Absolutely correct. The USN does not use Roman numerals thank god.

At the start of the war, Naval Torpedo Station Newport, RI was the sole producer of torpedoes for the USN. Despite employing 3,000 workers and working around the clock, they were only producing about three weapons per day. They were barely able to keep up with pre-war demands. Once the war started and rate of expenditures began to skyrocket, Newport fell drastically behind demand. To make matters worse, 233 Mk 14's were lost when Cavite was bombed on the first day of the war. The sub force compensated for this shortfall in several ways:

1. Going out with reduced loadouts.

2. Loading out with a mixed complement of Mk 10's and 14's.

3. Loading out with a mixed complement of Mk 14's and mines.

4. Reducing the number of torpedoes fired per target.

5. Swopping torpedoes between boats between patrols (as Luke noted above).

None of these compensation methods were popular with the crews, as it limitied what they could do. The Mk 10 was a fairly well liked weapon, but the range was short and the warhead relatively small. In mid 1942 when the shortage was at its' height, there was a lot of pressure placed on the skippers to be conservative with the number of torpedoes used. When combined with the gross unreliability of the Mk 14, this policy only served to lessen the number of ships sunk.

By January 1943 the crisis was over, although some shortages were still encountered in the Southwest Pacific command until the summer due to longer transport times. The problem had been solved by expanding Newport, reopening NTS Alexandria, starting up NTS Keyport, and bringing in civilian contractors.

The swopping of fish between boats presented no real problems in maintenance or reliability. The Torpedomen on the boats were superbly trained and capable and could take care of most problems. If anything major was suspected, the fish could be sent to the tender for overhaul. You have to remember that most of the time the fish just sat on its skid in the torpedo room and did nothing, requiring little or no maintenance. If the fish got bounced around in a depth charge attack, or if it sat in a flooded tube for a long period of time, it might require some careful checks. But again the TM's aboard the boat could handle many of these tasks. The boat TM's were somewhat distrustful of the tender pukes anyway and redid most of the maintenance checks themselves just to be sure. After all, your life depended on it.

EDIT EDIT

I forgot one thing. On a few rare occasions, boats went to sea with Mk 15 destroyer torpedoes onboard! The Mk 15 was similar to the 14 in many ways, but it was longer, had a larger warhead, and a longer range. The problem was that it was too long to fit the the standard fleet boat torpedo tube! The solution was to fit the smaller Mk 14 warhead on it and this shortened the fish just enough so that it would fit in the tube. Even with this mod, it was still too long to fit down the loading hatches and on the in room stowage skids. To accomodate them into the boats, the fish would be craned into the water, the outer door of the tube opened, the fish was floated into the tube, and the outer door closed. Once loaded, the weapon could not be completely removed from the tube and taken into the room. They were carried this way into battle and were the first fish fired.

The Mk 15 was more plentiful due to a much lower rate of expenditure by destroyers. Even still, this type of loadout was rare due to the problems outlined above.

Two books I can recommend if you are interested in the history of the torpedos and their problems

“HELLIONS Of The DEEP" The Development of American Torpedoes in World War II. - By Robert Gannon. This book pretty much slams the NTS

Iron Men and Tin Fish: The Race to Build a Better Torpedo during World War II
by Anthony Newpower. This book addresses how different countries addressed (or did not address) their respective torpedo problems.

Here's a question which has come up a few times on the forum and never seems to get answered to anyone's satisfaction.

What keeps the deck gun(s) from rusting into uselessness during a patrol? I've heard that were made from corrosion resistant steel and that the more delicate optical parts were taken below. But some seem to dispute that there is such a thing as corrosion resistant steel.

Excellent thread by the way. Makes for informative reading. :salute:

I can absolutely guarantee that USN submarines use great quantities of Corrosion Resistant Stainless Steel (CRSS). I have polished enough of it to last a lifetime! :DL

Naval guns contain a large percentage of CRSS, copper-nickel alloys, and chromium in their construction for just this purpose. Despite repeated dunkings, the guns held up well. However, the key word here is "resistant". The guns required careful maintenance whenever possible or over a period of time they would cease to function.

