By "very little", you mean none. The only pre-war testing involved a dummy torpedo which weighed less than a real one and still ran deeper than the settings. The firing pin also crushed due to the faster speeds vs the Mk10 torpedo and the "fix" was stronger springs with no further testing done. An actual live torpedo was never tested. Not once. Side note: The magnetic exploder was a copy (with all of it's flaws because of Earth's magnetic offsets) of the German design used in mines and was considered so secret the US Navy refused to provide instruction manuals to the crews. It had one original manual which was locked in a safe. Then war happened and nobody knew how to operate or maintain them. It's a miracle we didn't lose that war. Another excellent video about this terrible torpedo. ua-cam.com/video/eQ5Ru7Zu_1I/v-deo.html
My understanding is that from mid 1944 to the end of the war the updated version of the mk14 turned its success rate around to 60 to 70 % from its dismissal rate of 20 to 30% during the first half of the war. Yet the lessons learned have led to the incredible technology we have today.
@@jrregan yes the mistakes, hubris of the beurocrasy and lack of willingness to accept the fact that the mk14 torpedo was a danger to the subs that relied on it to work, cannot be overlooked or swept under the rug.
Great video. I have studied US sub history for many years. This is the best video on mark 14 issues I have seen. Imagine if we had entered WW2 with reliable torpedoes. The war may have been shortened by a year or more. Think about that, no Iwo Jima, no Okinawa, no atomic bombs.
Part of the problem was that the officer who had helped develop the Mark 14 was later in a command position and refused to allow any criticisms of HIS torpedo - blaming the sub Captains instead. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_14_torpedo .
Ya I should’ve specifically called out Christie for that, he’s who I was referring to when mentioning that the sub crews were blamed for the failures. Appreciate you watching and have a great week :)
@@HiddenHistoryYT I strongly suspect that's why Nimitz jr. was given the job of validating the Mk 14 failures, internal Navy politics needed a person with influential contacts...and who better than Nimitz's son.
Because the one denying the issue and initially in charge of it was the one who helped design the torpedoes 😂 So basically boiled down to someone not wanting to admit their own mistakes. Pretty classic
Yep. Contact Exploder was weak. If it struck dead on - the Exploder would break instead of setting off the torpedo - but - if it hit an angle - the exploder would not break - and the torpedo would detonate. The Fact that these torpedoes had so many different problems - meant that one problem might mask other problems - so that you didn't realize they were problems until the earlier problem was fixed. .
I read one time that the Navy asked a Princeton University Physics Professor to examine the Mk 14 Torpedo and suggest changes or improvements but his findings were ignored. The name of the Princeton University Physics Professor: Albert Einstein.
@@HiddenHistoryYT ….. torpedo failures weren’t only the mk14. The Bureau of Ordinance also failed with the performance of their air dropped and destroyer carried torpedoes. BuOrd torpedo programs were a system failure.
given how flawed the Mk6 magnetic exploder was, maybe BuOrd should have publicised it. If enemies copied it, they would have made life easier for The Allies!
The failures of the Mk-14 torpedo were the field testing that led to the later success of the US Navy's submarine program. As each problem was solved. The losses to the Japanese Navy became critical. Especially when more modern and effective submarines were being deployed with it, and later torpedo designs. It's too bad that the ship yards and the industrial capacity that supported them is gone today. Millions of people who could be part of an effective work force? Are left desperate, destitute and unemployable with no affordable place to live.
The Mk14 was responsible for getting many many many US sailors on subs and destroyers completely plastered with the fact that the grain alcohol fuel could be mixed with pineapple or peach juice to create the OG torpedo juice.
