The Mark 14 Torpedo - Failure is Like Onions

[Music] [Music] ah yes the mark 14 torpedo so many questions who invented the mark 14 what was the mark 14 why was the mark 14 well the origins of the mark 14 to read are actually relatively unremarkable the US Navy had a perfectly serviceable torpedo in the shape of the mark 10 which dated from World War one but this weapon had a number of shortcomings by the time of the early 1930s it's near quarter ton warhead was substantial but newer capital ships had been designed to withstand worse its effective range and speed were also now best described as uncomfortably close and pedestrian with a number of destroyers in many navies coming into service ostensibly having top speeds that were flat-out faster than the mark 10 meaning that a simple turn away and run for a few thousand yards would be a 100% guaranteed escape for these vessels and some cruisers were not much slower the introduction of the newer larger fleet submarines meant that whilst the 21 inch diameter would be kept the torpedo tubes themselves could be made longer to accommodate a longer torpedo which would then have more fuel and a more advanced engine as well as an extra crewmen's body weight in explosives design work would start in 1931 and would eventually yield a weapon capable of traveling almost three times as far as the mark 10 when it was going at similar speeds or around a thousand yards further than the older weapon at substantially higher speeds other work was being done to try and improve the speed at which the torpedo would actually level out at its design cruising depth as well as further work ensuring that the gyroscope which was a key part of keeping the torpedo going in a straight line remained powered throughout its journey whereas a number of ships in World War one had either gone down or been sent packing by a single torpedo hits due to either relatively or in some cases completely lacking underwater affection by now Neera ships had extensive torpedo defense systems and even older vessels were being refitted with bulges this in turn meant that torpedoes had to evolve you could of course pack in more boom which was always a good thing but the weapon itself had size restrictions even in the newer subs so you could try the new technique that had been derived from observations of underwater explosions in World War one especially those of German so-called magnetic mines which had been borne out in subsequent testing in the early 1920s and that was to go for an under keel detonation whilst this is a fundamental part of modern torpedo design back in the interwar period it was brand-new and also faced a rather considerable problem all torpedoes at this point had used contact to detonators mr. torpedo running deeper under the target's keel would of course not hit anything so how would you set one off in the right place the solution appeared to be the rod ler rather bluntly named mark 6 exploder this was a new kind of detonator that did not rely on physical contact but rather the change in magnetic field created by the ferrous metals that made up the hull and major internal systems of modern warships when the weapon passed into this magnetic disturbance it would trigger the detonator it seemed a perfect solution and other navies were indeed 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 this point however the problems would first start to develop work on the mark 6 was viewed paradoxically as an absolute top secret technology despite the fact that it was inspired by what was at the time a decade-old technology that had been used by another nation this paranoia ran to the point that once the manual describing how the new detonator worked was actually written it was then locked away in a safe where nobody who could actually use the thing in service would ever be able to access it presumably in a basement behind a sign saying beware of the leopard further issues would arise during testing tests by each nation on their own magnetic destination devices took place in wealthy areas of the ocean that they happen to have access to shockingly enough and this meant that the sensitivity of the detonator and the relative change in the magnetic field that was induced by ship's hull was relevant only to that and a few similar areas of the world which was something that will come back to haunt all navies who tried to use this technology in the early part of World War two this was because the magnetic field of the earth is not in fact constant all over the planet it varies by location especially by latitude but local geological makeup and sometimes even the time of year can also affect this field strength this could therefore result in a torpedo that was configured in one location but live fired elsewhere either not functioning at all as a weaker magnetic field would not activate the detonator or else explode far too soon as a stronger field would trip the detonators almost the moment they were active the former issue would largely plagued the Germans and the latter issue would largely affect the British until workarounds were established during the Second World War but since this was not yet a known factor and the US Navy happily gathered information based on testing around the equatorial regions of the world and would develop the sensitivities of the mark six exploder based on this data once these investigative test runs were done the new mark 14 torpedo promised to be a new and lethal addition to the US Navy's arsenal with the first production torpedoes being rolled out all that was left was a few full live-fire tests to determine that all the various systems have been thrown together were working as intended in sync with each other but here Congress's determination to throttle the US Navy out of every loose nickel and dimed came to the fore as well as the somewhat disjointed relationship between various boards of development all of which ostensibly were working for the same goal the Navy itself offered an old destroyer that was destined for scrap as a target but they didn't want the additional expense of