How Mark 14 Got 11 Sailors Killed and No One Admitted Why-ZZ

July 24th, 1943.

The Pacific Ocean, west of Trrook, 5:55 in the morning.

Lieutenant Commander Lawrence Dan Daspit pressed his eye to the periscope and saw something that submarine commanders dream about.

The Tonin Maru number three, the largest tanker in the entire Japanese fleet.

19,262 tons of steel and oil making only 13 knots.

No escort, no evasion.

dead ahead, framed perfectly in his crosshairs.

In submarine warfare, you spend weeks in a steel tube, breathing recycled air, eating canned food, running silent at 300 ft to dodge depth charges, and then on one clear morning, you get this, the gift from God.

Daspid had been tipped off by codereers.

He had positioned USS Tanosa perfectly.

Textbook approach.

Textbook range.

4,000 yards.

He fired four torpedoes.

Two hit.

The Tonin Maru shuddered, lurched to port, settled by the stern.

Her engines stopped.

She was done.

Daspit moved in for the kill.

He fired torpedo number three.

Hit.

No detonation.

Number four.

Hit.

No detonation.

Five.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

All hit.

None detonated.

For 1 hour and 22 minutes, from 10:09 in the morning to 11:31, Daspit fired torpedoes at a dead ship, a stationary listing defenseless ship.

The Japanese crew had abandoned their lifeboats.

They were back on deck, staring at the water, watching each torpedo arrive, hit the hull with an audible metallic clang, and sink harmlessly to the bottom, not explode.

Clang 11 times.

Daspit’s own patrol report entry filed one by one.

Fired eighth torpedo, hit, no apparent effect.

Fired ninth torpedo, hit, no apparent effect.

Fired 11th torpedo, hit well afted on port side, made a splash, then was observed to take a right turn and jump clear of the water about 100 ft from the stern of the tanker.

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

When the destroyer finally appeared on the horizon, Daspit had one torpedo left.

He had a choice.

Fire it or keep it.

He kept it.

He brought it back to Pearl Harbor because something was wrong.

Something had been wrong for 21 months and nobody in Washington would admit it.

This is not a story about a broken torpedo.

This is the forensic audit of an institution that sent 16,000 men into the most dangerous battlefield on Earth where the weapon it knew was unreliable and then blamed the men every time the weapon failed.

This is the story of how 11 duds out of 13 hits on the largest tanker in the Japanese fleet told the US Navy a truth it had been hiding since December 7th, 1941.

To understand why the torpedo didn’t work, we need to go back to where it was built.

Not in the Pacific, in Newport, Rhode Island, in the Great Depression, when the Navy made a decision that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time and cost an unknown number of American submariners their lives.

Part one, the weapon they never tested.

The year is 1931.

The United States Navy needs a new torpedo.

The old Mark 10, the standard submarine weapon since World War I, is obsolete.

Japanese warships are faster now, better armored.

The Mark 10 can’t catch them and can’t penetrate them.

The Bureau of Ordinance, BUROD, gets the contract.

Engineers at the Naval Torpedo Station in Newport, Rhode Island, begin work on what will become the Mark1 14.

The specifications are ambitious.

A torpedo that runs at 46 knots, 53 mph underwater that carries a warhead of 57 lb of TNT that can travel 4,500 yd at high speed.

And that doesn’t just punch a hole in a ship’s side.

It detonates beneath the keel where there is no armor, where the explosion lifts the hull and breaks the ship’s back like a twig.

On paper, it is the most lethal torpedo in the world.

But there is a number you need to hold on to right now because it explains everything that follows.

The entire annual research and development budget for the naval torpedo station was approximately $50,000 a year.

A single Mark1 14 torpedo cost $10,000.

Think about what that math tells you.

Testing a torpedo means firing it.

Firing it means losing it.

at $10,000 each in depression era dollars.

The Navy could afford five test shots per year if they tested nothing else.

So, the institution made a decision that seemed financially rational.

Use mathematical models, use dummy warheads, fire practice torpedoes at fishing nets, calculate the performance from components, and trust the math.

From the day design began in 1931 to the day the Mark1 14 went to war in December 1941.

A decade of development.

The torpedo was live fire tested against a real ship’s hull exactly twice.

Two times in 10 years.

One of those tests failed.

The Navy noted the failure and decided the math still said the design was sound.

Consider what this means.