The early 3"/50 and 4"/50 had the inner bore sealed by the breech block and a tampion in the muzzle. The tampion was easily removed before action. The later 5"/25 was made entirely of CRSS and other resistant materials and did not require the bore to be sealed.

For more information, surf over to the following links:

http://www.navweaps.com/Weapons/WNUS_Main.htm

and

http://www.oldsubsplace.com/Submarine%20Deck%20Guns.htm

These pages contain more info than you will ever want to know about naval guns. Enjoy! :up:

One other interesting method that the USN uses for corrosion control is the placing of zinc anodes in certain areas on the external part of the boat. When pure zinc comes into contact with steel, it greatly slows the process of oxidation and prolongs the life of the surrounding steel or ferrous metal. The zinc anodes will vary greatly in size, running from the size of your thumb to the size of a brick.

But, even so, many captains used Roman numerals in their patrol reports when documenting the use of torpedoes. :doh:

Bravo! Thanks for the deck gun answer and clearing this one up. I've seen the zinc plates on the keels of boats in dry storage at marinas and always wondered what they were about. :salute:

Thanks Luke and Davey for clarifying about the Mark 14 shortage. :yeah:

Small question :D :

I read US periscopes were fitted with colored filters in the rayfilter-assembly (red, green and yellow). How were these used? (red in bright light, yellow at night, etc?)

I'd also be interested to know what, if any, colorfilters were present in U-boats, but I guess I'm asking the wrong people. :hmmm:

Darn! Note to self: don't leave thoughts unfinished and then go on vacation, even if it is to gather photons from remote celestial objects. Where would such a story, written by a crewmember who survived the incident, reside? The story was excellent and well-worth putting a link in here. He was very worried about his sister boats and stated that no investigation into their seaworthiness was conducted.

My information shows that S-10 was SS-115. Confusing at best.

In this boat's case, it was an MBT that sprung a leak (more than sprung a leak, lost a section of beer can there) and they were unable to blow ballast from a full tank that contained the entire ocean! Ballast tanks, being open to the sea don't normally resist much pressure, as pressure inside and outside are the same. As such their resistance to depth charging would be unremarkable until a section of the tank just corroded out, leaving the boat unable to surface. I'm off to ferret out this terrific account, even though I have lost any trace of where it came from. Don't try this at home.

Holy Cow! Looking for the above story, turned up an even more enlightening story about the plight of the poor crews stuck in the sugar boats at http://www.subvetpaul.com/SAGA_8_96.htm . It's the story of THE SAGGING SAGA OF THE SUGAR BOAT. by Dr. Charles W. Gibbs, published in POLARIS August 1996. It's too long for me to cut and paste, it and its owner may not live for long, but here it is, the story of the sugar boat, the hidden enemy and the sagging sugar boat. If you never follow another link, please follow this one.

Holy Something or Other than a Cow! Found it. The Final Cruise of USS S-10 (SS-115), by Dale A. Danielsen, Published in POLARIS April 2000. Check this out and the entire lost until rescued by SubVetPaul, Polaris Sagas, selected articles of interest to submarine veterans published in the Polaris, official bulletin of the US Sub Vets of World War II.

Damn. Losing the boats is tragic, but losing the men and their stories is infinitely more so. I think I'm going to capture all of SubVetPaul's site to my hard drive too. Who knows when it will be gone.

Floating a boat in sea water is equivalent to floating it in battery acid. It eats everything, and what it doesn't eat it cruds up with mineral encrustation. I worked for awhile as a marine mechanic on salt water and you wouldn't believe the number of Mercaturkey Outboard lower units we opened with air chisels because they were eaten up with corrosion and encrusted so that they could not be disassembled normally.

