Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 157 - The Mk 14 Torpedo and How the US Hated Their Own Submariners

Episode Date: May 24, 2021

During WWII the US developed a revolutionary new torpedo that excelled at attempting to murder the people who launched it. This didn't seem to bother the US Navy. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys sources: https://www.wearethemighty.com/popular/ww2-navy-torpedo-problems-mk14/ https://navalunderseamuseum.org/mk-14/ https://www.defensemedianetwork.com/stories/torpedo-scandal-rear-adm-charles-lockwood-the-mark-14-and-the-bureau-of-ordnance/ https://www.businessinsider.com/how-legendary-wwii-navy-submarine-uss-tang-sank-itself-2020-10

🎵 🎵 Hello, and welcome to yet another episode of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. Pay no attention as to why I'm laughing. That won't make the cut. I'm Joe, and with me today is Liam motherfucking Anderson, champion and one of the hosts of well there's your problem the people's champ here to reclaim my championship belt how tall is Nate I don't know I've never met him in person alright we'll say he's 5'8

you know there are some stereotypes that are hurtful facts I assume Nate is 5 feet tall Nate I'm coming for you baby both Nick and I are about 6'3". I'm 6'2". I don't know. Like I said, last episode, I was almost, I'll stand on your shoulders and we'll retake Istanbul by ourselves.

And we'll Voltron together and create our own state. You know, I think last time you were on the show, I gave you a choice between talking about the Jewish Avengers or talking about what we're talking about today. Because obviously I'm a huge fan of your podcast. And you guys talk about the Kursk. So you

you've already listened to what I think is two hours of insane submarine shit. So we're going to do that again today. You talked about the Kursk, which was a Soviet and then Russian sub before it exploded and killed everybody or imploded, whatever. Poor Lieutenant Kebab.

He lost his legs. And it kind of blew itself up, right? Like that's like the, that's the lesson that i i got from that uh episode don't defer your maintenance kids i cannot i cannot stress this enough so we're going to talk about something else that happened uh so after listening to um kursk we're sitting through kursk and making that episode how's your feels on the concepts of being stuck in a submarine? Not great, Joe. You know, I'm glad you asked, but not great.

I, you know, for the longest time, I actually wanted to join the Navy, the only legitimate branch of the United States military. And I just like and I got talked out of it by my dad. I was a chubby kid. B, I have psychiatric issues. But like my dad was like, all right, look at you. You fucking think this is gonna sit well underwater for 12 months with a bunch of dudes and i was like oh you're probably right yeah i i don't have like claustrophobia or anything uh i'm not like especially great in tight spaces they don't bother me right like i was trapped on an elevator um like seven to eight years ago now

in toronto and we were in there for about 45 minutes and it wasn't until the end where i was just like oh mother like this is actually genuinely brutal uh but yeah just being crammed under the sea with a bunch of dudes like nah nah that ain't me yeah i i mean i can't say it's for the claustrophobia part because I was a tank crewman, but like the concept of being locked in a tube that, you know, could just mysteriously crush and murder you at virtually any point. If any small thing goes wrong,

always terrified me. I've never met a submariner, but I assume they have to be kind of weird my grandfather was a submariner during world war ii and by all accounts was a weird guy not a like like at least for part of world war ii and then he was uh uh in the it did working on the other manhattan project honestly but yeah he he just like weird guy by all accounts. Like, like,

you know how all goalies in hockey are kind of strange. Yes. Yeah. Same thing. Nobody ever talks about the, the, the, the submariner to,

to goalie pipeline. And yeah, it's weird because we are going to be talking about a world war run in world war two today, but mostly world War II. And it wasn't really until post-World War II where subs kind of weren't death traps and routinely murdered themselves. Though, depending on where you happen to be conscripted or enlisted to be a Submariner, that might still be happening to you today. Sorry.

Submariners, not a monolith. But for the early history of subs, and we've talked about U-boats and Civil War submarines a lot, and they all sound really, really bad. But American submarines, not much better. a lot and they all sound really really bad but American submarines not much better they were like it seems to be

the quality of life for an American submariner was much better than a U-boat crewman sure that is mostly due to like just not having a lack of resources due to losing a war and not having the entire world trying to to losing a war and not having the entire world trying to blow you up all at

once. But subs at the time were pretty shockingly low-tech things, even in comparison to what they were firing, which was torpedoes, which is mostly what we're talking about today. Though they did have deck guns

because in early submarine doctrine was to mostly use your debt guns um because you're supposed to surface and then let people surrender yeah yeah um also because you know every once in a while during world war one if you fired a torpedo you would. I mean, sink more than you should die because you're a submariner. So like the little accelerated, accelerated diving, I guess it would just be uncontrolled sinking. I don't know. It's like a water landing on a plane. Like you could just say plane crash.

I don't need you to dress this up for me. played crash i don't need you to dress this up for me um now even during world war one torpedoes were the real first fire and forget somewhat guided weapon in use uh some of these kind of sucked because it is world war one um it's like a lot of the the the cutting edge technology that came out in world war one that set the stage for truly groundbreaking stuff later on kind of suffered from growing pains a great example of that is the tank they killed their own crewmans a lot uh in world war one and also they went five miles an hour and sucked oh yeah they were they and were they're they're also hideous to look at i would counter that the mark 5 looks cool as shit you know like

a weird steampunk thing it's like just a it's a trap it's an angry set of tracks joe are you on drugs uh currently no okay just checking what if we gave an eggplant tracks well yeah it's like it's a what if a trapezoid could kill you should have studied trigonometry harder and so the the torpedoes in world war one were revolutionary you could um they had like a gyro mechanical angle calculator um that you could set and when you fired it it would arc in the direction of travel where you would believe that, you know, a transport or cargo ship or whatever is going.