The Mark1 14 was not a simple weapon.

It had a steam turbine engine, a gyroscope for course control, a hydrostatic pressure gauge for depth control, a 57-lb explosive warhead, and two entirely separate detonation systems, a magnetic exploder and a contact exploder, each relying on precise mechanical tolerances under combat conditions.

This was the most complex anti-ship weapon in the American arsenal, and it was never tested as a complete system against a real target.

There was a second problem layered on top of the first, and this one has a different name.

Secrecy.

The Mark1 14’s revolutionary feature was the Mark 6 exploder, a classified magnetic influence detonator.

The concept was genuinely brilliant.

A steel ship distorts the Earth’s natural magnetic field as it passes through the water.

The Mark 6 was designed to sense that distortion and detonate the torpedo warhead directly beneath the keel, where no armor exists, where an underwater explosion lifts the entire hull and snaps the ship’s spine.

An underke detonation is catastrophic in a way that a side impact explosion simply is not.

Budd was proud of the Mark 6.

They should have been.

It was in theory a breakthrough, but they were so protective of it that they built a wall of secrecy around it that made the weapon impossible to evaluate.

The service manual for the Mark 6 exploder was written, but never printed.

It was locked in a safe.

When the exploder was finally issued to the fleet in mid 1941, 6 months before Pearl Harbor, only commanding officers and torpedo officers were told of its existence.

The enlisted torpedo men who actually loaded, maintained, and launched these weapons every single day had no idea what they were handling.

Remember that the men closest to the weapon were deliberately kept ignorant of how it was supposed to work.

Now, the Mark1 14 goes to war with two hidden design flaws already inside it.

And here is the detail that transforms this from an ordinary engineering failure story into a forensic audit.

These two flaws were built to hide each other.

Flaw number one was in the depth mechanism.

The torpedo ran 11 feet deeper than set.

If a commander dialed in a depth of 10 ft, the setting for a magnetic detonation, the torpedo ran at 21 ft below the ship, below the magnetic explosive range, below everything.

Why? Because the torpedo was calibrated in still water using what engineers called the static test.

The problem at 46 knots, hydrodnamic forces pushed the torpedo deeper than the pressure sensor can detect.

The physics were understood.

Nobody applied them.

A single live fire test at combat speed in the Pacific would have found this in 1935 or 1937 before the war, before the casualties.

But flaw one had a shield, the magnetic exploder.

Buard’s reasoning was perfectly circular and perfectly wrong.

The Mark1 14 doesn’t need to run at precise depth.

The Mark 6 magnetic exploder will detonate it beneath the keel anyway.

The deeper it runs, the better positioned it is for a magnetic detonation.

So when submarine commanders began reporting missed targets in December 1941, January 1942, February 1942, Buard had an explanation ready.

Operator error, bad aim, inexperience.

The torpedo works.

The problem is you.

This was the institutional response.

Documented, repeatable, official, and it had teeth.

The Bureau of Ordinance had the authority to define what counted as a valid torpedo failure report and what counted as crew error.

In a chain of command where Buard’s technical judgment was treated as final, a submarine commander who kept insisting the torpedo was broken was essentially arguing with the institution that certified the weapon.

The institution that trained him, the institution whose engineers outranked his patrol reports.

On May 13th, 1942, USS Skipjack was on patrol in the South China Sea under Lieutenant Commander James Co.

He set up a textbook approach, fired two torpedoes at a Japanese target at 800 yards, watched the smoke trail of the first torpedo pass visibly under the stern of the ship.

No hit, no explosion.

He fired again.

Nothing.

Co wrote in his patrol report, “This was a bitter dose, and I now have little confidence in these torpedoes.

” He was not alone.

Across the Pacific, from Fremantle to Pearl Harbor, submarine commanders were writing the same things.

The torpedoes run deep.

The exploders don’t fire.

Something is wrong.

Buard’s response, you are wrong.

The weapon is correct.

Fire better.

Some commanders were relieved of command for complaining too loudly about torpedo failures.

Think about what that means.

The institution that built a defective weapon was punishing the men who reported the defect.

This was the first year of the Pacific Submarine War.

American submers in perfect steel boats with theoretically perfect weapons, watching those weapons fail, being told the failure was theirs.

But here in Newport, while Buard was defending its mathematics, something else was happening.