having to refloat it and the loss of scrap value that blowing large parts of it off would entail and so they insisted that the Bureau of ordnance pay for any such cost that were involved in the testing of what they saw as the Bureau of Ordinances torpedo a board declined to pay out and so the life.i tests were never actually done there was also the cost of the weapon itself at $10,000 per torpedo in 1930s money each weapon cost almost as much as a then brand-new f2f fighter and once delivered the USN was somewhat reluctant to blow up such an investment unless they absolutely had to and so it was directed that any tests that might be done in the future would not use a live warhead but instead instead a dummy warhead made of balancing weights was installed purely to ensure that the torpedo remained balanced on its run and didn't act like a gigantic explosive porpoise coupled with this were issues involving actually getting enough torpedoes out there to the fleet in the first place whilst they were ammunition a torpedo is far more complex and took far longer to build than a shell for a naval gun even a battleship shell torpedoes remember are effectively small self-guiding kamikaze submarines and so unless you have a large factory and an extensive production line going you're only gonna see handfuls produced each year after experiencing serious problems in World War one having received in the course of the entire war only enough torpedoes for a couple of major engagements and the US Navy had invested heavily in expanding torpedo production especially in anticipation of the vast numbers of torpedoes that would be needed by the clemson swarm and their leaders the Omaha class cruisers but the Washington Naval Treaty had seen most of that particular fleet sent into reserve all to the scrapyard as well as general funding pretty much collapse and so several million dollars of investment in torpedo production went away almost as fast as the factory had been constructed all this meant that by the 1930s there was precisely one factory capable of designing building and testing torpedoes which also meant that no one was around who could check on the claimed performance of the mark 14 despite the rather obvious bias that the manufacturer would have in reporting namely that of course everything was absolutely perfect the small budgets that were available also meant small orders which would mean fewer machines and fewer workers and so even as the US Navy began to pick up the pace of construction as the 1930s rolled on and began to order more and more torpedoes and the bemused factory you found itself struggling to keep up with the increasing demand and expand at the same time with orders coming in for submarine torpedoes destroyer torpedoes aerial torpedoes and torpedoes suitable for PT boats a rather large backlog began to build with torpedo production averaging just over half a dozen of types combined every week and even by the late 1930s as the factory had hit its expansion limits a backlog of hundreds and then thousands of torpedoes was opening up and this in turn left the US Navy even more hesitant than ever to risk losing even one of the precious mark 14 stock in any kind of live fire test emergency measures were taken towards the end of the decade the old factory the US Navy had briefly run during and shortly after World War one that had been shuttered was restarted after some rather clever political maneuvering by the US Navy 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 just to keep torpedo production in their particular state this end run opening the factory managed to bring production levels up to a mighty three torpedoes per day against a u.s. Navy target of 50 per day as Europe descended into war more money and 24/7 production was unlocked but the production rate would still remain at less than half the targeted rate in desperation the US Navy began contracting out to various other companies including the carmaker Pontiac the American can company who really missed a trick building frigates as well as a combine harvester maker and a number of other companies of increasingly implausible titles brink Ames - well weapons of warfare then of course war came to American soil in the form of the Kido butas early-morning wake-up call to Pearl Harbor and they'd rather inconsiderately managed to blow up over 200 of the carefully husbanded mark for teens in the process all of this meant that as American submarines surged out from various ports into their first major battle which was to save or at least stall the Imperial Japanese assault on the Philippines and they were using a weapon that had never actually been tested in live firing of which they had precious for you in the first place and for which the instruction manual for the most sensitive and technically advanced part the device was slowly collecting milled you in a safe on the other side of the Pacific but with an all-out assault by the Japanese under way shortages or not the US Navy submariners were going to fire their torpedoes at any targets they could find this being basically the first live firing cycle for the mark 14 was when the problems began to show up within weeks of the start of operations reports began to come in and they were not good and torpedoes were being fired but ships were rather inconveniently staying afloat torpedoes had been observed sailing under ships without exploding other times they were exploding far too early and still others have plowed headlong into their targets with the crash of over a ton of metal slamming into a ship highway speed echoing through the ocean and back to the hydrophone operators aboard u.s. submarines but few if any were actually doing their job of exploding on target more worryingly a number of submarines were simply vanishing without any sign or report of engagement either from them or by the enemy as it turned out the mark 14 had more than one problem but they were stacking on top of each other which at the start masked the extent of the issue on top of this the bureau of ordnance absolutely refused to accept the