I
think if you think you have a problem, then you have a problem. The
reverse is not always true, but most problems are not really the
problem we are think they are. They are a different problem. And
that's the real problem. And, by way of illustration, the problem
I'd like you to think about is how a World War Two American submarine
captain sank an enemy ship.
First,
he had to find it in the 165
million square miles of the Pacific Ocean, then get his 300 foot long
“pig boat” within half a mile of the target, close enough to see
it in his periscope and identify it in his silhouette manuals.
These gave the height of the mast, which, with a little geometry,
would give an estimated range to the target. The target speed would
be estimated, and its course relative to the submarine, or “angle
on the bow”. All these estimates would be entered into the
mechanical Target Data Computer (TDC). And only then could the
captain actually try to sink the target ship.
The
method chosen by the U.S Naval Bureau of Ordnance (AKA BuOrd), for
sinking a ship, was to detonate 643 pounds of “Torpex” explosive
close to its hull. That required every member of the 50 to 70 man
crew to aim and fire the 3,300 pound, 20 foot long, 21” diameter
Mark 14 torpedo (above), which would carry the Torpex at 46 knots to the
target.
As it passed under the steel hull, a magnetic detonator (above) would
set off the Torpex, or if the torpedo actually hit the hull, the
impact would drive a firing pin into the detonator. Either way, the
shock wave of the explosion would rip apart the steel hull and sink
the ship. The problem was, the target ships were not sinking.
Just
one week after the attack on Pearl Harbor, on 14 December, the USS
Sargo was patrolling off the coast of Vietnam when she spotted two
Japanese freighters. Having already lost one target because of a
premature detonation, Lieutenant Commander Tyson Jacobs fired three
torpedoes with the magnetic detonators disconnected, from 1,000
yards. He recorded no hits. In Christmas day, Jacobs closed to
within 900 yards of a target, and fired two more Mark 14's, and again
got no hits.
After
repeatedly risking his crew's lives and expending a total of 13
torpedoes, at a cost to taxpayers of $130,000 and making no hits,
Jacobs was so frustrated he radioed his complaints in the clear back
to Pearl Harbor: “The Mark 14...torpedoes are faulty in two
respects. First...(the) exploder cannot be relied upon...Second that
set depth is not being attained...”
Command
made their feelings clear when they stripped the Sargo of her
torpedoes and her next mission was to ferry ammunition. Said a crew
member, “We all felt Captain Jacobs was being punished for
tinkering with the BuOrd torpedo.” And Jacobs was far from the
only one. Historian Clay Blair, a submariner himself, would later
note, “By the end of March (1942)...every submarine
commander...believed the Mark 14 was defective.” But Rear Admiral
Robert English (above), Commander, Submarines, Pacific (ComSubPac) decided
the problem was with the captains and crews, and not the torpedo.
English began transferring captains whom were deemed “not
sufficiently aggressive”, out of command. Someone with an nasty
sense of humor saw to it that Jacobs was transferred to the BuOrd,
back in the states.
Captains,
desperate to hurt the enemy, and to protect their careers, began to
secretly disconnect the magnetic detonators, and tinker with the
depth settings on their Mark 14s. They also began to experiment with
firing techniques to find the angle of impact that gave the best
chance to detonate the Torpex. Sinkings went up, but Admiral English
thought this was because his new captains were more aggressive.
There
were still reports of Mark 14s failing to explode under their
targets, then circling back to threaten their own sub, of
“clanging” into the target but not exploding, and even of
Japanese merchantmen returning to port with un-exploded Mark 14
torpedoes jutting out of their hulls. Because of the ad hoc
experimentation during 1942, it was impossible to know which “fixes”
if any were actually working. But during that year U.S. subs fired
1,442 torpedoes, but sunk only 211 ships.
Luckily
for the United States for three crucial months in early 1942,
Admiral Charles “Uncle Charlie”
Lockwood (above) was acting commander of the submarines in the Southwest
Pacific, based in Australia – ComSubSoWesPac. At a conference in
San Francisco, Lockwood insisted the BuOrd should examine the
torpedoes that were not exploding. During a brake in the meeting Rear
Admiral “Spike” Blandy, commander of the BurOrd, confronted his
old friend. “I didn't know it was part of your mission to discredit
the BuOrd”. Lockwood replied, “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.” The confrontation ended their
friendship, but it did get action.
An
expert was dispatched from the Naval Torpedo Station at New
Port News, Rhode Island (above). He
reported the maintenance on the torpedoes was sloppy, and the depth
settings were probably being done incorrectly. Lockwood refused to
accept the report and in June 1942, ordered a few torpedoes fired
into 500 feet of fishing nets hung in Frenchman's Bay, Australia,
These found the Mark 14's were running ten to eleven feet deeper than
the depth set on the torpedoes. Lockwood ordered all the depths reset, and the
magnetic detonators disconnected on all the torpedoes in his command.