A rear admiral in Fremantle, Australia, was getting tired of reading patrol reports, and he was about to run a test that anyone with a fishing net and a ruler could have done in 1935.

Number two, the denial industry.

Charles Lockwood was not a bureaucrat.

He was a submariner who had been in the submarine service since 1914, who had commanded submarines, who had sat in those steel tubes, who knew what it felt like to pull a trigger on a weapon that was supposed to kill something.

By the spring of 1942, Lockwood was commander submarines Southwest Pacific, based in Fremantle, and the patrol reports landing on his desk were becoming impossible to explain away.

He read them carefully.

He noticed a pattern that had nothing to do with crew incompetence.

The misses weren’t random.

They were consistent.

The torpedoes were passing under ships, not over them, under.

So on June 20th, 1942, 18 months after Pearl Harbor, 18 months after the first patrol report started arriving, Lockwood ordered a test of breathtaking simplicity.

He stretched a fishing net across Frenchman Bay off the coast of Western Australia.

He attached calibrated depth gauges to the net.

He fired torpedoes at the net with the depth set to 10 ft.

The torpedoes cut the net at 21 ft.

Not 10, not 12, 21.

The torpedo was running 11 ft deeper than set.

Every single one predictably, reproducibly 11 feet too deep.

Lockwood sent the results to Washington, formally documented, mathematically undeniable.

Buorg’s response, documented in Clay Blair’s definitive naval history, Silent Victory, was to dispute the test methodology.

The nets were incorrect.

The gauges weren’t calibrated properly.

The results couldn’t be replicated under controlled laboratory conditions.

This is the controlled laboratory, remember, where no one had ever actually fired a torpedo at a real ship.

In August 1942, Buard finally conducted its own tests.

The results matched Lockwoods exactly, 11 ft deep.

After almost a year of war, after hundreds of failed attacks, after commanders relieved and reports dismissed, Buard issued a recalibration order.

The death problem was fixed.

The headline should read, “Crisis over.

” But here is where the story turns from frustrating to genuinely dark.

Fixing the depth mechanism didn’t fix the results.

Submarine commanders were now getting more hits.

The patrol reports confirmed it.

They could hear the impacts against the hull, but ships weren’t sinking.

The hit rate was climbing.

The kill rate wasn’t moving because fixing flaw one had just unmasked flaw two.

The Mark 6 magnetic exploder, the secret weapon, the revolutionary classified Marvel didn’t work in the Pacific Ocean.

Here is the engineering reality that nobody in Newport had considered.

The Mark 6 was designed and calibrated at Newport, Rhode Island.

Newport sits at 41° north latitude.

The Earth’s magnetic field at that latitude has a specific strength and a specific orientation.

Japanese warships were being hunted near the equator in waters at 10°, 5 degrees, sometimes nearly zero degrees of latitude.

At those latitudes, Earth’s magnetic field is measurably weaker and less uniform.

The magnetic signature a steel ship creates in the local field, the precise signature the Mark 6 was designed to detect, is fundamentally different closer to the equator.

The exploder had been calibrated for the wrong ocean.

The results were a grotesque double failure.

Sometimes the Mark 6 detonated the torpedo hundreds of yards before reaching the target, triggered by a magnetic anomaly in the water itself or by variations in the ocean surface field.

The torpedo would explode in open water and the subers would think they had hit something.

They hadn’t.

Other times, the torpedo would pass directly beneath a ship, exactly where it was supposed to be, and simply not fire because the ship’s magnetic signature at that latitude wasn’t strong enough to trigger a detonator calibrated for New England.

Now, think about what this looks like from inside a submarine.

You fire a torpedo.

You hear an explosion, but the ship keeps moving.

Was it a premature detonation? Did the torpedo miss? Did it run too deep? Did the magnetic exploder misfire? You cannot know because both flaw one and flaw two produce identical symptoms.

The torpedo doesn’t kill the target.

You cannot diagnose two simultaneous defects when they create the same failure mode.

And Buard had classified the Mark 6 so completely that submarine commanders weren’t even authorized to discuss its mechanics.

You couldn’t investigate what you weren’t allowed to know existed.

Rear Admiral Ralph Christie had been the officer in charge of developing the Mark 6 in the 1930s.

It was his invention, his professional legacy, the work of years of his life.

When submarine commanders reported premature detonations, Christy had a ready explanation.

Operator error, enemy counter measures, electromagnetic interference, everything except the obvious.