rising criticism and growing anger of the u.s. submarines captains insisting that their wonder weapon was absolutely perfect and it was in fact the submariners fault they were simply incompetent be awed said and they weren't using the torpedo correctly they also reiterated that no there would not be any tests especially now when torpedoes were being expended faster than they could be produced this was despite the captains of both USS sargo and USS seadragon among stutters even going 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's warships and transports that they were targeting serenely sail away into the sunset with nary a scratch of paint on their hulls to show for it the first suspect wasn't actually the mark 6 detonator but rather the mark fourteens torpedo depth setting although field fixes had still yielded little in terms of results these weapons that had been fixed by the crews aboard the submarines were at least scraping paint off of the targets as opposed to motoring along far below bothering the local fish bureau of ordnance his first reaction when they learned of this was to recommend disciplinary action against any US Navy officer who'd made alterations ostensibly for improper maintenance of the mark 14 which made consent in you to insist was absolutely fine meanwhile back in the real world the newly promoted Rear Admiral Lockwood had taken over command of u.s. submarine efforts in the most active part of the Pacific campaign with summer of 1942 approaching his forces had fired off more than a year's production of mark for teens in around six months and had precious little to show for it he decided that the awards decree or not he was going to conduct some tests and get to the bottom of this USS skip Jack was corralled for the task and a torpedo with a dummy warhead was dutifully fired at a torpedo net set for a running depth of 10 feet with the idea that the torpedo would punch a hole in the net as it passed showing where the torpedo was actually running as they reeled the net in 10-foot showed no hole then came 15-foot then 20-foot eventually after 25 feet of netting had come up a hole was revealed at that depth only a heavily loaded battleship would have been hit and even then a lucky swell might well carry anything short of the Yamato herself clear of such a torpedo to further tests the following day showed similar results with the average difference between the depth setting on the torpedo and the actual depth that traveled out being around 11 feet board was absolutely furious that their instructions to not test the torpedo had been disregarded but unfortunately for them and fortunately for the u.s. submariners the news of the tests also got to Admiral King who was chief of naval operations at the time and yes that Admiral King and if there's one thing King hated more than enemies of the US Navy or the British which to his mind sometimes were synonymous it was people who shortchanged his sailors within weeks of the tests man shortly after a number of visits and letters from Admiral King B Ward's tone suddenly changed it now admitted that yes in fact the torpedo was running deep and shortly thereafter one imagines Admiral King's standing behind the official and twisting their arm just that little bit further and they admitted that no they hadn't actually done any proper design or testing of the depth keeping device the reasons for this failure were manifold but primarily related to the very few tests had been done pre-war in these a dummy warhead was fitted as previously described 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 thus could be easily recovered this in turn meant that to run at the desired depth of the torpedo had to correct considerably more downwards than it would have had to do if the real heavier warhead had been aboard thus with the heavier actual explosive in place the torpedo would force itself deeper than was otherwise desired this was compounded by a number of other factors the warhead size had been slightly increased since the mark 14 had first been put into service which made it heavier still and thus dragged it down further still also the device is used to measure the depth of a test torpedo both onshore and the recorder built into the weapon had errors in their design that led to an artificially shallow result being recorded the on-board depth sensor that fed into the control fins was also compromised by its position previous such pressure measuring devices had been mounted along the body of a torpedo but the mark fourteens was installed on the cone-shaped tail in this area where water flowed back around the torpedo and it was also in the vicinity of the propeller the local water pressure was somewhat lower than average for the given depth thus given giving the depth control device a falsely shallow reading and so even deeper the door pedo went this last was an especially wonderful thing as this problem would only show up when the torpedo was actually moving if you simply placed a weapon in a tank at a given depth it would of course 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 thus indicate the actual issue somewhat mask though it may have been by all the other errors in the recording device itself still with this issue now identified on some US subs the skipper's simply dialed the depth setting down down to practically nothing the torpedoes would now at least run a depth where they should be hitting the target until a more permanent fix which was moving the depth sensor port back to the middle of the torpedo body could be implemented on newly built weapons as the summer of 1942 rolled on the mark 14 was now at least roughly the right depth however more and more reports were now arriving of weapons that were simply smashing into a target without exploding or else exploding very short something which had been present in small amounts earlier but would now account for the majority of the failures the Imperial Japanese he remained irritatingly afloat with most successes to date credited 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 multiple