So you could fire it and it would track down the target and hopefully hit it and blow it up. It was incredibly hard to actually do this. And the ability to do it, like on the torpedoeses internal mechanisms was actually invented before a calculator uh that could calculate it quickly so it was actually up to the captain and the gunner to just be really good at math so yeah roll the dice, right? Now, most nations after World War I

let their submarine fleet just kind of rust and go to shit. Obviously, people believe that it was the war to end all wars. It was never going to happen again. But also, just incredible economic devastation made R&D for a submarine fleet kind of hard um even the u.s which escaped from world war one very very well uh and also you know incredibly rich did not spend money on their submarines um but this did not actually mean that they stopped trying to come up with new stuff on a shoestring budget which as we both know uh from your podcast and mine

never could possibly go wrong uh so you see this dinghy right now what i want to do is put a 50 cal on it and then we're gonna give it some ballast right and we're gonna put on one of those old timey divey suits and we're gonna go beneath to see everybody i i do love seeing uh on the on the uh let's just go ahead jesus christ the scuco river and billy every so often you'll see the coast guard with one of their 50 cal dinghies you're just like this is a bit much boys you see those here too yeah they're not quite dinghies here because you have to worry about like the open ocean but they're like a armed bass boat kind of yeah yeah that's basically what we got i'm just like all right like you guys can can reel this in a little for me we are operating under the assumption that no one will shoot at us otherwise we're fucked we have a 50 cal and that is it was one of those things that they knew that their old torpedo, the Mark 10, which was from World War One, that operated on alcohol and steam for propulsion.

Hey, me too. So I'm going to go out on a limb and say it was pretty normal for submariners to drink the torpedo fluid. I don't know if they can, but if I learned anything... Windshield fluid. Yeah, it's like if I learned anything from

months of researching the Soviet military during the Afghan War, is if you put alcohol in something and even make it so it will kill soldiers, they'll still drink it you gotta find a way man listen that's that's a very human need when you're getting shot at yeah especially

when you just the depressing existence of being stuffed into a submarine right it's like I'm gonna get fucked up and help this um uh also this uh this this torpedo sucked um now uh obviously the US did not participate in World War I very for very long uh and their submarines this torpedo sucked. Obviously, the US did not participate in World War I

for very long, and their submarines an even shorter amount of time. But they did learn that the Mark 10 had a horrible problem of shooting fire out of it when it launched, which is a problem if you happen to be in the submarine

and want to live. Fires in submarine, very, very bad. So in 1926, the U.S. Bureau of Ordnance, which is known as the B.U.O.R.D., which I hate. Ugh. Yeah. Ugh, don't like that. Yeah.

They knew that they needed a new torpedo. The Mark 10 was developed and fielded within like less than a year, which is never a good idea. So they're like, okay, we need something better. Yeah, you're all the beta testers now. But I don't want to spend a lot of money, right? It's like the guy that goes to buy a used car, but it has like 500 bucks. Like you're gonna get a piece of shit and that's the only thing you can afford yeah um i i can say that as someone who has done that at least twice um and so they teamed up with general electric and

a few other companies to split the cost and uh which is incredible right uh and met together at the newport torpedo station uh to develop the mark 14 now the mark 14 was a big fucking torpedo it was 21 feet long 21 inches in diameter and weighed over 3 000 pounds a piece now one of the key things that the buord asked for was that well We'll keep saying it. It's literally in every document I found. Everybody calls it the B.U.O.R.D. and I hate it. I hate that. Go on. They're like, well, if World War I taught us anything,

it is when wartime economy hits, these are going to have to be built in literally any factory by any idiot that works in them that does not qualify for military service maybe like the most unskilled labor that you can possibly think of needs to be able to put this torpedo together right right uh they just disregard that entirely okay great so it was powered by steam uh and uh the electronics that made the torpedo work were probably the most advanced thing in the Navy at the time in 1926. It required very skilled labor and some of the most specific kinds of electronic assembly work that could only be made in one specific area at the time. work that could only be made in one specific area

at the time now on top of all of this was the one thing that made the torpedo like hypothetically like the golden ticket right like it's going to be the best torpedo in the world and that was the mark 6 exploder that went on the tip of it

is it really called the exploder yes the word exploder is used a lot in torpedo world apparently and i love it i like that i'm happy with that now uh in submarine warfare uh the best thing you can do is fire a torpedo and have it explode directly under the middle of the ship uh the idea was this explosion would break the ship's keel which I guess in ship speak is like its spine, causing it to split in half and sink. Now, this shot is obviously very hard

to pull off on a moving ship that is running away from a submarine, right? Right. So the Mark VI Exploder's entire job was to make that much, much easier. Now, as a whole, the Mark XIV was to be aimed with the same kind of, I would say the same kind of gyro system as World War I's Mark 10,