This posting neglects to tell the truth about the ordnance board and the original head of US submarines admiral English. The board had approved the Mk 14 after a SINGLE test firing run in quiet waters against a stationary target. Only TWO torpedos were ever test fired by the board and one did not detonate!!!! The ordnance board then said that it was good enough and never voluntarily tested the torpedoes again. Admiral English, head of US submarine operations in 1941 was bombarded with accurate reports of the failed torpedo detonations all through 1942 and refused to approach the ordnance board. English sated that the failures were due to a lack of aggressive spirt by the US submarine captains!! Thankfully English died in a Pan Am flight crash in Jan 43 and admiral Nimitz than appointed Adm. Lockwood (the guy mentioned above ) to head the submarine service and he took action. However he did not solve the problem himself!! Lockwood appointment commodore Swed Momson to solve the problem and he documented the flaws and fixed the Mk 14s problems. Swed Mumson received the Legion of merit and was promoted to captain for discovering all this..first he found that the contact detonator of the Mk 14 failed to trigger a explosion over 79% of the time (he proved this by dropping Mk 14s with a live detonators but no payload from 90' via a cherry picker onto a steel plate at Pearl Harbor). The triggering device was over engineered to avoid the torpedos exploding in the sub racks but the result was it would not fire when hitting a vessel dead on. He also showed that the ordnance board had calculated the running depth of the torpedo with a dummy, warhead, not a explosive laden torpedo, thus when fired in real action situations the much heavier torpedo ran deeper and deeper the further the target was from the sub. Lastly Momson determined that the torpedos sometimes got their rudders stuck and ran in circles. at least TWO US Subs were killed in the early war years by their own Mk 14 torpedos running in a circle and hitting them! Momsum recommended that the sub captains aim their torpedos by aiming the sub not using the torpedo rudders and the problem was solved. Momson himself decided to fix the contact detonator and personally tried out metals for the firing pin by scrounging metal from Pearl harbor felled Japanese planes and American plane propellers until he found a contactdetanator firing pin that reliably worked. The ordinance board after they finally agreed that the torpedo was flawed said it would take over a year (in the middle of ww2!!!) to redesign the firing pins...Momson by trial and error built reliable contact detonators and using navy machinists churned out replacements for the utterly flawed Mk14s replacing ALL of the firing pins on all torpedoes in 6 mo. The Ordnance Board by its utter distain for the fighting captains and crew of American subs, torpedo planes and destroyers was guilty of nothing less then murder and had to be dragged kicking and screaming to admit their error. No one there was EVER fired or disciplined for their gargantuan failures!
Admiral Christie who essentially designed it, and then blamed the crews for the failures and refused to admit the issues. Should’ve called him out specifically in retrospect. Thanks for watching and have a great week :)
Until the controversy was well under way in early 1943 the BUORD had never fired a MK14 for any reason. They were expensive and in short supply was the reason given for that fact.
Great info! It’s very interesting just how much tech / innovations went in torpedoes to get them to function how they wanted, especially on the German side of things. May have to look into that further. Thanks for watching and have a great week :)
Ya I should’ve specifically named him, that’s who I was referring to when saying that the sub crews were being blamed for the failures. His refusals to admit issues are almost criminal IMO. Appreciate you watching and have a great week :)
So many consistent inconsistencies, like the layers of an onion. in other words the mark 14 was a LEMON/Onion/Failure. And yet the German U-boats had effective torpedoes in WWI ! (25 years 1/4 of a century earlier) Nice one uncle Sam?
The number one problem was not machines it was people, yea we made changes, but that does nothing to the lives others throughout. Like today, when the human ego is dismissed the military personal suffer. The Navy was stupid to trust fools, on the East Coast it was most pointed with the sub attacts and people in charge that had to be fools.
Ya Christie was almost entirely to blame for the whole debacle IMO, in retrospect I wish I had specifically called him out in this, oh well. Appreciate you watching and have a great week :)
@@HiddenHistoryYT Your video mentions Lockwood. He was instrumental in fixing the problems and in developing the plan for US Submarine war against Japan. Not to be forgotten is Nimitz. Chester was an old submariner too. My understanding is that he and Lockwood were very close.
The US had an air-dropped acoustic homing torpedo during WW II, I think the Mk 24 FIDO. Far as I know, only dropped on submerged submarines because surfaced ones might see the thing homing on them, survive, and report back.
It was airdropped and by the time the aircraft had arrived the submarine had generally dived. The MK 24 could not outrun a submarine on the surface as it used an impact proof lead acid battery system and an electric drive . It was fast enough to catch a 8 or ten Knt submarine underwater. The whole thing went from concept to deployment in about 24 months which is remarkable. The thing dropped down to 20 mtrs, did a circular ultrasonic detection traverse and attacked the strongest echo it found. (so it might have to do a 420 degree traverse to come around to 60 degrees again if that was the strongest signal.) The most likely point of the submarine it would attack is the sail near the body junction or the body of the submarine below the sail. Either would cause a fatal penetration of the submarine. Earlier versions used a shallower depth search and may have blown the bottoms out of friendly naval vessels. The Mk 24 could detect submersed items below the traverse depth but they had to be further away to be within the ultrasonic field. All the electronics were of course based on Thermionic valves, rugged ones that could survive the air drop. The maximum drop height was only about 70 mtrs or so. The Mk 24 was probably most effective when the UBoat knew there were naval surface ships in the area, because in that case the Uboat likely ran at minimum speed to reduce the chance of sonic detection and then depth charging. Tim F
I find people you age usually use words wrong. Here, you use "synergistally" wrong. It's amazing how the younger people have very little familiarity with reading. Too much TV,
Another fantastic video as usual. No one works harder than hidden history thank you for gifting us this content!
