US Torps From German?
 

I once read that during Drumbeat on the Eastern Seaboard a German Electric went astray and ended up on a VA beach. It was retrieved and the US authorities then used it to "reverse engineer" or at least improve a US Electric.

Is this remotely true or just a fairy tale?

I don't know the accuracy of the particular situation. I do know, on both sides of the war, captured equipment was used for various things. Among the uses were indeed reverse engineering a technology. Another example was to study the equipment to find how best to destroy it.

Our Mark 14 was also a reverse engineered German torpedo, not to the extent that we reproduced every part exactly, but it was exact enough to share the same problems of depth keeping, detonator pin bending, magnet exploder not working, etc. We not only reproduced the torpedo successfully, but all its defects too!

I guess they figured that if we captured a German U-boat, we could rip off all the torpedoes for our own use before we scuttled the World War i relic of a U-boat:har::har::har:....

Turns out we stole the wrong torpedoes, for destroyer use anyway. We should have stolen Japanese torpedoes, which were faster and had much longer range. Unfortunately, at the ranges the torpedoes were good for it was very unlikely you would hit a single ship from even half their ultimate range. I'm sure American sub skippers would have used them to shoot from 6,000 yards and miss just about every shot. They were like a 70 yard field goal in American football. Can you kick that far? Sure. Can you actually get it between the uprights? Once in awhile.

Maybe we were best served by what we had.