His exploder didn’t work at these latitudes.

He wasn’t dishonest.

He was a brilliant engineer who could not accept that something he had spent years building was fundamentally wrong.

History has a word for this.

It isn’t stupidity.

It isn’t malice.

It is institutional arrogance.

And while Washington argued men were dying, not directly from the torpedo failures themselves, but from what those failures forced.

A submarine that fires six torpedoes to do what one should have done stays in the danger zone longer.

Its acoustic signature expands.

The escort that should never have known it was there gets a second chance, a third chance.

Some of those submarines never came home.

This wasn’t only an American story, and the comparison is important.

In April 1940, Gunterprin, Germany’s most celebrated yubot commander, the man who had sailed into the Royal Navy’s home anchorage at Scapa Flow and sunk HMS Royal Oak was in Bernafjur, Norway during Operation Vaserubong.

He had eight British troop transports in front of him, stationary, loaded.

He fired eight torpedoes.

All eight missed or failed to detonate.

He reported to Admiral Dunits.

I could hardly be expected to fight with a dummy rifle.

The German torpedo department responded the same way Buard did.

They blamed the crews.

It required a formal court marshal investigation to force the fix.

The German G7E torpedo had almost identical problems.

Leaky balanced chambers causing deep running.

Magnetic exploders calibrated for the wrong latitude.

Two different navies, two different hemispheres, the same weapon philosophy, the same institutional refusal to accept that the weapon was wrong.

the same arrogance.

The difference, Germany fixed its torpedo crisis in months.

America took 21.

By the spring of 1943, the magnetic exploder debate had reached the highest levels of naval command.

Admiral Ernest King, chief of naval operations, had essentially applied a blowtorrch to Board’s leadership.

The complaints from field commanders were undeniable.

And one submarine commander in particular was making noise that everyone in Washington could hear.

His name was Dudley Morton.

His boat was USS Wahoo.

And the way he operated, aggressive, relentless, innovative, was simultaneously an indictment of every submarine commander who had been told his failed attacks were his own fault.

Morton didn’t wait for perfect conditions.

He invented new ones.

In January 1943, he took Wahoo into Weiwok Harbor, a Japanese-held anchorage to attack surface ships at point blank range.

He pioneered the down the throat shot, firing directly at an incoming destroyer.

He sank more ships in his first three patrols under his command than most submarines managed in a year.

And he did it despite the torpedoes.

Wahoo’s official records note that on her fifth war patrol, faulty torpedo performance cut her results, probably by as much as 1/ half.

Morton was burning twice the ammunition to achieve half the potential damage.

He was running twice the risk, staying in danger zones twice as long.

In April 1943, Buard finally admitted what Lockwood had proven the previous June.

The magnetic exploder was susceptible to premature detonations.

Even then, the formal deactivation order signed by Admiral Nimttz himself didn’t come until July 24th, 1943.

July 24th, 1943.

Remember that date because on that exact same morning on the other side of the Pacific, Dan Daspit was lining up his periscope on the Ton in Maru.

The deactivation order meant contact exploders only.

No more magnetic detonation.

hit the hull, the pin fires, the warhead explodes.

Simple, mechanical, reliable.

Except nobody had properly tested the contact exploder under combat conditions either, because for 20 months, the torpedo had been running too deep to make reliable contact.

And when it did make contact, the magnetic exploder was supposed to fire first.

The contact pin had never been stress tested at 46 knots against a real hull.

Nobody knew this yet.

They were about to.

Men like Lieutenant Commander James Co didn’t stop going out.

They kept filing their reports, kept going back down underwater with weapons their superiors told them were fine.

Every dive they made with the defective torpedo was an act of professional courage that earned no medals and received no recognition.

If their story matters to you, if the record should reflect what they actually faced, a like on this video is a small thing, but it keeps that record visible.

And visibility is the only thing history has left to offer them.

Part three, the weapon that punished good aim.

July 24th, 1943.

The same morning, Nimttz signed the deactivation order for the magnetic exploder.

Dan Daspit’s first four torpedoes at the Tonin Maru.

Two hit at awkward angles and detonated.

The tanker’s engines stopped.

11 torpedoes fired afterward at broadside at ideal range.

At the perfect 90° angle that submariners were trained to shoot for.

All hit, none detonated.