Another rum and Coke please
I also heard that in cash-strapped US navy in the 30s, they couldn't afford to test and lose torps, so very little testing was done.
Great point! Thanks for watching and have a great week :)
By "very little", you mean none. The only pre-war testing involved a dummy torpedo which weighed less than a real one and still ran deeper than the settings. The firing pin also crushed due to the faster speeds vs the Mk10 torpedo and the "fix" was stronger springs with no further testing done. An actual live torpedo was never tested. Not once.
Side note: The magnetic exploder was a copy (with all of it's flaws because of Earth's magnetic offsets) of the German design used in mines and was considered so secret the US Navy refused to provide instruction manuals to the crews. It had one original manual which was locked in a safe. Then war happened and nobody knew how to operate or maintain them. It's a miracle we didn't lose that war.
Another excellent video about this terrible torpedo. ua-cam.com/video/eQ5Ru7Zu_1I/v-deo.html
My understanding is that from mid 1944 to the end of the war the updated version of the mk14 turned its success rate around to 60 to 70 % from its dismissal rate of 20 to 30% during the first half of the war. Yet the lessons learned have led to the incredible technology we have today.
@@jrregan yes the mistakes, hubris of the beurocrasy and lack of willingness to accept the fact that the mk14 torpedo was a danger to the subs that relied on it to work, cannot be overlooked or swept under the rug.
Unfortunately many many missed opportunities before due to its failures. Appreciate you watching and have a great week :)
Great video. I have studied US sub history for many years. This is the best video on mark 14 issues I have seen. Imagine if we had entered WW2 with reliable torpedoes. The war may have been shortened by a year or more. Think about that, no Iwo Jima, no Okinawa, no atomic bombs.
Greatly appreciate it! And one does have to wonder! Thanks for watching and have a fantastic week :)
Part of the problem was that the officer who had helped develop the Mark 14 was later in a command position and refused to allow any criticisms of HIS torpedo - blaming the sub Captains instead.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_14_torpedo
.
Exactly . Covering his ass , criminal in my opinion. Y
Ya I should’ve specifically called out Christie for that, he’s who I was referring to when mentioning that the sub crews were blamed for the failures. Appreciate you watching and have a great week :)
@@HiddenHistoryYT I strongly suspect that's why Nimitz jr. was given the job of validating the Mk 14 failures, internal Navy politics needed a person with influential contacts...and who better than Nimitz's son.
@@Greymist73 I agree, he was the perfect man for the job!
And you can bet the brass asses of the time made sure he was promoted and made a hero of their ranks.
Sir,you go farther,dig deeper,forever searching,to get the best and to be the best in searching out information.I tip my hat to you sir!
Greatly appreciate it! Thanks for watching and have a great week :)
Why was the naval bureau of ordnance back then so stubbornly stupid to not believe so many?
Because the one denying the issue and initially in charge of it was the one who helped design the torpedoes 😂 So basically boiled down to someone not wanting to admit their own mistakes. Pretty classic
This was the most in depth video I've watched on these torpedoes.
Glad to hear! Appreciate you watching and have a great week :)
Depth was one issue, the contact exploder was another.
Yep. Contact Exploder was weak. If it struck dead on - the Exploder would break instead of setting off the torpedo - but - if it hit an angle - the exploder would not break - and the torpedo would detonate.
The Fact that these torpedoes had so many different problems - meant that one problem might mask other problems - so that you didn't realize they were problems until the earlier problem was fixed.
.
That was really the biggest issue tbh that it had so many issues 😂 Thanks for watching and have a great week :)
Appreciate you watching and have a great week :)
I read one time that the Navy asked a Princeton University Physics Professor to examine the Mk 14 Torpedo and suggest changes or improvements but his findings were ignored. The name of the Princeton University Physics Professor: Albert Einstein.
A John Wayne movie "Operation Pacific" made it sound like it was the firing pins malfunction. Thanks for getting the real story.
Appreciate you watching and have a great week :) and I’ll have to check that out!
I would recommend a similar video regarding the Mark 13 torpedo carried by the Devastator and Avenger.
I will check that out, thanks for the suggestion! Have a great week John :)
@@HiddenHistoryYT ….. torpedo failures weren’t only the mk14. The Bureau of Ordinance also failed with the performance of their air dropped and destroyer carried torpedoes. BuOrd torpedo programs were a system failure.