but much, much better. You didn't need an incredibly weird calculator to set it. You didn't need to know trick as you were getting fired at, sure. Yes. So it would be equipped with the exploder so you would fire the torpedo it would curve towards its target right um and the idea was you'd fire it so then you could get the fuck out of there um because you know at the time especially the mark 14 which would later be fixed with the mark 18 um since it's propelled by steam it it's like firing an rpg it just leaves a giant fucking trail going right back to where you fired it

like look it came from that way so like you need to be able to get the fuck out of there after you fire it or you're gonna get blown up now this exploder was based on a very very uh good and proven british and german magnetic influence device uh the exploder was based on a very, very good and proven British and German magnetic influence device. The exploder would be triggered by the steel hull of a ship as it passed directly beneath it. So it would pass directly under the keel and then explode because it would sense the steel. Also, back then, that was the one place that ships really didn't have armor. They assumed if you'd hit a mine, you'd with the front of the ship uh or higher up right um if you got broadsided or whatever so there are obvious other situations where you would want to use torpedoes

or um you know how they could or or or would act if you fired them, say you missed, right? What if it doesn't hit the keel? Then what? Sure. What if, I don't know, it goes too deep and it explodes and doesn't do any damage at all? These are all very important questions, and they're all very important questions that the BUOard decided were not that important.

Now, they thought that this exploder is obviously flawless, and then it would just simply work every time. That's all we need to worry about. So the idea of blowing up the keel of a ship, it's unarmored. We don't need that much explosive. So we're going to put a very small, some people call it a moderate amount of explosives in the torpedo itself, because that's all you need to break the keel of a ship. You can already kind of see where this is going to be bad. Oh, boy.

And then it gets worse. This is when it came time for testing. They decided they didn't want to do that either. Come on, man. And honestly, I have been. I kind of admire that, that though like the dedication to cutting corners like it really does seem as we go on that the

view or actively hated Submariners because I've never seen to get the death to hurry up really yeah and boys even like because we did an episode long time ago about the M16 right there of that and that

is that's pretty bad um but it doesn't seem that it has such disregard for like for testing and safety it was sabotaged so like they knew what they they knew what they were doing right which is obviously very very bad uh but you kind of like it's it's much different than just simply not giving a fuck because obviously I mean it's the government they don't actually care about the lives of the people of where they put these weapons otherwise they wouldn't do war

but so they did one test which I like that I think is the least amount of testing anybody's ever done before fielding a weapon um so it was one test it was carried out with two torpedoes and it was fired on an old derelict sub on may of 1926 uh you want to guess of how successful these tests are wildly absolutely wildly successful I will not hear i will not

hear anything to the contrary you're doing one test with two torpedoes right like at this point it actually should be kind of hard to fail the tests because you know like the m16 passed its first tests because they were fudged like no we're gonna fire in a very specific clean manner so it can't possibly fail like this is kind of what I expected. Like, maybe they'll park the derelict sub right on the nose of the other sub. So, like, you just point blanking it with the torpedoes and you can't possibly miss. So, one torpedo ran under the target and did not explode. And the other one worked.

So, at a 50% success rate. That's not bad. That's not bad. That rounds up to 100. Yeah. And the B.U.O.R. decided, success rate that's not bad that's not bad that rounds up to 100 yeah the B.U. or that's good that's good it's good we're in a war boys let's do it they're not yet it's 1926 no we're in a war boys

let's do it they got like over a decade to figure this out like now we're good we're in a war what if we got a bombard I don't know Mexico wrap it now we're good we're at a war what if we got it when we got a bombard i don't know mexico wrap it up we're done um uh so yeah the 50 percent sane dude it's so bad you want to guess what when the next how long it would be until the next testing would be done on these uh give me like 1939 1942 jesus fuck wow and i was just like 13 years you know because i know the u.s government is incredibly incompetent 13 years seems like a wildly too long time no of course it's worse it's actually dumber than that but we'll get there um now you would assume

that with a torpedo that fails literally at the flip of a coin uh and hardly works it would at least be cheap right i would hope right like if i could make 10 oh it's not cheap is it god damn a joke so the goal was to make each torpedo cost around a thousand dollars um it's not bad i guess it's pricey for the day but it's actually quite the same country that built the f-35 like yeah but it's not real to be fair this is before things got that stupid uh because the government still has oversight over these companies right it turns out their oversight is just very very bad um so once you added in the exploder the slight fixes they had to get to even get to work

50 of the time and then all of the the problems they were having with it getting it to work even to that level they end up costing around ten thousand dollars a piece which as you can tell is a cost over on of ten times that's that's bad uh so for comparison at the same time that is five times more than a new car during the same time frame yeah but the car doesn't have a part called the exploder I mean I guess the internal combustion engine

I mean it is a car in 1926 you might be able to call the entire thing an exploder hey man listen the lightweight lightweight is good so with inflation each one of these torpedoes would cost around two hundred thousand dollars in today's money yeah which i mean doesn't sound

that that expensive when you compare it to like i don't know like us any smart bomb but if you think about it how much would that smart bomb cost if you started off with the floor cost of two hundred thousand dollars a piece piece. Whoops, fucked up. It's a half billion now. Sorry, buddy. And we'll just be taking our no-bid contract and disappearing into the never-you-mind. For comparison, an M4 on contract from the government,

which is honestly more high-tech than the torpedo, costs around $400. Fuck. Fuck. Yep. Now, some of these engineers weren't bad at their jobs. They simply did what the government asked them, and then when they tested it, and the government actually

told them it's good to go, they're like, oh, wait, hold on, what? We have all of these problems. We just told you it was broken. We literally did these tests to prove it to you. Like, imagine any other thing that, like, you would be given at anything. Like, a fucking Xbox with a 50% fail rate. Like, there would be a class action lawsuit waiting to happen. Oh, it's so bad.

