© 2007 Jeffrey R. Cox
I’m continuing to plod through Scorpion Down – it’s one of about six books I’m reading right now – but I have noticed a pattern in all of the accounts of the Scorpion, one which has only been touched upon in the Scorpion accounts and, though known in navy circles, has probably been generally ignored in most history books. But given that this was a problem we had faced before and will face again in the current war, it is one that should be remembered.
One of the more popular theories as to the cause of the sinking of the Scorpion is a malfunction of some type in the submarine’s torpedoes. Under this theory, a torpedo would have activated – gone on a “hot run” as the Navy terms it – either inside the tube or the torpedo compartment, possibly because of an issue with the torpedo’s battery. The hot run involves activation of either or both of the torpedo’s warhead or propellant. It is a potentially dangerous situation, but submariners are taught to handle it to a point where it becomes instinct. One way is to keep the torpedo in the tube or compartment and turn the submarine around, which activates a kill switch in the torpedo designed to prevent circular runs. Another, less favored method, is to launch the torpedo out of the tube, which gets it away from the submarine, though it possibly endangers others, including he submarine itself if it makes a circular run. The theory with the Scorpion – based on the fact that the submarine was found headed east, away from its intended destination – is that a torpedo made a hot run in the tube or torpedo compartment, and the Scorpion was attempting to turn itself around to deactivate the torpedo when the warhead detonated. An alternate theory is that the torpedo was launched for whatever reason and made a circular run, striking the Scorpion as it would a target.
This theory appears to be generally considered the most likely scenario, except by Edward Offley, of course, and the Naval Ordnance Command, whose job it is to administer and monitor the performance of munitions for the Navy. This caused some friction with the submarine service, and highlights an embarrassing, scandalous and borderline criminal episode in the history of the U.S. Navy.
To discus that episode properly, a little background for the uninitiated in military history is in order.
Generally, in a naval engagement, the tactical objective is to sink the enemy’s ships. That is most easily accomplished by opening holes in the hull to let the water in. If it sounds flippant, it should not. In ancient Greek and Roman times, this was not always the preferred method for dealing with enemy navies. Ramming a ship to damage the hull and sink it was a major tactic, but so was shearing off the ship’s oars to immobilize it. Another method was to seize the ship and board it with marines, turning a naval battle into in essence a land battle. The Romans most famously used this tactic in the First Punic War with the corvus (raven), where they used a giant swiveling spike mounted at the prow of a ship to hammer into an opposing ship’s deck, holding it fast while Roman legionaries boarded the ship, often crossing on the corvus itself. It was in this way that the Romans, despite no naval tradition, were able to hold their own against the Carthaginian navy. Unfortunately, the corvus gave Roman ships major stability issues, so later Romans used grappling irons instead to similar effect on other enemies.
Still, ramming an enemy ship to sink it was the most popular and effective tactic. It remained so for a very long time. It was modified in some forms – fire ships and demolition ships, for example. And there were some countermeasures against it, the most famous of which was “Greek Fire,” the napalm-like substance used by the late Romans and Eastern Romans (or Byzantines) to keep enemy ships away from them.
With the advent of cannons and naval artillery, ramming went out of style, but was still a useful tactic. Hitting a ship with cannons or explosives did not always poke enough holes in it to let the water in. As iron and steel replaced wood as the primary hull material in warships, this became more of a problem. But if you pack enough explosives, you can still poke through the armored hull below the waterline like you could in ancient times.
Thus you have the torpedo. You take the ancient concept of ramming a ship, poking a hole below the waterline to let the water in, and add in the explosive warhead, necessitated by modern armor. That’s it. It also is much cheaper from a military standpoint. The “torpedoes” of ancient times or even the Civil War were crewed ships. The crewed ship now is instead a gun, the torpedo is basically a bullet.
Torpedoes are most famously used by submarines, but destroyers were also a traditional platform for torpedoes. A standard arrangement would be for a destroyer to have its 5-inch guns forward of the bridge, have a triple or quadruple rotating torpedo mount amidships, have a second mount aft, followed by its aft 5-inch guns. The Japanese also equipped their light and heavy cruisers with torpedo mounts, and would use them to devastating effect in the early years of World War II.
Even as airpower started becoming the dominant force, the torpedo still retained a necessary role, and was even adapted for use by aircraft. The famous explosion of the USS Arizona notwithstanding, most of the damage done to the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor was done by Japanese aerial torpedoes. The British battleship Prince of Wales and battlecruiser Repulse were sunk off Malaya mainly by aerial torpedoes. A saying in World War II went something like if you wanted to damage a ship you used bombs, but if you wanted to sink it you used torpedoes. It was the truth. Bombing could sink a ship only if it caused secondary effects, like induced explosions of ammunition or fuel. Technically, at the Battle of Midway, in which the US torpedo squadrons were completely ineffective, the Pacific Fleet sank only one Japanese ship – the heavy cruiser Mikuma, sunk after she was accidentally rammed by her sister ship Mogami and then bombed by US aircraft, which detonated her stock of torpedoes. The four aircraft carriers of Kido Butai – Akagi, Kaga, Hiryu and Soryu – were actually sunk by the Japanese themselves after they were irreparably damaged in US dive bombing attacks. The bombing caused induced explosions of ammunition, fuel and aircraft, but did not irretrievably destroy their watertight integrity like they did the Mikuma.
