I had never seen Blunt worked up like this. It must have been an extremely sore subject among the whole staff. 'I'm your man,' I said quickly. 'Let me try the job. As a matter of fact, I've had some ideas.' I really hadn't, not recently, at any rate, though there had been some at one time. 'Look,' I said, laying down, the cane and getting to my feet. I wobbled across the room, turned and wobbled back. The weak leg throbbed. 'See?
I'll be giving back the cane in a couple of weeks!'
'You're a liar, Rich!' Blunt was grinning at me. 'I've already asked the doctors about you and they say you won't be rid of it for a month. But if you want the job, I'll see if I can talk the Admiral into letting you have it.'
I could have whooped for the sheer pleasure of it.
The very same day I sat down to read through the pile of stuff written about the torpedoes. It was immediately evident that someone had already done a pretty good job of sorting and classifying. In general the complaints which occurred most often could be classified as three: Dud hits, that is, torpedoes known to have hit the target but which failed to explode; under- runs: torpedoes seen to pass harmlessly under the target; and prematures: explosions taking place before the fish reached the target.
The firing mechanism of the torpedo warhead contained a device-highly secret before the war-which was designed to cause detonation when passing into the magnetic field of a ship.
Torpedoes passing under a target's keel should therefore explode somewhere beneath, with devastating results. Some of them did. Perhaps the port-flanking escort, which had chased us and had been broken in two with our last torpedo aft, had been a casualty of this type. of explosion. And that also, of course, was why our circular torpedo during the patrol off Palau had gone off while passing overhead; and I remembered that it had actually made three passes at us before finally detonating.
Clearly there was something highly erratic about the manner in Which this part of the mechanism functioned. It could be blamed for nonexplosion of the underruns and the premature explosion of others.
Another section of the exploding mechanism was intended to cause the torpedo to go off upon hitting the side of a ship.
One report in this part of the file was circled in red crayon and bore evidence of considerable handling. It detailed the experience of one skipper who happened to cripple and stop a large tanker on the open sea. There were no escorts, and no air cover, but he couldn't surface because the tanker had manned its guns. Conditions otherwise were ideal-weather sunny and calm. And he had sat there, firing torpedo after torpedo in single shots, as though he were shooting torpedo proving shots in Newport Harbor. And not one of them had gone off. He had fired fifteen all together, eight under the most ideal setup imaginable, and except for the initial salvo there was not the slightest question but that every torpedo hit the target. Yet the only detonation out of the whole bunch was one of the initial salvo which just happened to strike in the vicinity of the propellers.
And of the underruns themselves: why did torpedoes set to, run at a depth of ten feet beneath the surface sometimes pass under ships which must draw twenty feet or more? One or two submarine skippers had theorized, early in the war, that Japanese vessels must have extraordinarily shallow draft, but this could not be the answer. I came upon reports of some experimental firings in Brisbane in which practice torpedoes were fired through nets. When the nets were hauled in it was found that the holes made by the torpedoes were considerably deeper than expected. A full report had been sent in to Washington, of course, but as yet nothing remedial had been done about it.
My interview with Admiral Small was nearly a repetition of the talk with his Chief of Staff. This was going to be his personal project, he told me. What he wanted me for was to be Project Officer, to follow through for him and render reports as to what had been discovered. One comment he made was to the effect that he was tired of sending torpedoes all the way to Japan to find out that they wouldn't work. 'We'll try them out right here, with regulation warheads on them!' he said.
That was why, within a few days, I found myself poring over large-scale charts of the Hawaiian Islands, trying to select a spot for what the Admiral had in mind. With the topography the Islands, the place was not difficult to find: a sheer rock cliff, with deep water right up to the rock. Plenty of room for submarine to approach and fire into the rock, and for a torpedo to make a normal run without danger of hitting the bottom. A sandy bottom, to make later recovery of the torpedoes practicable.
