History lesson; MARK 14 torpedo.

Timestamp:2:30: Dogger Bank, Jutland, Dardanelles, Mediterranean Convoys, Battle of the Atlantic 1.0, etc. One major naval battle? I am a somewhat ignorant American, but even :”I” know that WWI was, naval-wise, just more than the HSF and the British Grand Fleet facing off in a pointless stupid gunfight, at Jutland, that would decide nothing. Your grasp of naval matters is seriously deficient. As for the Mark 14? It was an underdeveloped and untested weapon?. As such, it would exhibit “teething problems”. The Americans had no war experience with such types of complex “guided missiles”. For what they tried, it proved out, that bureaucratic incompetence, underfunding, lack of basic engineering applied science, and over-confidence led to the same exact debacles as the British and Germans and JAPANESE, were to suffer with their own torpedoes and for much the same reasons.

In the British and German cases, their attempts at magnetic influence exploders proved to be as incompetent as the American attempts. . These deficiencies showed up in the Norwegian campaign at sea. The Germans went to inertia hammers and acoustic seekers. The British went to impact fuses. Both navies drew on their WWI experiences to solve their problems. It took them about 18 and 14 months respectively to sort their fish out. The USN's Bu-Ord knew about the British problems, but assumed that the American fish were “reliable”. (There is that bureaucratic incompetence and lack of war experience.). War begins. The untested Mark 14, along with the Mark 13 and Mark 15, all three exhibit poor manufacture quality control, poor depth control, impact fuse firing pin design defects. The magnetic influence exploder circuit, as with the British and German versions, was not calibrated to the Earth's local magnetic field flux, where the submarines operated. . All three navies, for the most part, two years into their respective naval wars, gave up on the magnetic influence exploder principle, until they could mount proper post-war survey mapping to generate firing tables for such exploders. In the meantime, all three navies had to fix their defective fish as best they could and did so. Far from being the worst torpedo, the Mark 14 was just typical of initial WWII weapon malfunctions and defective weapon systems deployed by the major war fighting nations.

As for the Japanese, their supposed magnificent Type 93 torpedo, had two issues which they NEVER FIXED in production. . One was the excessive nose wander, which caused their fish to drift off fire solution. The other was a supersensitive impact fuse that caused their torpedoes to explode prematurely due to ship's wakes, before they reached their targets. Why do you think that the Japanese only scored three hits at Java Sea, with over 140 fish fired, or not one hit at all at Second Guadalcanal with over 40+ fish fired at the helpless and powerless USS South Dakota? If the Japanese torpedo men (Tanaka Raizo's own crews, for example.) did not correct at the operator level for these known defects, the Type 93 was as useless as firing cheese.

Which brings us back to the Americans, who mostly fixed the Mark 14, from the “bottom up” by field-testing and debugging the weapon as their sub crews gained war experience with it. This is what “war experience” means in the context of proofing a weapon system. You see the problem, you investigate causes inside the system., You modify the system. Troop-quals for the professionals out there. If the system is so terrible ;that it resists any fixes, you scrap it and start over. (Like British WWII tanks.) The Mark 14 was tweaked; until it worked. Got that? .it was not the best torpedo in the world when all the fixes were dialed in, but it was never the worst. The basic engineering proved sound, and effective once the quality issues and pre-war testing mistakes were sorted. You should refrain from hyperbole and stay true to proper historical context when you tackle a subject like the Mark 14, It is taught in the USN, as an object lesson, not for being terrible as a weapon system, but for the human factors involved, that caused it to be confidently deployed “without adequate testing and refinement in development of a basically soundly engineered artifact.”.

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