I have heard that the US had massive problems with the Mark 14 torpedo during the war.
What was the problem?
Shouldn’t the USN board of ordinance fix these things before the torpedo was used on a battlefield?
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Mark 14 torpedo had four major flaws:
- It run deeper than set
- The magnetic exploder often caused premature firing
- The contact exploder often failed to fire the warhead
- It tended to run “circular”, failing to straighten its run
To make matters worse, those flaws were often masked and were presumed to be other problems. It took 20 months to correct these problems.
The development of torpedoes were done frugally, as each torpedo produced cost $10.000 ($168.000 today) in a depression-era peacetime. The Navy didn’t want to spend that much for live fire tests and was also reluctant to provide target ships. So there were no live fire tests and the designers had to rely on their own judgement. Also Board of Ordinance had feeble budget to do tests and it was because congress had made budget cuts to the Navy.
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