attacks on the Japanese carriers were launched by lucky u.s. submarines with over a dozen torpedoes having the potential to sink several carriers ending up simply detonating in open water along with several others that would hit but didn't explode and a couple that by some miracle actually did their job and damaged their targets on what in that particular case it was the carrier geo but the ship survived as to other torpedoes in the salvo which likely would have finished off completely failed to work once again the initial behind the lines belief was that though there was no problem sir the super secret magnetic detonator must be working perfectly after all we invented it but this was not the case the magnetic field near the area where initial development trials had been run was somewhat weaker than the magnetic field did the area where the torpedoes were actually being used and so what was happening now was that with this much stronger magnetic field the torpedoes were detonating when they detected a disturbance in line with their calibration except that this disturbance was well before the target and with the stronger fields tripping the detonator too early when they worked at all the torpedo would simply shower the target ship with sea spray running the torpedo somewhat deeper would in theory allow it to get closer as the overall field strength of the ship would diminish with depth but nobody was going to set a mark 14 to run deep again for a little while after the incidents earlier in the war a year and a half into the conflict and with little to show for their efforts u.s. submariners we're deactivating the detonators of their own accord against orders with Bureau experts coming out and issuing reports that once again blamed the crews for not using their weapons properly and despite these same experts making constant mistakes in setting up the torpedoes that they were supposed to know everything about to the point of the submarines crews having to correct the experts work to prevent the subsequent launch finally resulting in something being sunk namely of the Submariner that had just launched a Mach 14 this in spite of the fact that premature explosions had actually been a known issue to board for about three years at this point but of course they couldn't be seen to lose face finally almost two years into the war reality began to sink in yet again and orders filtered through the fleet to deactivate the mark six magnetic exploder with one final holdout reactron Christie finally being overruled by more senior officers the reason for Christie's refusal well he'd been on the team that had helped to develop the mark six and would sooner believe that his entire command namely the Australian based us submarine units was full of utter ranking competence rather than admit he might in some way possibly have made a mistake two decades earlier and so with the primary detonator deactivated and the depth control issue on its way to being fixed the remaining issue was that a quite a large number of torpedoes were now in fact hitting their targets but not detonating at all this made little sense at first because well the mark 14 did have a backup contact detonator surely this system couldn't be malfunctioning as well well that question could be answered in extreme detail and with a lot of colorful language by the crew of the USS tin OSA who had come across a Japanese whaling ship and unleashed no fewer than 15 torpedoes into it scoring 13 hits enough to put any vessel on the ocean floor let alone a relative small 19,000 ton civilian whaling ship instead with only one torpedo left to their name the crew simply heard clang after clang after crash as duds poked tiny holes in their prey the last weapon aboard was brought back to port where board dutifully reported that of course there was absolutely nothing wrong with it however the US Navy's officers were becoming less and less intimidated by boards bluster and more tests were conducted shortly thereafter at Pearl Harbor involving both firing torpedoes at nearby cliffs as well as dropping torpedo heads off of a gantry onto the ground with only the contact detonator enabled and no warhead obviously what they found was that in almost three-quarters of cases hits the impacted perpendicular to the target the ideal angle that your sub commanders were trying to aim for a failed to explode however they did also find that an impacts at an angle tended to work slightly more often and so immediate orders were issued to go against pre-war training and try and aim torpedoes to strike targets at an angle this saw some improvement at once but duds were still a major problem and back ashore further 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 whereas you might imagine that a detonator pin should be in line with the torpedoes direction of travel in the case of this particular lineage of contact detonators board in their infinite wisdom had decided to align the pin at 90 degrees to the line of travel of the torpedo so that when the torpedo slammed into a target the deceleration would force the pin sideways against its mounting the friction slowing or stopping it from activating completely until the deceleration was over unfortunately the deceleration being over usually correspond to the entire mechanism being destroyed by the torpedo head smashing itself headlong into the ship's hull the angled approach had some success because the impact was spread out over slightly longer period and the direction of travel was now slightly closer to the firing pins line of travel which reduced the level of friction on the mounting and gave a slightly higher chance for the device to actually work although this had been a problem as mentioned previously in the older thirty not mark ten torpedo the Bureau of ordnance had simply assumed that using the same slightly stronger mounting spring that they'd eventually used to solve the problem in the older weapon the detonator would work absolutely fine at the much higher forty six dot impact speed that the mark fourteen was capable of when fired up close the