That's just so bad. I expecting tesla to make this fucking torpedo oh that's some podcast synergy right there baby i have i listen kylie jenner went through the tunnel and i just have like and i have nothing against the uh kardashians really uh i know they're heroes of your people but uh they're the only armenians you're allowed to bad mouth on the show but it's just like yep it's a tunnel you're a genius elon you've done it you've reinvented the wheel like what if we made a tunnel that was more dangerous than any car tunnels but made it in TikTok lighting. We modeled this after Selang. Now, if you've never heard

about that... We're calling it Selang 2 and we're putting it in Vanoise, California for some reason. Like I said, the engineers were pretty concerned. A lot of their concern was with the Mark 6

exploder. Obviously, it worked. It was a marvel of technology if it worked correctly. And the engineers were trying desperately to get it to work correctly. However, they came up with one very specific flaw, that it was actually too

good at its job of sensing steel and being pulled with magnets and stuff like that right um because it was picking up variations of the earth's magnetic field no which means every time you fired it it would act differently depending on how deep you were and where you were in the world oh my god dude no if we don't know what they're shooting at how can they know what we're shooting at it's like i made the joke before about flipping a coin and seeing if it worked but quite literally

like you're flipping a coin and the torpedo's like oh too close to the earth gonna kill you now at this point that they didn't theorize that it would be so bad, it could possibly murder its own crew, but we'll get to that point. Um, we're still, um, now engineers or like,

especially submarine crewmen, right. Um, that wanted to work on these things. Cause it's pretty, it's pretty apparent very early on, like these things kind of suck. Uh,

and soldiers, just a little semen at the time, uh, were rules weren't so strict, right? Um, they could tinker with things that didn't work. Just fuck around with giant explosive torpedoes.

Nobody really gave a shit. Right. Uh, and the B ward was kind of worried about that, which I mean, admittedly, rightfully so. Don't let Siemen fuck around with explosives. Yeah, fair enough.

So even engineers that worked in munitions couldn't fuck with this thing. The exploder was considered a closely guarded state secret, so much so that maintenance and operating manuals had been written, but were never printed or distributed. Christ. Because later on, when it becomes very obvious

that 100% it's at fault of the torpedo, the B.U.O.R.D. would then blame submariners for not doing correct maintenance, and they're like, we fucking can't! We don't know what we're doing. You don't know what we're doing you don't know what we're doing none of us know what we're doing and that is pretty much what happened um the mark six worked entirely well in some places and not at all in others that's insane i just that what it's it's like when we crashed, I think, a lunar rover because we accidentally did it in miles instead of kilometers. Yeah, yeah.

God, that was stupid. Or like there's like one decimal point off somewhere and just fucking exploded it. So, like I said before, like the exploder is so sensitive, it's picking up the Earth's magnetic field. So how do you think it's going to pick up a ship? Really, really well, right? Yeah, of course. Yeah, that led to them exploding before they even got to the target. That's so stupid.

It makes it harder to steer, I guess. You can't see where this torpedo is coming from if it explodes before it gets to you. So they saw a problem where they were firing it during training, and then later on during actual war, they're like, wow, that exploded like 100 feet early. That's not going to do us any good. In other cases, it would just thump off the side of a target ship

and not explode oh god another huge problem um was that the torpedo would dive way too low uh it would run off the target and go like they call it diving too deep or whatever right and then either not explode at all and just continue on to the depths of the ocean or explode 20 feet way too low. Scaring the shit out of some of those creepy lantern fish. Those poor guys. Guys, stop throwing torpedoes down here. We know that we're a sin against God and nature.

Leave us alone, goddammit. So, in one case in 1943, there's a guy named lieutenant dan daspit uh he was the commander of the uss tenosa he fired all but one of the ship's torpedoes at a japanese tanker the tone maru three so out of 15 torpedoes only two detonated. And those blew up before they hit the ship. Come on! When he got back to Pearl Harbor he had one torpedo that

he did not fire. And it was taken from his sub and examined and found to be in perfect working order. The problem of course being perfect working order is still broken. It's still broken. This was but Daspit was still broken. This was, but Daspit was not alone.

This shit was happening all over the place. And as soon as the torpedo was used in the war, everybody quickly found out that it didn't work for shit. Just a week after the attack in Pearl Harbor, the USS Seawolf fired eight torpedoes off the coast of the Philippines, and one actually went on target. Hey, it hit it.

Reel it in boys. We're done here. It did its job. When it impacted, it didn't explode. For God's sakes, man. I had such high hopes. In the first few months of the war. So in the first

couple months of the war, American subs fired 93 torpedoes at enemy shipping. Now, to be fair, most of these torpedoes were fired at cargo ships. They couldn't shoot back for the most part. Only three ships were sunk.

Oh, jeez. By mid-1942, more than 800 torpedoes had been used in the Pacific War. You want to guess how often they failed? Give me a 95% failure rate. I know you're trying to be sensational, but it was 80%. Hey, you know, see?