Never cheap when come to test your important weapons. Test and test again until you get it right.
Thanks for watching and have a great week :)
given how flawed the Mk6 magnetic exploder was, maybe BuOrd should have publicised it. If enemies copied it, they would have made life easier for The Allies!
😂 Thanks for watching and have a great week :)
An excellent synopsis.
Greatly appreciate it! Thanks for watching and have a fantastic week :)
The failures of the Mk-14 torpedo were the field testing that led to the later success of the US Navy's submarine program. As each problem was solved. The losses to the Japanese Navy became critical. Especially when more modern and effective submarines were being deployed with it, and later torpedo designs.
It's too bad that the ship yards and the industrial capacity that supported them is gone today. Millions of people who could be part of an effective work force? Are left desperate, destitute and unemployable with no affordable place to live.
Very true. Thanks for watching and have a great week :)
The Mk14 was responsible for getting many many many US sailors on subs and destroyers completely plastered with the fact that the grain alcohol fuel could be mixed with pineapple or peach juice to create the OG torpedo juice.
Yep! Appreciate you watching and have a great week :)
At the beginning of the war and into 1943, the BuOrd was the BEST weapon the Japanese had to use against the Americans!
Thanks for watching and have a great weekend :)
If a rifle cartridge had a 90 percent failure rate, the military would have been in mutiny.
Never thought of it that way before! Thanks for watching and have a great week :)
Right?! The army would've flipped their sh*t if they got ammunition that defective.
This posting neglects to tell the truth about the ordnance board and the original head of US submarines admiral English. The board had approved the Mk 14 after a SINGLE test firing run in quiet waters against a stationary target. Only TWO torpedos were ever test fired by the board and one did not detonate!!!! The ordnance board then said that it was good enough and never voluntarily tested the torpedoes again. Admiral English, head of US submarine operations in 1941 was bombarded with accurate reports of the failed torpedo detonations all through 1942 and refused to approach the ordnance board. English sated that the failures were due to a lack of aggressive spirt by the US submarine captains!! Thankfully English died in a Pan Am flight crash in Jan 43 and admiral Nimitz than appointed Adm. Lockwood (the guy mentioned above ) to head the submarine service and he took action. However he did not solve the problem himself!! Lockwood appointment commodore Swed Momson to solve the problem and he documented the flaws and fixed the Mk 14s problems. Swed Mumson received the Legion of merit and was promoted to captain for discovering all this..first he found that the contact detonator of the Mk 14 failed to trigger a explosion over 79% of the time (he proved this by dropping Mk 14s with a live detonators but no payload from 90' via a cherry picker onto a steel plate at Pearl Harbor). The triggering device was over engineered to avoid the torpedos exploding in the sub racks but the result was it would not fire when hitting a vessel dead on. He also showed that the ordnance board had calculated the running depth of the torpedo with a dummy, warhead, not a explosive laden torpedo, thus when fired in real action situations the much heavier torpedo ran deeper and deeper the further the target was from the sub. Lastly Momson determined that the torpedos sometimes got their rudders stuck and ran in circles. at least TWO US Subs were killed in the early war years by their own Mk 14 torpedos running in a circle and hitting them! Momsum recommended that the sub captains aim their torpedos by aiming the sub not using the torpedo rudders and the problem was solved. Momson himself decided to fix the contact detonator and personally tried out metals for the firing pin by scrounging metal from Pearl harbor felled Japanese planes and American plane propellers until he found a contactdetanator firing pin that reliably worked. The ordinance board after they finally agreed that the torpedo was flawed said it would take over a year (in the middle of ww2!!!) to redesign the firing pins...Momson by trial and error built reliable contact detonators and using navy machinists churned out replacements for the utterly flawed Mk14s replacing ALL of the firing pins on all torpedoes in 6 mo. The Ordnance Board by its utter distain for the fighting captains and crew of American subs, torpedo planes and destroyers was guilty of nothing less then murder and had to be dragged kicking and screaming to admit their error. No one there was EVER fired or disciplined for their gargantuan failures!
Apparently quality control and testing was lacking -who was responsible for the initial approval😮
Admiral Christie who essentially designed it, and then blamed the crews for the failures and refused to admit the issues. Should’ve called him out specifically in retrospect. Thanks for watching and have a great week :)
Until the controversy was well under way in early 1943 the BUORD had never fired a MK14 for any reason. They were expensive and in short supply was the reason given for that fact.
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A typical complete "cluster-f..k".