But torpedoes were and are very finicky creatures. Calling a torpedo a bullet as I did earlier, while clarifying the role of a torpedo, can only be done with some caveats. You aim your gun to fire a bullet. The bullet’s trajectory is dependent entirely on the positioning of the gun, and once you fire it, the bullet is gone, you have no control over it and will never see it again.
Torpedoes are a different kettle of fish. For one thing, you can set the torpedo’s depth, which was important in World War II. Set the torpedo too high and you can hit the armor belt on a warship, doing minimal damage. Set it too deep, and the torpedo can go under the ship entirely.
On submarines and destroyers, you cannot always position yourself so that your torpedo tubes are facing directly at the enemy, or where you expect the enemy to be when your torpedo arrives. In fact, you can rarely do so. So you can order the torpedo to run at a different course than the ship, within some limits. Without going into too much detail, torpedo ballistics can be rather complex.
So a torpedo is a pretty complicated piece of machinery. Since the end of World War II, it has become even moreso. Some torpedoes have their own active sonar, to allow them to hone in on their targets. Some are wire-guided, so their launching submarine can control them, within limits.
But those newer bells and whistles were not available in the heat of World War II, when the U.S. sailors had, to say the least, issues with their torpedoes.
The U.S. Pacific Fleet fought Nihon Kaigun, the Imperial Japanese Navy, in World War II. The Japanese had made the use of the torpedo into an art form. Their torpedoes launched from planes and submarines were all right, but their real weapon was the 24-inch diameter Type 93 Torpedo, dubbed the “Long Lance” after the war, probably by U.S. Navy Historian Samuel Eliot Morison. The Long Lance was used by Japanese destroyers and cruisers (the U.S. Navy’s refusal to arm its cruisers with torpedoes was a major blunder, in my opinion), and was the scourge of Allied sailors throughout the Pacific. In terms of range, accuracy and explosive power, the Long Lance was superior to anything the U.S. Navy could offer in the Pacific.
So just how did U.S. torpedoes compare? In a word, they sucked. Not just comparatively with the Long Lance, but they sucked by any reasonable measure. Not just ineffective, but more of a danger to the U.S. sailors than they were to the Japanese. Granted, U.S. torpedo doctrine as not nearly as well developed or as effective as that of Nihon Kaigun, but the torpedoes were all so bad that the effectiveness of American tactics was reduced further.
The U.S. had three types of torpedoes in World War II:
* Mark XIII, used by aircraft
* Mark XIV, used by submarines
* Mark XV, used by destroyers and other surface ships
They were all horrible, so bad that it was called the
Great Torpedo Scandal.
The Mark XIII had to be dropped at such a low altitude and slow speed that it put U.S. aircraft in danger. Witness the performance of the torpedo squadrons at Midway. The Mark XIV and Mark XV were largely the same. The Mark XV received little criticism, probably because their deficiencies were not always noticed in a battle that became a close-quarters gun-fest between ships. But those deficiencies and their effects were magnified in the Mark XIV, where a lightly-armored submarine depended on stealth and surprise for a successful attack, which was all too often thwarted by the torpedo.
Those deficiencies generally came in three categories:
Depth control - U.S. torpedoes generally ran about 10 feet deeper than their depth setting, so the torpedoes would often run under their targets.
Magnetic influence exploder - the Mark XIV was equipped with the Mark VI magnetic influence exploder. A magnetic influence exploder was a sort of proximity fuse for torpedoes. When it enters a ship’s magnetic field, it detonates. The idea was to detonate the torpedo beneath the target’s lightly-armored keel, which could do catastrophic structural damage to the target. Unfortunately, a ship’s magnetic field changes depending on its position on the earth’s surface, resulting in premature detonations – which revealed the presence of the submarine. For that reason, the magnetic influence exploder had been abandoned by most of the world’s navies, but not by the U.S.
Impact exploder – when the magnetic influence feature of Mark VI exploder was finally dumped, the impact exploder proved faulty. An impact exploder is basically a torpedo’s firing pin. When the exploder strikes the target, the impact drives the pins into the percussion caps, detonating the torpedo’s explosives. Except impact would often crush the firing pin instead of driving it into the percussion mechanism, resulting in a lot of duds, which, in the case of a submarine, would again reveal its presence.
The Bureau of Ordnance, in the face of enormous evidence as to the performance of its torpedoes, consistently blamed human error and refused to acknowledge the evidence. So American sailors were sent into harm’s way with a torpedo that could get them killed.