There you go. I did it. That's worse than the test. Granted, they fired two torpedoes for testing but still like yeah 80 failure rate um some failed to explode uh while others still aimed like they were supposed to simply miss or would run under their target several blew up before hitting the set of japanese ships and you know not only was that bad but it led to them immediately being fired upon and many ship and many subs died this way oh god now although imagine how happy you'd be when you actually

sang something yeah like against all odds this fucker actually works holy shit dude we did it we could go home now now if you're thinking that the navy was understanding that their subs had been armed with a giant piece of shit of course they weren't they blamed their own captains and gunners saying they were simply couldn't aim for shit um that was not the case uh but you know for the most part that's kind of what happened like the bu order like well clearly it's working we're still sinking subs you guys just suck at shooting but one admiral did not buy this he's like look i get that some people are bad at their jobs but this would this would require accepting that the vast majority of our submarine fleet is incompetent and that's kind of steep right um so admiral

james lockwood took a bunch of torpedoes and carried out his own unofficial test off the fleet is incompetent and that's kind of steep right so Admiral James Lockwood took a bunch of torpedoes and carried out his own unofficial test off the coast of Australia he fired six torpedoes at an underwater net meaning this unofficial test rallied together by some random Admiral was more of a test than

the first test that actually fueled this thing Christ oh my god oh my god oh my god at best when torpedoes still functioned they ran 10 or 15 feet below their set gauge this effectively made them useless all right so just reset the gauge it's fine who cares well that is one of the fixes he immediately told people to use. Yeah, he's like, fuck you. Hope you remember all that trigonometry.

Just aim up, bro. Now, this forced the Buhl Award to carry out an actual official test in 1942. After being used in a war for years. That's so fucking grim what they discovered was dumber than everybody or what everybody originally thought um so at one point sub commanders pointed out how bad it was to only have a magnetic exploder and demanded not only a larger payload but a contact exploder as well understandable yes it's 100 like the first thing I was reading about when I was reading about the Mark 14 was like,

wow, that seems like they're really missing a point here. Like what if we have to hit the fucker directly? Or what if I do hit the fucker directly? You know? And I mean, that is how admirals had largely been training their crew, right?

Is like hit the fucking ship. Right. Understandable. You, you, you usually want to sink the ship by hitting it or so i would think but i guess i'm just a crazy person yeah uh clearly we're uh sub amateurs here um so the buor did they're like fine whatever we'll give you your contact tip and we'll give you hundreds of pounds of more explosive you want to guess what they didn't do after that what's that change anything else about the nice nice so they made it significantly heavier and then did not change the propulsion or gyro systems at all sweet good great so uh and this this of course led it to fail nearly a hundred percent of the time also that

50 test that i told you about was done before adding the contact exploder and the additional explosives so after doing that it was never tested um like when lockwood carried out the tests he noticed like weird it seems to be like the tip and the tail of the torpedo kind of waggled as it went. Like completely like shimmying in the water. After all, who doesn't want to? What is a tour? What is a dog?

And then a really furry torpedo, right? Yeah. Oh, I mean, if you're the Soviets, kind of for tanks, right? Yeah. Aww. He's got a cute little face on it. If you're the Soviets, kinda, for tanks, right? Now,

remember the contact exploder? That's like, yeah, obviously you want that. Another problem. It also didn't work, remember? Because they're hitting the ships and it's not exploding. So, like, every portion of this torpedo is failing, right? Right.

But they fixed, so they worked on some things, but it did not fix the erratic gyro mechanism that was making them fly wildly off course or the random explosions, which they didn't fix that either because that was the exploder causing that, which were still happening all the time because after the small fixes that were made, sub captains continue to write in their logs.

Motherfucker didn't work right. Motherfucker didn't work. No, but we have fixes. So the Bureau did the adult thing and the thing we probably all assumed they would eventually do again. And that is refused to accept that there was anything wrong with their torpedo at all.

Yeah, that's right. Just plow ahead. Like nothing's wrong, baby. I love that shit. At this point... America number one. It was working kind of

by sheer saturation of torpedoes. They were sinking a lot of Japanese ships. I would like to think that a lot of the ships that the American subs were sinking were just like wily coyote punching a hole directly through a wall but with a with a torpedo um now at this point this was no longer a b-word thing or uh something that uh admirals knew about ever went

down to like everyday samaritans knew that the sub that the the fucking torpedoes didn't work um everyone knew that the weapon torpedoes didn't work. Everyone knew that the weapon was shit, and it was something of an open secret, and commanders began to try to get around it. Lockwood requested permission to disconnect the magnetic exploder from the torpedo because even though the

contact exploder didn't work great, it at least would hit the fucking target and give it a better chance. The B.U.O.R.Ord refused to allow them to do that. Oh, cool. Why? Reasons! It's a sunk cost fallacy, but it kills people.

Okay, that's alright. The submarine crews were then forbidden to do anything beyond regular maintenance of the torpedoes, which remember, they could not do. They were told not to touch the mark 6 exploders in any way and to further prevent unauthorized tampering the buord ordered that the sub-based torpedo shop apply dabs of blue paint to the screws that held the exploder mechanism to the

torpedo body of course this meant the buord never met any fucking enlisted people in their entire life. Because the only thing that happened was the Submariners bribed the members of the torpedo shop, who were also enlisted sailors for the most part, with tobacco and booze to get a can of paint the same color so they could fuck with it and then repaint them. I like that. No, I really like that. Good job, boys. That's American. That's what won us the war that's american ingenuity and it won us the war i quite honestly like when i first read

about the paint i'm like oh soldiers are just gonna fucking figure out a different paint color and fuck it up anyway or they're just like it's gonna be an open secret their captain just won't report them for which also didn't happen um lockwood and eventually a few other naval commanders would get involved and this would eventually turn to a political dick measuring competition between the buord and the poor bastards who actually had to use this fucking thing um this eventually ended with the buord relenting on the rule about disconnecting the magnetic exploder but it didn't solve just all of the other problems uh specifically why the contact exploder wasn't working.

