The Bureau of Ordnance and the Newport Torpedo Station were guilty of designing and issuing an entire generation of faulty torpedoes. Peacetime budget constraints and a preservationist attitude toward ordnance combined to create an interwar regimen under which the vast majority of scientists and submariners who rotated through Newport never heard or saw a torpedo explosion. To compound this error, both organizations proved incapable of making the transition from peacetime apathy to wartime demand and accepting incriminating combat evidence suggesting major ordnance flaws. Their blind faith and anemic testing may have saved money and material before the war, but it certainly cost lives during the war. Because of this logistics fiasco, veteran submariner and historian Paul Schratz said he “was only one of many frustrated submariners who thought it a violation of New Mexico scenery to test the A-bomb at Alamagordo when the naval torpedo station was available.” Legitimate fault for this debacle must be assigned for the sake of those survivors and their fallen comrades who endured the struggle and won the war.

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Perhaps Admiral Lockwood encapsulated the submariners’ long frustration best when he suggested at a wartime conference in Washington that, “If the Bureau of Ordnance 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.” Although his submarines never had to resort to such measures, history has tended to overlook their early months of struggle, focusing instead on the final two years of their campaign.

What must never be forgotten is the fact that just over 50 years ago, submariners were forced to engage the enemy for 18 months with ordnance that proved to be at least 70 percent unreliable. Often, Japanese merchantmen would enter port with unexploded Mark XIV torpedoes thrust into their hulls. Despite the problems with ordnance, American submariners, a mere two percent of U.S. naval personnel, sank more than 1,178 merchant vessels and 214 warships, totalling more than 5,600,000 tons. They sacrificed 52 submarines, 374 officers and 3,131 enlisted men from their close-knit ranks. The Silent Service suffered 40 percent of all naval casualties in the Pacific, yet managed to destroy 55 percent of all Japanese ships. American submarines succeeded where the Germans had twice failed–in the systematic and complete blockade of an island nation.

One can only speculate as to the war’s outcome had there been reliable torpedoes available from the onset. As for the American submarine campaign against Japan, we must always honor its sacrifices, take pride in its accomplishments and continue to learn from its mistakes–mistakes that fostered a scandal described by Clay Blair, Jr., as “the worst in the history of any kind of warfare.”

First-time contributor Douglas A Shireman writes from his home in Winthrop Harbor, Illinois. For further reading, see: Sink’em All: Submarine Warfare in the Pacific, by Charles A. Lockwood; and Silent Victory: The U.S. Submarine War Against Japan, by Clay Blair, Jr.; War Beneath The Sea, by Peter Padfield; and Thunder Below! by Admiral Eugene B. Fluckey.[ TOP ] [ Cover ]

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