As a result, there is no shortage of stories of the miserable performance of U.S. torpedoes:
* In action of Balikpapan in 1942, four old destroyers (
John D. Ford,
Pope,
Parrott,
Paul Jones) under the command of Commander Paul Talbot attacked 12 helpless stationary Japanese transports. They sank four, but the score would have been higher had their first torpedo attacks not resulted in zero hits, or at least zero hits with explosions. As a result, the Japanesw were scarcely delayed in their invasion of what is now Indonesia, let alone stopped.
* After the battle of Savo Island off Guadalcanal in 1942, the destroyer
Selfridge attempted to scuttle the burning Australian heavy cruiser
Canberra by firing four Mark XV torpedoes at the stationary target. Three ran beneath the
Canberra, only one hit. The
Canberra did not sink until she was torpedoed by the destroyer
Ellett.
* After the Second Naval Battle of Guadalcanal in 1942, destroyer
Gwin attempted to scuttle the badly damaged destroyer
Benham with four Mark XV torpedoes. Two missed, one ran erratically, one exploded prematurely.
Gwin had to sink
Benham with gunfire.
* During the Battle of Leyte Gulf in 1944, the destroyer
Irwin was directed to scuttle the burning, immobilized carrier
Princeton.
Irwin fired six torpedoes. Only one hit the
Princeton, an ineffective hit on the bow after the torpedo mysteriously curved to the left. Two more circled and headed back for the
Irwin, forcing the destroyer to take evasive action. Fortunately, both torpedoes missed.
Princeton was eventually sunk by torpedoes from the
Reno, one of the few U.S. cruisers armed with torpedoes.
*
Irwin was not alone. Submarine
Triton had to dodge one of its Mark XIV torpedoes that made a circular run.
*
Triton was lucky. Submarine
Tullibee was sunk in 1944 by one of its own Mark XIV torpedoes that made a circular run.
* Submarine
Tang was also sunk in 1944 by one of its own Mark XIV torpedoes making a circular run.
* The “crown jewel” of Mark XIV performance has to go to the submarine
Nautilus. During the Battle of Midway,
Nautilus attempted to sink the badly damaged and immobilized Japanese carrier
Kaga.
Nautilus proceeded to fire four torpedoes at
Kaga. The range was 2700 yards. The result? One torpedo malfunctioned and never left the tube. Two ran erratically and missed. One struck the badly damaged carrier and failed to explode, breaking in two in the process. The warhead sank, but the tail was used as a flotation device by the carrier’s survivors in the water.
Nautilus was subject to counterattack by
Kaga’s escorting destroyers.
* The crown jewel of Mark XV performance and in my opinion of U.S. World War II torpedo performance in general has to be the attempted scuttling of the aircraft carrier
Hornet, an incident that would be humorous if not for what could have been the potential catastrophic consequences.
The listing and abandoned USS Hornet
during the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands, before her attempted scuttling.In the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands during the Guadalcanal campaign in 1942, both U.S. aircraft carriers
Enterprise and
Hornet were damaged. But
Enterprise was still operational – the last operational U.S. carrier in the Pacific – so she was withdrawn and unable to provide air cover for
Hornet. The lack of air cover allowed subsequent Japanese air attacks to frustrate efforts to repair
Hornet or tow her clear. The picture above notwithstanding, the
Hornet does not appear to have been in immediate danger of sinking, but as night approached the Japanese moved in with heavy surface forces, and their radio messages indicated they were intent on capturing the immobilized carrier. For that reason, it was decided to have the destroyer
Mustin scuttle the
Hornet.
The results were Monty Pythonesque.
Mustin carefully fired eight Mark XV torpedoes at
Hornet. Of those eight torpedoes, two ran wild and missed and three others had “indeterminate” runs, which means they missed and no one knew why. Three torpedoes hit, but the damage they inflicted was not enough to sink the
Hornet. By this time, Japanese float planes, launched from their cruisers and battleships, were overhead.
Destroyer
Anderson was ordered to help the
Mustin scuttle the Hornet. She fired eight Mark XV torpedoes of her own. Of those eight, one exploded prematurely and one ran wild. Six hit, but only four exploded. The damage inflicted was still not enough to sink the
Hornet.
The Japanese float planes began marking the location with flares for their rapidly approaching surface forces to see the U.S. ships in the night. In desperation,
Mustin and
Anderson resorted to gunfire, but they only caused the fires on
Hornet to burn more brightly. The behavior of the Japanese float planes convinced
Mustin and
Anderson that the arrival of the Japanese surface forces was imminent, so they fled, leaving a U.S. capital ship to the mercy of the enemy for the first time.
And indeed the Japanese battleships an cruisers were at hand. They found
Hornet burning so badly that they were unable to tow her, so they sank her with two of their Long Lance torpedoes.
It was only after years of incidents like this and mountains of evidence that the Bureau of Ordnance was bludgeoned into accepting that U.S. torpedoes were faulty and needed some remedial measures.
So what does this have to do with the sinking of the
Scorpion? The Bureau of Ordnance that vehemently denied its torpedoes were a problem in 1942 was later renamed the Naval Ordnance Command, and proceeded to vehemently deny that its torpedoes were a problem in 1968.
But submariners have long memories, even if the Navy bureaucracy does not.