Now, enter a crazy person, but legendary Submariner, a guy named Charles Momsen, who is known as The Swede. Now, he was contacted specifically because Lockwood knew he didn't really care about politics or the chain of command, and he had a bit of a reputation about telling people who outranked him to go fuck themselves. Nice. He also was known as being a great engineer, on top of being a submarine commander.

He invented the Momsen Lung, which was like a breathing apparatus that submariners could use in order to escape a dying submarine um and it worked um so like he was very very good people respected him so like well if we bring momson in maybe the b ward will listen to him because like the momson lung got distributed so clearly they trust this guy right so momson did this in the craziest way possible he attended the live firing of the torpedoes, and when one failed, he simply dove into the water to check it out, fighting it to be...

Fuck. Just fucking with very recently fired unexploded ordnance. He found that the torpedo had snapped in half, and he took the unexploded ordnance back with him to Pearl Harbor. Now, after fucking with it a bit more, he found the contact exploder, which was like this pin.

When the contact hit, it caused the pin to drive back, triggering the explosives. It was supposed to be a revolutionary, quick-functioning technology, but it was way too delicate. What would happen is the contact exploder would hit, and then it would break. Then it was way too delicate. So what would happen is

the contact exploder would hit, and then it would break, and then it just wouldn't explode. With a head-on explosion. Ideal. This was Momsen further tested this in the coolest way possible. He slid an active torpedo warhead filled with

sand and a live exploder down a cable from a 90 foot cherry picker crane onto a steel plate out in the middle of the out the middle of the desert just like i'm gonna drop some fucking torpedoes from this goddamn crane to be fair that's basically how we did trinity so yeah yeah i mean science back then was way cooler um let's kick it overboard whatever man this was to simulate a head-on like if if you were to fire like if you were to fire your torpedoes like a broadside a 90 degree uh hit which is how people were trained to do at the time uh 70 percent of the exploders failed uh when he did it this way now this is a problem in more ways

than one uh most mostly being that the torpedoes weren't working but um the torpedo captains and gunners have been trained this is the best way to attack a target so this is the way everyone is attacking meaning that the very way that they're attacking made sure the torpedoes wouldn't work the best part is that the Bureau still didn't fucking buy it why why

instead of taking Momsen's word they went to Princeton to visit a professor by the name of Albert fucking Einstein oh my god wasting his time we're dick deep in pile one at this point. Oh, don't worry. Albert Einstein took one look at Momsen's

work and he's like, yeah, it looks like your exploder is too delicate and is breaking with head-on collisions. So they finally agreed to change the exploder. We lost Einstein. We gotta change the torpedo. You can thank the jews once again but rapid fielding of a new torpedo would take a year or more to do uh so like that's that's a lot in wartime right uh until then they simply ordered everyone to shoot the torpedo at a different angle

uh which is like how momson got the fucker to work is if the torpedo at a different angle, which is like how Momsen got the fucker to work, is that if the torpedo hit at an angle, the contact exploder would work. Now, this did nothing to fix the wildly suicidally inaccurate gyro aboard the torpedo.

And this is where we get into a little story I like to call how a whole bunch of American submarines sank themselves. Yes. Enter the USS Tullaby. So the Tullaby was a Gato class sub that carried 24 Mark 14 submarines. The Tullaby was kind of an unfortunate sub from the time it was laid down to the time it actually went to war didn't have the greatest luck

from like it's it's field testing or sea trials or whatever they found out that it just kept being having air leaks it's a problem that's bad right I've heard that's bad

if you're in a sub I would be concerned about that we need all the air goes inside guys that's bad right I've heard that's bad if you're in a sub I would be concerned about that all the air goes inside guys that's how we live now they air stays in water stays out any deviation from this is a problem if you're in a submarine there you go that's all of subbreeder school we've got it

everybody on the boat sign up today for your legion of the old crow's sub-mariner certificate I will actually We've got it. Everybody on the boat. You're welcome. Sign up today for your Legion of the Old Crow Submariner Certificate. I will actually do that if someone has a template. Just copy and paste your name and you can be a Submariner in the Legion of the Old Crow. With it spelled wrong.

Like the S's backwards or something. So these problems were eventually ironed out to the point it wouldn't actively kill everybody and they ended up going on several combat patrols. So it was laid down in 1943. If you notice, that is a year after they started finally testing these subs. They are still outfitted with these, or started testing those torpedoes.

It is now still outfitted with those torpedoes. outfitted with those torpedoes. And after about a year of combat service in March of 1944, which by the way, still have those torpedoes. Oh, we're timely. We're timely here. Yeah. It was sent from Pearl Harbor

to Midway to refuel and then off to its fourth combat patrol. Their mission was to head north of Palau Islands and take part in the operation there against the Japanese Imperial Navy. But then it vanished, and nobody ever saw it again. Now, this actually happens

with frightening regularity with subs. It's pretty common for them to travel alone, and if something horrible was to happen, there's no good way to escape that motherfucker. You just die. No Japanese messages were intercepted saying they had sunk the sub.

