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The Worst Weapons Failure of WW2 That Nobody Knows About

December 1941. The United States sends its entire submarine force into the Pacific armed with a torpedo that has never once been fired with a live warhead at an actual ship. For the next twenty-one months, American submariners will watch their weapons sail under targets, explode too early, or slam into steel hulls and simply stop. The Mark 14 torpedo carried three fatal defects — all hiding behind each other — and the men who built it kept insisting it worked fine. This is the story of the worst weapons scandal of the Second World War: how the Naval Torpedo Station at Newport, Rhode Island, designed and delivered a broken weapon, how the Bureau of Ordnance blamed submarine crews for its failures, and how officers like Rear Admiral Charles Lockwood and Lieutenant Commander Dan Daspit fought their own chain of command to prove the truth. Lockwood ran unauthorized tests with fishing nets in Western Australia. Daspit brought back an unfired torpedo as evidence after watching thirteen out of fifteen shots fail against a stationary 19,000-ton tanker at point-blank range. The fixes came not from the engineers who built the weapon, but from combat sailors dropping sand-filled warheads off cranes onto steel plates and machining new firing pins from scrapped aircraft propellers. The cost was staggering. During the window when Japan's merchant fleet was most vulnerable and its anti-submarine defenses weakest, American submarines could not do their job. Historian Clay Blair concluded the torpedo scandal extended the Pacific War by many months. By some estimates, up to seventy percent of submarine-launched torpedoes were duds before mid-1943. Aircraft carriers were within torpedo range and survived because the warheads self-destructed. The Mark 14 eventually became a reliable weapon that served for decades — but not before institutional arrogance, secrecy, and a refusal to test under realistic conditions created one of the most consequential equipment failures in modern military history. 📍 TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 — The Torpedo the Navy Never Tested 1:40 — Newport: The Monopoly That Built a Broken Weapon 3:54 — Inside the Mark 14: Design, Speed, and a Fatal Flaw 5:12 — The Mark 6 Exploder: Classified Beyond Reason 7:21 — Bad Data Validating Itself: The Depth Sensor Trap 8:11 — Christmas Eve 1941: 12 Torpedoes, Zero Explosions 10:08 — The Bureau's Response: Blame the Submarine Crews 11:27 — Admiral Lockwood vs the Bureau of Ordnance 13:07 — The Unauthorized Net Test at Frenchman Bay 15:30 — Defect #2: Premature Explosions and the Magnetic Exploder 16:16 — Three Japanese Carriers Dead to Rights — Seven Prematures 19:44 — Nimitz Orders: Shut Off the Magnetic Exploder 20:15 — Defect #3: The Contact Pistol That Jammed on a Perfect Hit 21:38 — USS Tinosa: 13 Duds Against a Stationary Ship 25:00 — Sand Bombs and Crane Drops: The Improvised Fix 26:37 — September 1943: The Mark 14 Finally Works 26:52 — 5.3 Million Tons: What American Submarines Did Next 29:03 — Why Every Other Navy Fixed It Faster 32:03 — Daspit's Last Torpedo: Evidence Over Another Shot 📚 SOURCES: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_14_torpedo https://www.defensemedianetwork.com/stories/torpedo-scandal-rear-adm-charles-lockwood-the-mark-14-and-the-bureau-of-ordnance/ https://historynet.com/us-torpedo-troubles-during-world-war-ii/ https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2018/2/8/fire-one-fire-ten-implications-of-the-torpedo-scandal-of-world-war-ii https://militaryhistoryonline.com/WWII/MarkXIVTorpedo https://hackaday.com/2020/05/13/the-mark-14-torpedo-when-just-about-everything-goes-wrong-even-the-testing/ 📋 ABOUT THIS VIDEO: This documentary examines the Mark 14 torpedo scandal of 1941-1943, the worst weapons system failure of the Second World War. The Mark 14 torpedo, designed at the Naval Torpedo Station Newport Rhode Island starting January 1931, carried three overlapping defects: a depth-running error of approximately eleven feet caused by misplaced hydrostatic pressure ports, an unreliable Mark 6 magnetic influence exploder calibrated for North Atlantic latitudes but deployed in the western Pacific, and a contact pistol firing pin that jammed on perpendicular impact at forty-six knots. Rear Admiral Charles Lockwood proved the depth defect through unauthorized net tests at Frenchman Bay Albany Western Australia on June 20 1942. USS Tinosa under Lieutenant Commander Dan Daspit demonstrated the contact pistol failure on July 24 1943 when thirteen of fifteen torpedoes failed against the 19,000-ton tanker Tonan Maru No. 3 between Palau and Truk. Admiral Chester Nimitz ordered the Mark 6 magnetic exploder deactivated on June 24 1943. Fixes reached the fleet by September 1943. #WW2 #WWII #WorldWar2 #Mark14Torpedo #USNavy #SubmarineWarfare #PacificWar #TorpedoScandal #CharlesLockwood #DanDaspit #MilitaryHistory #WW2Documentary

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About the Channel

The Worst Weapons Failure of WW2 That Nobody Knows About

The Tank Britain Was Too Embarrassed to Deploy

The Tiger and Panther Tanks Weren't as Good as You Think

Why the 'Invincible' Zero Became a Death Trap by 1943

Why America's Fastest-Built Ships Kept Cracking in Half

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