11 straight duds on a stationary defenseless target at ranges as close as 875 yards.

Notice what Daspid noticed.

Two torpedoes detonated.

They were the ones fired at oblique, awkward angles, not ideal shots.

Then the contact exploder was switched in.

Then 11 perfect shots failed.

Not randomly, specifically.

Only the textbook shots were failing.

Daspit was a precision thinker.

He wrote down every shot, every time, the angle, the range, the result.

And after the 11th dud, he made a decision that required more discipline than anyone who has never sat in a submarine tube in wartime can fully appreciate.

He had one torpedo left.

He could have fired it.

One more attempt.

One more chance to sink the biggest tanker in the Japanese fleet dead in the water right there.

He didn’t fire it.

He’d already decided his patrol report entry had already decided to retain one torpedo for examination by base.

He brought it home.

Lockwood’s memoir records what happened when Daspit walked into his office at Pearl Harbor.

I expected a torrent of cuss words damning me.

The Bureau of Ordinance, the Newport torpedo station, and the base torpedo shop, and I couldn’t have blamed him.

19,000 ton tankers don’t grow on trees.

What Lockwood got instead was a torpedo in a log.

The engineers at Pearl Harbor tested the contact exploder immediately.

What they found was the third flaw.

and it was the most mathematically absurd mechanical failure of the entire scandal.

The contact exploers firing pin was designed correctly in principle, but was too fragile for the specific combination of speed and angle that submarine doctrine demanded.

At a perfect 90° broadside hit, the ideal firing geometry, the shot every commander was trained to take, the shot that created the maximum hull contact, the impact was too violent for the pin to complete its function.

The force of hitting a ship’s hull at 46 knots perpendicular drove the firing pin against the detonator mechanism so hard and so fast that the pin crumpled before it could strike the primer.

The physical collision destroyed the detonator faster than the detonator could fire.

But at a glancing angle, an oblique, imperfect, less than ideal hit.

The reduced force allowed the pin to travel correctly.

The pin had time to move.

The detonator fired.

The better your aim, the less likely your torpedo was to explode.

Let that settle.

The official training doctrine, aim for broadside, maximize the hit angle, set up the textbook shot, was producing textbook duds.

And this had been true since December 7th, 1941.

Every commander who had placed his torpedo perfectly at 90° and heard a clang instead of an explosion, they were doing everything exactly right.

The weapon was punishing them for precision.

Now look at the cascade.

The torpedo runs 11 ft too deep, so it often passes under a ship entirely.

When it does make contact, the magnetic exploder, calibrated for the wrong hemisphere, fires prematurely or not at all.

When the magnetic exploder is finally deactivated and the torpedo runs correctly, the contact pin crumples at exactly the shot angle the doctrine prescribes.

Flaw one, masked flaw two.

Flaw two, masked flaw three.

You cannot diagnose the firing pin if the torpedo rarely hits anything at the right depth.

You cannot see the contact pin failure when the magnetic exploder is supposed to fire first.

Each flaw made the next one invisible.

This is why 21 months passed.

It wasn’t stupidity.

It wasn’t one lazy inspector or one bad engineer.

It was a cascade of failure modes that were architecturally designed to mask each other and an institution that interpreted every unexplained failure as crew error rather than weapon error.

Think about what Buard had told submarine commanders for 18 months.

Perfect broadside shot, perfect angle.

That’s how you sink a ship.

That was the official doctrine, the training standard, the metric by which commanders were evaluated.

And every commander who followed that doctrine and heard a clang instead of an explosion was told, “You must have done something wrong.

Your aim, your targeting data, your execution, never the weapon, never the pin.

” Lockwood ordered the definitive tests at Cahulawi Island, Hawaii.

His team fired live torpedoes at underwater cliffs to isolate the contact exploder under direct impact conditions.

They dropped weighted dummy warheads from a crane at different angles to measure pin behavior across impact speeds.

The results were precise and damning.

At a direct 90° impact, the failure rate was approximately 70%.

At oblique angles, the mechanism functioned reliably.

This time, perhaps because the war was now almost 2 years old, perhaps because the Pacific campaign was in genuine danger, Buard responded promptly.

The contact exploder was redesigned.

A heavier, more robust firing pin engineered to function correctly under direct impact.

Tests confirm the fix.

By September 1943, corrected exploders were being shipped to the Pacific Fleet.

21 months, three flaws.