So the US assumed it was lost to enemy fire or maybe a mine. Because if it hit a mine and sank, nobody would ever say anything about it. And nobody would probably say anything else because it's not like you're going to go retrieve their logs, figure out what happened

because it's a fucking sub. It's about the Pacific Ocean. Who knows how many goddamn ships are out there we don't know about right uh but one guy managed to survive um cliff uh quaking dale quaking dale uh very strange last name i'll call him cliff he was a gunner's mate aboard the tullaby uh he fired two torpedoes at a Japanese ship and said that the sub had been rocked immediately after by an explosion so large he was literally ripped from the sub and thrown clear of its wreckage into the Pacific

Ocean holy shit I don't know how he survives this but he is the only survivor confirmed from the Tullaby he was on its roster so like we know he's not making it up and And then he was picked up by the Japanese and tortured as a POW for the next 17 months.

I think at one point he was chained to a tree on Palau Islands as the US bombed it. Managed to survive all that. Good for you, Cliffy. Way to go. Way to go, Cliff. We're proud of you. Honorary member of the Legion of the Old Crow. that good for you cliffy way to go way to go cliff we're proud of you honorary lead uh member

of the legion of the old crow yeah uh much like the mormon church i bestow legionnaire membership on the dead um now spicy with the main differences i will never do that for hitler which the more which mormon church has done multiple times now uh cliff said that the last torpedo he fired and did an immediate circular run uh now a circular run is as you can imagine is when a torpedo immediately turns back around and starts charging towards the sub that fired it which is a problem that everybody knew that the mark 24 had. It was bad. It immediately circled back around and blew up the sub. Oh, good.

That's ideal. This killed 70 people. He was the only survivor. Jesus. The circular run thing was such a common occurrence for the Mark 14 that it happened at least 24 times during the war. Now, the reason why I say at least...

Yes. Jesus. Now, two of those times, maybe more, but two that we know for sure, ended with people being killed. The Tullibee being one and the USS Tang being the other. Now, the Tang is generally the one that comes to mind. Like if you search sub that sank itself,

which is something that I did, the Tang will come up. The reason for that is because the Tang is the most successful sub in US Navy history. Yes. It was so good, it had to kill itself. It sank 33 Japanese ships and one American one, being itself. On September 1944, the Tang was sent off on its fifth war patrol

into the streets of Formosa, modern-day Straits of Taiwan. Probably something else if you happen to live in the PRC. During the patrol, the Tang sank several more enemy ships before she ran out of luck and on the morning of October 25th the Tang fired its last torpedo now I've seen several sources say this is a Mark 18 torpedo rather than Mark 14 torpedo well up in the air on that one

but a small side note here that doesn't actually matter uh because the mark 18 was rapidly fielded to make up for how bad of a torpedo the mark 14 was yeah it was a it was an electric torpedo and it was a giant buggy piece of shit that managed to produce lethal quantities of hydrogen gas every once in a while when it was fired. Nice. It was also known for being much slower than a Mark 14 because it's electric. And like if its batteries were very temperamental and sometimes when it was fired, they would just be dead. It also had a horrible problem of circular runs. And we know this because during testing,

one circled back around and nearly killed the submarine that was firing it, the USS Flying Fish, which managed to dodge it in time. Either way, when the Tang fired its last torpedo, it immediately circled back around at it. And as slow as the torpedo was, it was still way faster than a sub could dodge its own shot. After the

captain, who survived and was given a medal of honor for shooting himself down... Nice! I love this shit. His medal of honor is technically for being the captain of the most successful ship or the most successful sub in the U.S. Navy. I feel like you should get a medal

of honor for shooting yourself. That's fucking funny. Yeah, you're so good. You feel like you should get a Medal of Honor for shooting yourself. That's fucking funny. Yeah, you're so good, you killed 33 ships and yourself. The Medal of Honor should be bestowed for hilarity at some points. 20 seconds after firing it, he said, it blew up the tang. So that's a real fast

circle. Damn. That's like immediate. Which leads me to believe that nobody's really sure what caused it it could have been a fucked up gyro it could have been his magnetic uh exploder was still attached and just immediately triggered it on its on itself nobody really knows um when it exploded it killed 78 men uh with nine were able to actually use a momson lung and uh get to the surface and survive. Um,

and unfortunately for them, they were also captured by the Japanese, uh, the Japanese ship. They were pulled up. Yeah. It's good news. You survived. Bad news.

You're Japanese POW. Like, fuck. Um, the Japanese ship there, they were pulled up onto also happened to house the uh the sailors from the ships that they sank the last couple days uh before they sank themselves which led to them being brutally beaten um though credit where credit's due uh. The crewman of the Tang said when they found out

that the sailors from the ships that they had sank were the ones beating them, they actually weren't that mad at them. Fair enough. I don't blame you. Good. It's fine. I'd beat us too.