idea being that with a more powerful spring the pin would travel across and detonate before the deceleration could pin it against the side of its mounting needless to say and shockingly enough they were wrong and needless to say if they've done some actual testing before the war this issue along with all the others would also have been picked up a short-term solution was devised by the machinists at Pearl Harbor by replacing the firing pin and other parts related to it with copies that were made of aluminium the lighter parts having less inertia and thus somewhat less resistance to the springs sideways movement even when they were undergoing a high-speed deceleration in new-build weapons do orde would grudgingly grudgingly adopt an electric detonator that was triggered by a simple ball switch but by now winter of 1943 approached almost two years into the war and the mark 14 was finally now mostly working several thousand torpedoes and dozens of missed targets later there was still a remaining issue of faulty gyroscopes sometimes sending the torpedo spiraling back at the vessels that had launched them and this appears to have been responsible for at least two losses of u.s. submarines as well as a number of close calls and rather nasty scares but to be fair this was an issue that played more than just the mark 14 and indeed will show up on occasion in many other navies during the war and so whilst this particular failure was especially surely deadly and even more so once the mark 14 actually would start exploding it was not a particular failing of the mark 14 now shockingly once a torpedo traveled at something resembling the right depth with a detonator that actually worked the number of vessels that were sent by u.s. submarines suddenly began to rise helped by the introduction admittedly of torpex in 1942 a new form of explosive that was rather wittingly named torpex because it was the torpedo explosive which happened to give the torpedo a punch about 50% greater than its original tnt warhead had possessed indeed these fixed mark 4 teens would bag the single largest warship ever sunk by a submarine when USS archerfish sent the carrier Shinano to the bottom later in the war these fixes would also spread out to other weapons the mark 13 aerial torpedo the mark 15 aboard u.s. destroyers and the mark 18 aboard PT boats would all benefit from varying degree varying degrees from these solutions that had been arrived at with the mark 14 since their own issues stemmed from similar design failures by board ironically enough the US Navy managed to overcome its bottleneck of torpedo production around the same time that it overcame most of the issues with the Mach 14 and so by the end of the war huge stockpiles of perhaps the most reworked torpedo in existence were just sitting around whilst the Mach 14 would be improved into the mark 16 post-war using a number of features taken from German torpedoes so many mark fourteens remained in stock that they wouldn't actually leave US Navy service until the early 1980s albeit they were very much a second-line weapon by that point making this utter disaster of a B award project eventually morph into what was actually the longest serving torpedo in US Navy history the mark 14 and it's some questionable capabilities in the first couple of years of the war remains one of the greatest if somewhat less known what-ifs of World War two that have a relatively plausible point of change you see even a small live firing test program in the early 1930s might have resulted in the u.s. Navy entering the war with an actually functioning torpedo instead of the next best thing to sailing up to a target and raising a flag with the word bang written on it mounted on a periscope if this live-fire test program had happened and fixes had been implemented and the Japanese Navy might have found itself quite a few ships short prior even to the battles of Coral Sea and Midway and even if that somehow didn't change the forces available for those two battles the mark 13 aerial torpedo who was similarly affected by B Awards curse and so both the ineffectual Devastator attack using the mark 13 early on at Midway as well as the submarine attack on the battle cruiser Kirishima by submarine might both have borne fruit and whilst it may seem easy to dismiss boards conduct as simply saving money in the interwar period their continued obstruction of any and all attempts to solve the problems once the war began likely delayed the devising and implementation of solutions by a considerable amount of time depending on the source myths this is rated at least months possibly even up to a year or so the cost in time effort and of course lives of servicemen failed by their weapons all caused by this practically unforgivable behavior by beraud cannot be overlooked and definitely should not be forgotten that's it for this video thanks for watching if you have a comment or suggestion for a ship to review let us know in the comments below don't forget to comment on the pin post for drydock questions

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 805,365

Rating: 4.9220352 out of 5

Keywords: wows, world of warships, Mk14, torpedo, Admiral King, USN, WW2, IJN, Shinano, Mk6 exploder, BuOrd

Id: eQ5Ru7Zu_1I

Length: 33min 27sec (2007 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 12 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Rick-476]

A video detailing the development, manufacture, and usage of the Mark 14 Torpedo, a weapon given quite a bit attention in the earlier books. If you thought the torpedo was bad in the books, it's much worse in real life.

Something I that I always recall when I think about this torpedo is its $10,000 price tag, which translates to over $175,000 in 2020.

[u/crzyhawk]

The aerial Mk13 and the DD launched Mk15 were just as bad. They got it all sorted out by the end of the war, but until mid 43 or so, all USN torpedoes were pretty bad.

[u/Dr-Tightpants]

Good watch, I’ve seen it before but it always astounds me how wilfully ignorant the navy was when it came to the torpedo problems.