Thanks for watching and have a great weekend :)
Well, if TMs didn't drink the fuel... wouldn't have a short run
Appreciate you watching and have a great week :)
@@HiddenHistoryYT great vids TMC(SS) RET.
Can you make a video about the Japanese manned Torpedoes from WWII???
Most definitely! Thanks for the suggestion and watching, have a great week :)
There was also Das Limpet, which could steer a torpedo towards an enemy. Thrum.
Great info! It’s very interesting just how much tech / innovations went in torpedoes to get them to function how they wanted, especially on the German side of things. May have to look into that further. Thanks for watching and have a great week :)
@@HiddenHistoryYT Have a giggle when you look it up. Sorry.
@@m1t2a1 😂😂
@@HiddenHistoryYT Once again, sorry. It's a good movie, an old favourite.
I see no mention of the stubborn Admiral in charge of testing who just refused to believe the truth.
Ya I should’ve specifically named him, that’s who I was referring to when saying that the sub crews were being blamed for the failures. His refusals to admit issues are almost criminal IMO. Appreciate you watching and have a great week :)
I would say the torpedo debacle is criminal. Not just a royal eff up.
Completely agree! Thanks for watching and have a great week :)
So many consistent inconsistencies, like the layers of an onion. in other words the mark 14 was a LEMON/Onion/Failure. And yet the German U-boats had effective torpedoes in WWI ! (25 years 1/4 of a century earlier) Nice one uncle Sam?
Another spectacular weapon from USA!
😂 Thanks for watching and have a great week :)
Early Mark-14s were bad, later Mark-14s were great.
Very true! Thanks for watching and have a great week :)
@@HiddenHistoryYT I enjoyed the video, 2nd time watching someone cover the Mark-14
@@spectrastar2749 Drachinifel? He’s the GOAT IMO. Been a minute since I threw on one of his videos tho tbh, need to get back into the Dry Dock!
should read, failure of the NAVY Bureau of Weapons and leadership.
Who is it by?
Epic failure.. from multiple years..?
Yep, absolutely. Appreciate you watching and have a great weekend :)
The number one problem was not machines it was people, yea we made changes, but that does nothing to the lives others throughout. Like today, when the human ego is dismissed the military personal suffer. The Navy was stupid to trust fools, on the East Coast it was most pointed with the sub attacts and people in charge that had to be fools.
Ya Christie was almost entirely to blame for the whole debacle IMO, in retrospect I wish I had specifically called him out in this, oh well. Appreciate you watching and have a great week :)
@@HiddenHistoryYT Your video mentions Lockwood. He was instrumental in fixing the problems and in developing the plan for US Submarine war against Japan. Not to be forgotten is Nimitz. Chester was an old submariner too. My understanding is that he and Lockwood were very close.
430
Had this torpedo been fully operational beginning in 1942, the war might have finished sooner, saved thousands of lives, brought peace sooner.
So many missed opportunities! Thanks for watching and have a great week :)
The US had an air-dropped acoustic homing torpedo during WW II, I think the Mk 24 FIDO. Far as I know, only dropped on submerged submarines because surfaced ones might see the thing homing on them, survive, and report back.
Yep. They referred to it as a "mine" to disguise that it was a torpedo.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_24_mine
.
Great info! Thanks for watching and have a great week :)
It was airdropped and by the time the aircraft had arrived the submarine had generally dived. The MK 24 could not outrun a submarine on the surface as it used an impact proof lead acid battery system and an electric drive . It was fast enough to catch a 8 or ten Knt submarine underwater. The whole thing went from concept to deployment in about 24 months which is remarkable. The thing dropped down to 20 mtrs, did a circular ultrasonic detection traverse and attacked the strongest echo it found. (so it might have to do a 420 degree traverse to come around to 60 degrees again if that was the strongest signal.) The most likely point of the submarine it would attack is the sail near the body junction or the body of the submarine below the sail. Either would cause a fatal penetration of the submarine. Earlier versions used a shallower depth search and may have blown the bottoms out of friendly naval vessels. The Mk 24 could detect submersed items below the traverse depth but they had to be further away to be within the ultrasonic field.
All the electronics were of course based on Thermionic valves, rugged ones that could survive the air drop. The maximum drop height was only about 70 mtrs or so.
The Mk 24 was probably most effective when the UBoat knew there were naval surface ships in the area, because in that case the Uboat likely ran at minimum speed to reduce the chance of sonic detection and then depth charging.
Tim F
I find people you age usually use words wrong. Here, you use "synergistally" wrong. It's amazing how the younger people have very little familiarity with reading. Too much TV,