All three found in the field by the men Buard had spent two years accusing of incompetence.

All three fixed by field engineers under the authority of field commanders always as Clay Blair wrote over the stubborn opposition of the Bureau of Ordinance.

But before we get to the numbers, before we look at what happened when the weapon finally worked, there is a cost to calculate.

A cost that doesn’t appear in any official tally.

Part four, the bill.

Let’s look at the numbers honestly because this is the forensic audit and the audit doesn’t end at the engineering fix.

In 1942, a full year of defective torpedoes, American submarines conducted approximately 350 war patrols and sank around 180 Japanese ships.

In 1943, partial fixes coming in through the year.

Magnetic exploder deactivated in July, contact pin fix arriving in September.

The same patrol count produced approximately 335 ships sunk, nearly double the 1942 figure.

In 1944, the first full year with all three defects corrected, 520 patrols produced 603 ships sunk, more than the previous two years of the war combined.

The same submarines, the same crews, the same commanders, the same ocean.

The only variable that changed was whether the torpedo detonated when it hit something.

Now ask the harder question.

What were those 180 ships in 1942 actually supposed to be? American submarines fired $1,442 torpedoes in 1942.

That is over $14 million in weapons expenditure at $10,000 per torpedo.

Those torpedoes were hitting ships.

The patrol reports confirm it.

Commanders heard the impacts, sometimes felt the submarine shudder from the detonation pressure of a nearby explosion.

Many of those ships escaped because the weapon that hit them didn’t fire.

But the dollar figure is the least important part of this calculation.

Submarines that fired multiple torpedo spreads because one working torpedo wasn’t enough stayed in the kill zone longer.

Their propulsion noise expanded their acoustic signature.

The escort ship that should never have located them had more time to get a fix, more time to drop depth charges.

Some of those submarines never came home.

52 American submarines were lost in the Pacific during the war.

The precise contribution of the torpedo scandal to those losses is not calculable with certainty.

But the physics are clear.

When you fire eight torpedoes to do what two should have done, your exposure time triples and your vulnerability multiplies.

The official USS Wahoo record is instructive.

On her fifth war patrol, faulty torpedo performance cut her results probably by as much as one half.

That is the official US Navy’s own language.

This was Mush Morton’s boat, the most aggressive submarine commander in the Pacific.

The man who rewrote the doctrine on how submarines should fight.

His results were hald by defective weapons.

Morton died on October 11th, 1943.

USS Wahoo was sunk with all 79 hands while attempting to exit the Sea of Japan through La Peru’s Strait.

She had just completed a successful patrol.

Four ships sunk.

She went down under sustained air and surface attack.

The wreck was found in 2006 on the floor of the Sea of Japan.

Her crew is still aboard.

Morton died one month after the torpedo fix was complete.

Now, I want you to meet a man named Eugene Flucky.

Not because he’s famous, though he should be far more famous than he is, because his story puts the numbers back into human dimension.

Flucky took command of USS Barb in May 1944, eight months after the corrected torpedoes reached the fleet.

Under his command, Barb sank 17 Japanese ships.

He earned four Navy crosses and the Medal of Honor.

He sent a landing party ashore on Sackelin Island, the only US ground combat operation on Japanese territory during the entire war to blow up a train.

He set a world speed record for submarines at 23.

5 knots while escaping a Japanese harbor through a minefield in the dark.

He survived every patrol without a single crew member killed or seriously injured.

They called him Lucky Flucky.

He insisted it had nothing to do with luck.

Luck is where you find it.

But by God, you’ve got to go out there and find it.

He was methodical, obsessive about preparation, relentless about understanding his enemy’s behavior patterns.

He was, in short, the same kind of officer the Pacific submarine fleet had always had.

He just got to do his job with a weapon that worked.

Flucky didn’t become a great commander in 1944.

He was the same officer with the same crew with the same training.

What changed in 1944 was that when he pulled the trigger, the weapon fired.

The submarine commanders of 1942 were not less brave than Flucky, not less skilled, not less aggressive.

Some of them were more aggressive.

They didn’t they just couldn’t show it because aggression requires a weapon that works.

The men who went on patrol through 1942 and into 1943 with defective torpedoes were paying a price the institution refused to acknowledge for 21 months.

There is one more detail from the Tonan Maru story that deserves to be told because it is almost too ironic to be real.

