop the primer.

That was why Daspit’s two torpedoes fired at oblique angles into Tonan Maru number three had exploded.

They hit at obtuse angles, but all his point blank 90° shots failed.

The Navy’s own tactical doctrine had been to hit targets as close to perpendicular as possible.

But that advice was actually sabotaging the torpedo’s effectiveness.

It was a perverse reality.

Submarine skippers who aimed perfectly were being punished by design physics they couldn’t have known about.

As an intriguing side note, it later came to light that Bourd had once consulted a famous outside expert about the Mark 6 exploder problems, none other than Albert Einstein.

The great physicist was asked to review the exploders blueprints.

After examining the design, Einstein reportedly concluded that the firing pin would likely deform upon impact and suggested adding some sort of cushioning void in the design.

In essence, even Einstein saw the floor.

But Buard, for whatever reason, did not act on his recommendation.

It seems it took the gritty empirical work of MSON and Lockwood’s team in the Pacific with actual torpedoes, cliffs, and drop towers to force the bureau’s hand.

Armed with this damning evidence, Lockwood now had everything he needed to confront Bujord one last time.

Mson compiled the test results, photographs, fragments, a compelling case that no honest person could deny.

Low took this straight to Washington.

One can imagine the mix of triumph and fury he felt.

Here was proof that his men and he had been right all along and that countless wasted torpedoes and lost lives were due to a mechanical failing that could have been discovered earlier if the bureau had only listened.

In his official war diary, Lockwood noted returning from Washington madder than hell after presenting the findings.

Bour finally had to admit the truth.

The contact exploder was indeed faulty.

They agreed to redesign the exploder, but then came the kicker.

Designing and mass-producing a new exploder could take a year or more.

The bureau estimated a year in the middle of a war.

For Lockwood, Mson, and every submariner, that was not acceptable.

Admiral Lockwood was not about to let his boats go to war for another year with duds.

If Bour couldn’t give an immediate solution, he would find one himself.

Commander Mson had anticipated this and advised that it should be possible to rebuild the existing contact exploders with better materials and perhaps slight design tweaks.

The key problem was the firing pin and its guide.

They needed to be strong enough not to deform, but light enough to move quickly and perhaps with a stronger spring to drive it home.

This pointed to using improved metallurgy, higher grade steel or special alloys.

Pearl Harbor’s submarine base workshops sprang into action.

The best metallurgists and machinists in the Pacific Fleet were rallied.

In a twist of poetic justice, they sourced a supply of excellent high-grade metal from the wreckage of the very enemy that had caused the US to enter the war, a downed Japanese aircraft.

Specifically, the engine of a Japanese zero fighter that had been shot down during the Pearl Harbor attack was salvaged, and its aluminum and steel alloys were repurposed.

The team melted down pieces of that engine to create new, sturdier firing pins, springs, and explod.

When that source ran low, Lockwood’s men turned to the US Army Air Force’s units at nearby Hickhamfield for help.

Piles of bent and damaged airplane propellers made of high-grade aluminum alloy were available scrap.

When asked, an Army Air Force’s officer happily handed them over, quipping, “A better use for a busted prop couldn’t be found anywhere.

These propellers were melted and machined into components for the torpedo exploders.

The makeshift project became a top priority.

Every machine shop at the subbase worked around the clock to retrofit the torpedoes in the fleet.

The result of this crash program was a modified Mark1 14 exploder, tougher, more reliable with a redesigned firing pin assembly that would not crush under impact.

Testing of the modified exploders showed immediate promise.

The new firing pins struck true, even in head-on collisions, and the warheads detonated as intended.

By the fall of 1943, Admiral Lockwood could report that his Pacific Fleet submarines were finally armed with torpedoes they could trust.

From that moment on, all major exploder problems suddenly disappeared, Lockwood noted with satisfaction.

What a simple sentence to describe the end of a 2-year nightmare.

After countless patrols of heartache, things had finally been made right.

is worth noting that one torpedo quirk persisted even after the fixes.