The
BuOrd argued the nets were not hanging properly, and did not give a
fair measure of depth But when Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral
Ernest King, read the report, and matched it with similar problems
reported by his destroyer captains in the Atlantic with the Mark 14 (above),
he “lit a blowtorch under the Bureau of Ordnance". So on
first August, 1942, the BuOrd finally agreed the depth control system
on the Mark 14 had been “improperly designed and tested.”
Admiral English at Pearl Harbor still refused to believe there was any problem with
the magnetic detonator, and Lockwood's experimentation played a part
in ensuring that “Uncle Charlie” was not given permanent command
of ComSubSoWesPac. The man who was, immediately ordered the magnetic
detonators reconnected.
Then
God, or chance, intervened. On the evening of Wednesday, 20
January, 1943, Admiral English and eight members of his staff left
Pearl Harbor in a 4 engine Pan Am flying boat, bound for another
briefing in San Francisco. Because
of a strong tail wind the old Pan American Clipper arrived over
California 3 ½ hours ahead of schedule, just in time to get caught
in a violent storm. Conditions prevented a landing on San Francisco
Bay, and the Pan Am crew decided to try to make Clearlake, 115 miles
north, among the coastal redwoods. But about 7:30 the morning of
Thursday, 21 January, the plane slammed into a 2,500 high mountain,
killing all 19 on board, and decapitating the staff of ComSubPac.
At
the end of August 1943, the new ComSubPac
in Pearl Harbor was Vice Admiral Charles Lockwood, who set out to prove he had been correct in
his year old assessment of the Mark 14. His first order was to
conduct a series of test shots against the 700 foot high vertical
cliffs (continuing another 800 feet below the surface) along the east
shore Kanapou Island (above), 100 miles east of Pearl Harbor. His second
order was to again disconnect the magnetic exploder.
The
first two shots against the cliffs exploded, but the third proved a
dud. Navy divers managed to raise the weapon, and bring it back for a
post mortem. It was the kind of testing that should have been
preformed before the Mark 14 had gone into production in 1930, but
depression era budget cuts had eliminated. It was discovered the
firing pin had indeed retracted on contact with the basalt cliff
face, but at 46 knots, the collision had bent the guides intended to
ensure the firing pin would contact the detonator charge, preventing
detonation. Further testing at the cliffs and dropping warheads from
a crane showed that a direct 90 degree hit almost ensured a 70%
failure rate.
Lockwood immediately ordered his boats as sea to shoot so as to hit
their targets at high angles, and never the text book straight on attack from 90
degrees. Using steel made from the melted propellers of Japanese
planes shot down during the Pearl Harbor attack on 7 December, 1941,
a simple rebuild of the guides for the firing pins, cut the failure
rate in half.
The first corrected Mark 14s made their combat patrols
in September 1943. For that year, U.S. subs doubled their sinking of
enemy ships, sending 335 targets to the bottom. And during the first
four months of 1944, they sank another 183. Clearly the corner had
been turned.
Over
the entire year of 1944, U.S. submarines sank 600 Japanese
merchantmen, as well as one battleship, seven aircraft carriers, nine
cruisers and numerous destroyers and escorts. But during the first 7
months of 1945, they sank just 190 Japanese ships, only because the
Japanese merchant marine had been finally swept from the sea by
United States submarines.
Oil, iron ore, copper, aluminum and food,
stolen from the Philippines, China and Indonesia ,
could no longer reach Japan and feed its people or its war machine.
After the war, submariner Paul Schratz admitted he believed it was
“a violation of New Mexico
scenery to test the A-bomb at Alamogordo when the naval torpedo
station(in Newport News) was available.”
In
four years of war, 288 American submarines with 16,000 crewmen, just
2% of the U.S. Naval personnel, sank 1,178 Japanese merchant ships
and 214 warships, 55% of all Japanese ships sunk in World War Two.
The cost to the United States Submarine “Silent Service” was 52
boats, and 3,405 officers and men, a casualty rate of 22%, the
highest for any American combat force in World War Two, and 40% of
all U.S. Naval casualties in the Pacific. The majority of those
deaths occurred during the first two years of the war, when the
torpedoes did not work. Had the Mark 14 torpedoes worked from 7
December, 1941 on, it seems likely the Pacific war would have ended
two years earlier, when the Japanese war machine ran out of raw materials, and before the fire bombing of Tokyo that killed
100,000 in one night, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki.
It
turned out, the real problem with the Mark 14 torpedo was not the
depth setting, the magnetic detonator, or the faulty firing pin
guides or even all three. Nor was it the depression era short sighted budget cuts of
testing a new weapon system. Any and all of those things, or other unrelated mistakes were bound to be made. The real problem with American torpedoes
was that every invention and belief has been designed and built by
fallible, egotistical human beings, who refused to acknowledge that
is exactly who they are. Human beings are always the problem. And
they are the only ones who can fix that problem.
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