After Desperate left her listing in the Pacific and dove to avoid the incoming destroyer after he surfaced hours later to find her still floating, he requested that a second submarine be dispatched to finish the job.

The order that came back returned to Pearl Harbor.

The Tonin Maru was taken under tow by Japanese rescue vessels.

She was towed to Trrook.

She was repaired.

She returned to service.

She was finally sunk 7 months later on February 17th, 1944 by carrierbased aircraft during Operation Hailstone.

Aerial bombs from USS Bunker Hills strike aircraft did what 11 Mark1 14 torpedoes could not.

The ship that proved the contact exploder was broken survived long enough to be killed by a different weapon entirely.

If your father or grandfather served on submarines during the war or on destroyer escorts or on the ships that depended on submarine activity to protect their supply lines.

I would be honored to read their story in the comments.

What boat? What ocean? What year? Those details matter more than any archive I can access.

The official patrol reports are incomplete.

The men who were there knew things that never made it into any document.

If you carry their story, please share it here.

Part five, the verdict.

September 1943, 21 months and three weeks after Pearl Harbor, the first corrected Mark1 14 torpedoes with the redesigned, heavier contact firing pin are shipped to the Pacific Fleet, not a different weapon, not a replacement.

The same torpedo with three specific, documented, correctable mechanical problems now addressed.

three flaws that could have been found with a live fire test in 1935, 1937, or 1939, before the war, before the casualties, before the 21 months of patrol reports full of clangs.

All three problems had been identified and solved in the field, not by Newport, not by Buard, by the engineers working at Pearl Harbor and Fremantle under the authority of Lockwood and other field commanders.

Clay Blair in Silent Victory: The Definitive History of the American Submarine War, wrote this.

After 21 months of war, the three major defects of the Mark1 14 torpedo had at last been isolated.

Each defect had been discovered and fixed in the field, always over the stubborn opposition of the Bureau of Ordinance.

That sentence is not an editorial comment.

It is an institutional indictment.

Now, look at what happened.

1944 becomes the most devastating year for Japanese shipping in the entire war.

By early 1944, American submarines are so effective that commanders are struggling to find targets.

The Japanese merchant fleet, which entered the war with roughly 6 million tons of cargo capacity, is reduced to 2 million tons by August 1945.

Of that 2 million tons, only 320,000 was in condition to actually carry anything.

The Japanese cabinet, reporting to the National Diet after the surrender, named the destruction of merchant shipping as the greatest cause of defeat, not the atomic bombs, not the island hopping campaign, the submarines.

American submarines made up less than 2% of the US Navy by ship count.

They sank 54.

6% 6% of all Japanese vessels lost during the war.

That was the potential.

Available from December 1941 with the same crews, the same boats, the same tactics, throttled for 21 months by three mechanical flaws and one institutional refusal to acknowledge them.

Buard was not staffed by villains.

The engineers at Newport were talented.

But the administrators who defended the Mark1 14 were most of them genuinely convinced they were right.

Christy was brilliant.

He simply could not accept that his invention was wrong.

There’s a word for what happened at Buard.

Not fraud, not negligence in the legal sense.

The word is insularity.

An institution so convinced of its own competence that it built a wall between itself and the evidence.

The secrecy that was supposed to protect the Mark 6 from enemy intelligence also protected it from friendly scrutiny.

The same classification that kept the Germans from studying the magnetic exploder kept American submarine commanders from diagnosing its failure.

Buard had accidentally built a weapon that was immune to its own users reports.

That is the most important thing to understand about the Mark1 14 scandal.

It was not a conspiracy.

It was something more dangerous than a conspiracy.

It was a system that rewarded confidence and punished doubt.

A system where admitting a flaw meant admitting responsibility for the flaw.

Where the men who reported failures were by institutional logic challenging the credibility of the institution where the institution’s response to being challenged was to challenge back with more authority with the power to relieve commanders and dismiss reports.

Every bureaucracy has some version of this reflex.

Every large institution protects itself with the same tools.

Classified information, credential authority, the ability to define what counts as valid evidence.

The difference is that most institutional arrogance doesn’t put men on the ocean floor.

There’s also something uncomfortable to acknowledge here.

The fixes worked.

The 1944 numbers are real.

The submarine campaign was decisive.

But the Tanosa incident was not unique.

It was just the most dramatic and precisely documented example of a pattern that had been appearing in patrol reports for 20 months.