Further tests showed that the Mark1 14’s depth keeping wasn’t perfect.

Mson and Taylor ran another series of net tests and discovered that the torpedo’s depth control, while now closer to correct, tended to oscillate in a wave pattern.

The torpedo would porpus slightly, running shallow, then deep in a cycle.

The cycle was roughly 500 yd long, meaning a torpedo might be above or below its set depth, depending on how far it had run.

This was not something that could be easily fixed in the field as it was a fundamental dynamic characteristic.

However, now that they knew about it, Lockwood skippers could compensate.

They learned to adjust depth settings or timing so that by the time a torpedo hit the target, it would be on the shallow part of its sinewave oscillation.

It wasn’t perfect, but it was workable.

The main point was the torpedoes were now exploding when and where they were supposed to.

In a final gesture of vindication, Captain Swedson was promoted to captain and awarded the Legion of Merit for his pivotal role in solving the torpedo fiasco.

He had worked tirelessly behind the scenes to give the silent service its teeth back.

But if Mson was the brains, Lockwood was the heart and spine of the effort, the leader willing to stake his career on fighting the system for the men under his command.

The respect he earned was apparent in how his men referred to him.

They called him Uncle Charlie as a term of endearment because he listened to them and championed their cause.

As one naval officer later remarked about Lockwood’s style, he listened and then took action, sometimes at what too many of the current crop of flag officers would consider high risk.

High risk indeed.

Lockwood had essentially gone rogue in troubleshooting the torpedoes, doing what Newport torpedo station should have done in the first place.

But in war, results are what count.

With reliable torpedoes finally in hand by late 1943, the US Navy’s submarine force was unleashed in full fury upon Japan’s shipping.

The timing was critical.

The Pacific War had entered a new phase.

American industrial production was cranking out new fleet boats, trained crews, and new commanders were taking bold initiative.

Now their weapons would not betray them.

The difference in the effectiveness of the undersea campaign was dramatic.

Skilled and aggressive skippers who had been held back only by dud torpedoes now went on legendary rampages against enemy shipping.

Submarines like USS Wahoo under commander Dudley Mush Morton, USS Tang under commander Richard Oka, USS Barb under commander Eugene Flucky and many others began tearing apart Japan’s logistical arteries.

They no longer had to double or triple shot targets to ensure a kill.

One torpedo, one ship, that became the ideal.

They refined tactics, conducting more surface patrols during the day using radar to find convoys, submerging to attack, and coordinating wolfpack tactics.

By late 1944, the US submariners, once described as virtually useless, even unarmed in the early war, were now feared as sharks prowling the Pacific.

With dependable torpedoes, any Japanese ship that ventured out could be and often was doomed.

The results speak for themselves.

By war’s end, American submarines had sunk an estimated 55% of all Japanese ships lost, including both merchant and naval vessels.

The subs, which made up less than 2% of the US Navy’s tonnage, strangled Japan supply lines and sent 2,728 ships, totaling nearly 10 million tons to the bottom.

They severed the oil and raw material shipments that Japan desperately needed from its conquests, contributing immensely to the collapse of Japan’s ability to sustain war.

On a more personal scale, the same skippers who had once come home cursing their dud torpedoes now returned from patrols with grin inducing tallies of sunken tonnage and enemy vessels destroyed.

Confidence soared.

The submarine force became a tight-knit brotherhood of success, bonded by having come through the dark days of faulty weapons and having prevailed.

Admiral Lockwood, for his part, remained at the helm of the Pacific submarine force through the end of the war.

In October 1943, just as the torpedo fixes took effect, he was promoted to vice admiral, a reflection of the trust placed in him and the results achieved under his leadership.

He would later write a memoir titled Sink Them All, capturing the aggressive spirit he instilled once the torpedoes were no longer a question mark.

On September 2nd, 1945, Lockwood was on the deck of the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, witnessing Japan’s formal surrender.

No doubt as he watched the ceremony, he remembered the perilous journey to that moment, including the battle he fought against faceless bureaucrats to ensure that when a US sub fired a torpedo, it would strike true.