Now, by the end of World War II, 52 American subs were lost, and it is the highest casualty percentage of any american armed force uh that meaning they lost one in five holy shit of 16,000 submariners 3,500 were killed so like i got bad fucking odds that's bad I said, at least two of those, the Tulipy and the Tang, kill themselves. But there's probably a third, which means there's probably a fourth, and so on and so forth. There's evidence to suggest a third,

the USS Grunion, which is a terrible ship name. It sounds like the USS Grundle. The USS Merkin. Make your grun. USS Ass Neck. The Grunion was lost off the coast of Alaska during the A2 and Kiska

campaigns. And it was just lost. Nobody found it until very, very recently. And while there's no definitive proof the people that observed the wreckage said that's almost certain that a null functioning mark 14 circled back around and blew it the fuck up and took all hands on deck and there's a reason why i said there's probably more of 52 lost subs fully eight them, nobody has any fucking idea what happened.

They just gone. They were, they simply vanished and they were chalked up to like a sea mine, maybe. Malfunction, lost at sea, nobody really knows.

But that's what they had the grunion listed as too until like 20 years ago. Oh wow. So there's a very, very good chance that there's several more subs on the bottom of probably the pacific maybe the atlanta circle death yeah it's like you know we used to uh make a joke um i believe i'm not exactly sure what the joke uh seeds of it are wherever it came from but like whenever we would get in a firefight with the uh with the afghan police and our patrols uh not with them mind you but like as a team we called the death blossom because they would just

fire blindly in every direction uh and this is truly the real death blossom. It's like fire it right back into your own face. So you feel any better about being a submarine in World War II now? I feel worse, man. One in five death rate, like circle death. That's awful. I'm not sure which is worse. Like statistically, the U-boats are the American subs, but like the U-boat casualty rate was catastrophic too.

Um, but yeah, it was, all I know is I don't want to be underwater during a war at any point. Yep. So I, I am, I am,

I am with you on land, please. I will take my chances where I can walk more than 500 feet i don't know if i would want to do my job in world war ii either because the casualty rate for american tank crews is quite high that's not great yeah yeah those m4 those sherman's man not the you know they were better than people give them credit for, but also being in a tank, you live by the tank, you die by the tank. Most of the time when your tank dies, you die with it.

If something goes through those walls... There's something poetic about that, I suppose. Yeah, if something goes through the walls of that tank, you're going to become one with it at a cellular level. So, Liam, we do a thing on this show called Questions from the Legion, as you're aware, as most people are aware

of at this point. Now, if you'd like to ask us a question, Legion, donate to the show. You can email it to me, DM to me through Patreon. You could load it into a submarine, fire a torpedo, and have that torpedo circle back around and have your own question from Legion delivered right back to you. Yes.

Don't worry. Today's question is actually different. We talk about depressing things on the show quite a lot. Like we just talked about casually around 16,000 people dying or 3,500 people dying give or take um so this question is what is something good that is happening in your life right now uh well joe i actually let's see i'm going to the beach tonight uh that'll be fun uh i just got a new job that's the exciting thing in my life uh i'm a project manager at company undisclosed. I,

and yeah, I mean, it's going pretty well, but I'm for the first time in my life, I'm like relatively financially stable. I'm like, things are swimming into view, like being able to maybe buy a house and buy an engagement ring.

And the first thought isn't like seizing panic. One good thing that's happening for me is like as most people are aware you've been hearing me shill them at various points during the life history of this podcast in the middle of writing a sci-fi series um it's going to be published through atheon books hopefully sometime soon um and i'm almost done with it. Uh, like I am on an, uh, granted we're talking manuscript here for the third book. So like, who knows how long the editing process is, but maybe five to 10,000 more words and I'm done with my manuscript. Uh, and for a while there, like I've never risen my first series. It's been very, very hard. Uh, And it has been a journey of about five years of work now to finally be done.

And like, it feels like I know I should feel accomplished about more things that I do. Well, I'm proud of you. I truly feel like I've like accomplished something. Almost. Almost. Mind you. I mean, Candle of Hooligans is a fucking fantastic book thank you so i'm excited yeah and hopefully uh you know i've been it's it's been weird because

like like i said it's my first not only is it my first fiction it's my first sci-fi it's my first series so like i've been dealing with the same characters and their lives and all of these other things for five years. Like that's longer than most relationships in my life. Yeah. So like, it's, it's very strange. Uh,

but like, I'm, I feel very good about it. So like, I can't wait. I hope, I hope it doesn't suck. I guess that's,

that's what I should say. Uh, but Liam, yes, this is the end of the show please plug your show hi hi well there's your problem we are a podcast about engineering disasters okay some of us are communists one of us is an anarchist i'll leave it up to you to decide who's who yeah i think that's uh something that i've picked up on while listening

to your show and i think people have picked up on that while listening to this show as well as that me and nick definitely lean more into the anarchist side of things but who cares i mean like and so liam thank you for being on the show thank you for having me i look forward to eventually worming my way back onto yours oh yeah yeah i gotta i gotta check the spreadsheet but uh but a show about engineers hosted by an engineer would have a fucking spreadsheet we do have a spreadsheet we have the guest spreadsheet uh i wish i was so organized as to have a spreadsheet but i do not also slide into the podcast dms because that'll make this a lot easier i will uh i will not be wearing clothes uh so oh until next time everybody uh don't go in it

i feel like this is a sub man just don't go like yeah this is probably the third fucking time i'm gonna end a show with saying don't get in the submarine no no don't do it not if you're a confederate not if you're an american not if No, no, don't do it. Not if you're a Confederate, not if you're an American, not if you're anyone. Just don't do it. Fight your wars on land like God intended. Train good, sub bad. Yes, train good, sub bad. There we go.