Before Daspit’s log, there were dozens like it.

Less systematic, less precise, less backed by a physical torpedo preserved as evidence.

The pattern was visible if anyone had looked at the reports together instead of dismissing each one in isolation.

Why did it take the Tenosa specifically to force the issue? probably because Daspit did something nobody else thought to do.

He didn’t fire his last torpedo.

He brought evidence home.

Everyone else had fired everything they had and written a report.

Reports can be dismissed.

A torpedo sitting on a dock in Pearl Harbor.

Cannot.

Dan Daspit was promoted to full commander after his Tanosa patrol.

He received the Navy Cross.

He went on to complete more patrols.

He survived the war.

In the autumn of 1943, when the corrected contact exploders reached the fleet and the kill rate finally started climbing, Daspit knew something the statistics couldn’t quite capture.

He knew what a clang sounds like when it’s supposed to sound like an explosion.

He knew what it means to fire torpedo number eight at a dead ship and write in your log, “Hit.

” No apparent effect.

Somewhere in the Pacific, a Japanese tanker he had hit 11 times was still alive, carrying the oil he had tried 11 times to deny it.

The torpedo failed Daspit 11 times.

Daspit did not fail the torpedo once.

He filed the report.

He kept the evidence.

He put a piece of metal on a dock in Pearl Harbor and said, “The problem is here.

Test it.

” And because he did that, because one commander refused to accept that 11 duds on a stationary ship was operator error, September 1943 happened.

The fix happened.

The numbers climbed.

Some men change history by winning battles.

Daspit changed it by refusing to fire his last torpedo.

The verdict.

Forensic summary.

Here is the final bill.

The Mark1 14 torpedo had three defects.

Everyone correctable.

Everyone found without the help of the institution that designed the weapon.

Everyone fixed in the field by the people who actually used it under conditions the designers never tested.

The depth mechanism ran 11 ft deep because no one tested it at combat speed.

The magnetic exploder was calibrated for the wrong hemisphere because no one tested it in the Pacific.

The contact firing pin failed under direct impact because no one tested it against a real hull at 46 knots.

Three test failures.

21 months of war.

The numbers.

1942.

180 ships sunk.

1944.

603 ships sunk.

Same submarines.

Same men.

A different trigger.

The cost.

Not fully countable.

Failed attacks.

Exposed submarines.

Crews that never came home.

ships that escaped and continued carrying oil to Japanese engines and steel to Japanese guns.

A tanker hit 11 times that survived to carry fuel for seven more months.

And the lesson, the one that every institution eventually learns the hard way if it’s lucky enough to survive long enough to learn it at all.

The most dangerous defect is never the one you can see.

It’s the one that prevents you from seeing the others.

Fix the depth problem and the magnetic exploder’s failure becomes visible.

Fix the magnetic exploder and the contact pins failure becomes visible.

But fix nothing.

Insist the weapon is perfect and the men are wrong and all three defects remain hidden, nested, masking each other, invisible.

Buor didn’t just build three flaws into the Mark1 14.

It built an institutional system that made those flaws impossible to diagnose.

And then it spent 21 months defending that system while American submariners brought home patrol reports full of clangs.

The Mark1 14 torpedo didn’t fail because it was badly designed.

It failed because the institution that built it refused to believe it could be wrong.

And that belief, not the engineering, not the budget cuts, not the depression era frugality.

That belief is what caused 21 months of the most important naval campaign in American history.

Daspit knew that the moment torpedo number three hit the tone in Maru and he felt nothing.

He just didn’t have the evidence yet until he saved one.

If this forensic audit gave you something to think about about the Pacific War, about how institutions fail, about the distance between official records and what actually happened, hit that like button.

It helps this channel reach the viewers who care about getting the history right, not the version where the weapons always worked and the heroes always won.

The version where men went to sea anyway, filed their reports and kept going back out.

Subscribe if you want the next chapter.

Every video on this channel goes past the battlefield and into the systems, the decisions, and the people who made them.

Because war is not just weapons, it is bureaucracies.

And sometimes the most dangerous enemy is the one with a desk and a file cabinet and 21 months of paperwork defending a weapon that never worked.

And these men had names.

They had patrol reports.

They had log entries that said again and again, “Fired torpedo, hit, no apparent effect.

” They deserve a history that doesn’t smooth over the clangs.