One imagines that among the thoughts in Lockwood’s mind was a silent salute to the submariners who didn’t live to see that day.

Some of whom might have survived had those torpedoes worked from the start.

The Mark1 14 torpedo scandal stands as a cautionary tale of military bureaucracy.

how the combination of peacetime budget constraints, overconfidence in unproven technology, and institutional refusal to heed frontline feedback nearly cost the US Navy dearly in World War II.

It took 21 months of war, and the dogged persistence of officers like Charles Lockwood and Swed Mson to finally resolve the torpedo troubles.

In that time, dozens of submarine patrols had been wasted.

Hundreds of American lives were lost and untold numbers of enemy ships escaped when they could have been destroyed.

As one historian noted, the Pacific War might have been shortened by as much as a year had the torpedoes been functional from the outset.

Critical early battles like the Battle of Midway could have tilted even more decisively.

At Midway, for example, the submarine USS Nautilus managed to hit an enemy aircraft carrier with a torpedo during the chaos, only to have it prove a dud, robbing the US of what could have been an additional carrier kill at a pivotal moment.

After the war, the Navy did quietly address accountability for the torpedo fiasco.

The Bureau of Ordinance had to reform its practices.

Never again would a US torpedo be deployed without comprehensive testing.

Duplication of testing by independent parties became standard.

a direct response to the fact that Newport had been the sole designer, builder, and tester of Mark 14s and thus had been grading its own homework with no oversight.

The torment the sub crews endured forged a determination in the Navy to prioritize reliability and to listen to combat feedback.

In a postwar evaluation, board itself admitted that peacetime frugality and unrealistic tests were to blame for the Mark 14’s woes.

But such admissions came only after victory was won.

Thanks in no small part to those who fixed the problems in spite of official resistance.

For Admiral Uncle Charlie Lockwood, the highest reward was seeing his boys, the submariners, finally able to fight with weapons equal to their courage.

He remained a beloved figure in the submarine force.

A sailor in his command once said, “He’d ask us for results.” And by God, once we had the torpedoes that worked, we gave them to him.

Lockwood retired in 1947, a highly decorated vice admiral.

History remembers him as the architect of undersea victory in the Pacific, and that victory was as much due to his tenacity in a bureaucratic battle as it was to his strategic acumen against the Japanese.

As the credit’s role on the saga of the dud torpedoes, it’s fitting to reflect on the quiet heroism displayed not on a bloody battlefield, but in the workshops and test ranges far from the public eye.

Think of Captain Mson risking life and limb diving on a misfired torpedo in the waters of Hawaii.

Think of the machinists at Pearl Harbor melting down enemy scrap metal to give American torpedoes sharper teeth.

Think of Dan Daspit and countless other subs skippers who kept pressing the attack despite every instinct telling them their weapons might fail.

The psychological toll of which is hard to fathom.

These were acts of dedication and innovation under extreme pressure.

In the end, the Mark14 torpedo went from goat to hero.

By 1944 to 45, it was a lethal, refined weapon.

The same basic torpedo design, but finally purged of its defects.

The US silent service with Lockwood at the helm would go on to be one of the deadliest forces of the war.

Living up to their potential as sharks hunting convoys at will.

Japanese sailors came to fear the sudden unseen strike of a submarine torpedo sinking their ship.

A fear that American sailors wished they could have instilled from day one.

The story of Admiral Charles Lockwood and the torpedo scandal is not just a tale of technical troubleshooting.

It’s a story of leadership and moral courage.

Lockwood exemplified the principle that a commander’s duty is to fight for his men as surely as they fight for him, he championed truth over protocol, results over excuses.

And by doing so, he saved lives and helped secure victory in the Pacific.

The next time we recount the great battles of World War II, let’s remember that some of the most crucial battles were invisible.

Like the battle to make a torpedo work, the stakes of that battle were every bit as high as a clash of fleets.

And the outcome, thanks to one officer who proved the torpedoes didn’t work, then made sure that they did, helped seal the fate of an empire.

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