And not long after about two weeks, and I still needed the Cane, I stood on the bridge of the Skipjack as she fired a deliberate salvo of warshots into the cliff. One out of four went off. The other three were duds. Then the divers went to work, and for the next several days there was the tedious job of looking over each fish to find out what had happened.
Similarly, we fired numbers of torpedoes down a torpedo range through a series of nets, marking and calibrating exactly at what depth each fish was actually running for each net position.
We built up great experience tabulations, based on the net shots and the explosion tests. To get more data for our tables, the sub base strung guy wire's to a building, slid torpedo war- heads down them-loaded with a mixture of sand and sawdust to the right weight, however, instead of TNT to collide with a section of steel plate on the ground. We used several guy wires so as to simulate various angles of impact, and the heights were carefully calibrated to produce the proper speeds.
The results of all our tests, when Admiral Small finally gave them his approval, were conclusive. The magnetic feature was so delicate and intricate-a marvel of design and ingenuity but totally undependable in service-that it might as well be for- gotten. The mechanical part of the exploder, which should in- variably go off upon impact, was also too delicate and at the same time too heavily constructed. Its inertia was so great that upon impact the firing pin, key to the whole thing, would be deformed or bent before it had a chance to do its job. And the torpedoes habitually ran as much as twenty feet deeper than they were supposed to. Like everything else about them, how- ever, the depth was erratic; they wobbled down the course like a sine wave, alternately deep and shallow. It was just luck what part of the curve the target happened to be on.
The more we got into the problem, the madder everyone got.
Everything we had discovered should have been found out on the proof ranges long ago, before the war in most cases. The design failures should have been discovered by proper tests be. fore the torpedoes ever got to the proof ranges. And there was no excuse for our not receiving the correct depth-running data, no more than for the refusal of the torpedo designers to accept, or at least investigate, our earlier findings that the torpedoes ran deeper than set. When the Admiral took off for Washington this time, he was loaded.
When he returned, not many days later, there was a glint of cold fury in his eyes. Captain Blunt and I met him at the air- field. By this time I had given back the cane, though the leg still bothered me. 'They believe us at last,' he growled, 'but they're not doing a thing about it. The new exploder will be the answer to everything, when it's ready.' He snorted. 'Ready! Hell!
Maybe next year, it might be ready! They haven't even built one yet!'
Blunt turned to me. 'Tell him your idea, Rich,' he commanded.
The idea was simply stated. 'I've been looking over the exploder,' I said, 'and of course if we could make it work the way it ought to, that would be the best answer of all. It occurred to me that perhaps if we could rebuild the mechanical firing gadget with lighter parts and completely disconnect the magnetic part of the exploder, we might get acceptable results. far as the depth settings on the torpedoes are concerned, which is an entirely separate problem, at least we know what's wrong and can make allowances for it.'
Admiral Small's reaction was characteristic. 'Hop to it, Rich!' was all he said, but I found doors opening for me wherever went. More weeks of work followed, and I had the heady feeling that we were at last getting somewhere. Our research, if it could be called that, now had a definite goal: a firing-pin mechanism strong enough and light enough to complete the necessary motion upon impact with the target before the crushing force of the impact itself bent it all out of shape. We were working with split seconds, and the answer, when it was finally found, was unbelievably simple. Airplane propellers had to be very light and very strong. We collected all the damaged propellers we could find and cut the required parts from the hard, light metal.
'Better use for a busted prop,' the Army Major at Hickam Field told me, 'could not be found anywhere!'
From then on the problem became one of production, for the Admiral insisted that he would hold a submarine back from patrol, if necessary, before letting her go without previously having seen to it that every exploder she carried in her torpedoes had the modification. Every available machine shop in the submarine base was pressed into service to make the new parts.
A rigid inspection system was set up, too, for Admiral Small was adamant on this score.
The reports from the first few boats which took the modified exploiters to sea were jubilant. Where
