Mark 14 Torpedo - Solutions

Solutions

Against orders, some submariners disabled the magnetic influence feature of the Mark VI exploder, suspecting it was faulty. An increase in hits was reported. Shortly after replacing Wilkes in Fremantle, newly minted Rear Admiral Charles Lockwood ordered a historic net test at Frenchman Bay on 20 June 1942. Eight hundred torpedoes had already been fired in combat, more than a year's production from NTS.

Jim Coe's Skipjack did the honors, firing a single fish with an exercise head, set at 10 feet (3 m), from 850 yards (780 m). It hit the net at a depth of 25 ft (7.6 m). Not satisfied, James Fife, Jr. (formerly Chief of Staff to John E. Wilkes, who Lockwood was replacing in Perth-Fremantle) followed up the next day with two more test shots; Fife concluded they ran an average 11 ft (3.4 m) deeper than the depth at which they were set. BuOrd was not amused. Neither was the CNO, Admiral Ernest J. King, who "lit a blowtorch under the Bureau of Ordnance". The fact that destroyers' Mark 15 torpedoes were suffering the same failures may have had something to do with it as well. On 1 August 1942, BuOrd finally conceded the Mark 14 ran deep, and six weeks later, "that its depth-control mechanism had been 'improperly designed and tested'". This satisfied Lockwood and Robert H. English (then ), who refused to believe the exploder could also be defective.

Finally, in July 1943, Admiral Lockwood ordered his boats to deactivate the Mark VI's influence feature and use only its contact pistol.

Tests were carried out by 's gunnery and torpedo officer, Art Taylor. Taylor, "Swede" Momsen, and others fired warshots into the cliffs of Kahoolawe, beginning 31 August. Additional trials, supervised by Taylor, dropped dummy warheads filled with sand from a cherry picker raised to a height of 90 feet (27 m), producing a 70% failure rate. A quick fix was to encourage "glancing" shots (which cut the number of duds in half), until a permanent solution could be found.

In September 1943, the first torpedoes with new contact pistols were sent to war. "After twenty-one months of war, the three major defects of the Mark 14 torpedo had at last been isolated. ... Each defect had been discovered and fixed in the field—always over the stubborn opposition of the Bureau of Ordnance."

Once remedied, sinkings of enemy ships rose noticeably. By the end of World War II the Mark 14 torpedo had become a much more reliable weapon. Lessons learned allowed surface ships such as destroyers to remedy the failings of the Mark 15; the two designs shared the same strengths and faults.

After the war, the best features of the improved Mark 14 were merged with the best features of captured German torpedoes to create the hydrogen peroxide-fueled Mark 16 with a pattern-running option. The Mark 16 became the standard United States post-war anti-shipping torpedo, despite the large remaining inventory of Mark 14 torpedoes.