At any rate, just like battery acid, salt water acts as an electrolyte. When two dissimilar metals are bathed in it, one of the metals becomes a cathode and has crap added to it (yum!) and the other acts as an anode and is eaten for lunch by the action of the electrolyte and the cathode. The way to stop this temporarily is to find a metal that acts as the anode for just about all other kinds of metal and attach it electrically to the other metal. It so happens that zinc is an anode for all the different kinds of metals used in boat, ship and submarine construction. So you bolt these zinc anodes to prop shafts, decks, whatever, one per electrically isolated amalgamation of metal parts and only the zinc is eaten for lunch, not your precious prop shafts, ballast tank metal, guns or whatever else you thought would be good to go for a bath in a battery electrolyte.

Periodically, the zinc anodes are inspected and replaced if they are depleted. If you miss one lousy piece of metal that is electrically isolated from the rest of the boat, it STILL gets eaten. Yum! Salt water is fun! Zinc anodes stop electrolytic corrosion, but oxidation is a chemical process not affected by anodes. Paint, muchas chipping and grinding are about the only tools you have there.

I must admit it's pretty clever. Sacrificing one cheap piece of zinc to help preserve the more valuable parts. :cool:

Yeah salt is nasty stuff. Drive a car through enough midwest winters and it slowly gets eaten too.

And the Oops of the Year Award goes to...:doh:

Me.

USS S-10 is indeed SS-115. It was a typo...yea...that is my story and I'm sticking to it! :D

Great links, RR! I had read that S-10 story as well but misplaced the link.

No problem. Computers take human error and replace it with a lot harder to find random typos.

Now the question has to be asked, because of the rank of the author of the S-10 story. Is his info accurate or was there indeed an investigation of the condition of the sugar boat fleet. Just guessing here, but since its stablemates were all of the same age in the same environment, it is likely that if an investigation were held they would have found other boats in the same shape. Either that or there was something unique about S-10 that was so obvious to them that no investigation was necessary.

I have no doubt that we're getting the truth about what the author saw and experienced. But that might not be the whole truth about the upper level follow-up.

In any event our sugar boats are brand spankin' new from the factory and never malfunction, the one most glaring omission in Silent Hunter 4. I clearly remember reading an account (Enright of Archerfish?) where he had a radar malfunction and basically wrote, "Damn, there goes half my torpedo load to waste." Malfunctions were indeed the "hidden enemy" not present in our games.

RR, thanks for clearing that up! High school chemistry was 25 years ago for me!

I was in the Deck Division on the Darter when I first reported aboard and chipping and painting was a never ending task. Every time we pulled into our home port of Sasebo the first evolution was a fresh water washdown. We would rig up a hose from the pier and hose down the boat in an attempt to remove as much salt residue as was possible. Almost immediately the needle guns and chipping hammers would come out followed closely by the paint brushes. Most of the time it was just touch ups, but twice in one year we completely repainted the boat from the water line up! It was dirty, hot, nasty work and we all hated it, but fully realized that it was vital.

One other nasty job assigned to Deck Division was the cleaning of the zinc anodes. I don't remember the periodicity (I think it was twice a year), but we would have to find every zinc block above the waterline and scrape off the powder left behind by the process that RR described. At first we used wire hand brushes and this took forever. One of my shipmates had a bright idea of using a wire wheel attached to a pneumatic gun. This spun the wire wheel pretty damn fast and it made quick work of the zinc block, but produced a white cloud of dust everywhere. We were rigged up in full protective gear with respirators and sweated our butts off, but it was worth it as it saved a lot of time.

Navy...it's not just a job, it's an adventure!

I have been around and associated with sailors my entire adult life, and I can tell you that no one ever has the whole "big picture", especially enlisted sailors. They might like to think they do, but they usually don't and sometimes make assumptions. If you think that gossip flows well at a women's club meeting, try hanging out with sailors! Half truths and rumors flow like beer. The more sensational a story may be, the more sailors like it. It is a actual form of entertainment on most boats and ships.

The author of the story may have truly believed that no inspections were made, but may have not known the whole story. All USN ships are periodically inspected (approximately every 5 years) for seaworthiness and condition of equipment by the Board of Inspection and Survey, the dreaded INSURV. Believe me when I tell you that these guys are extraordinarily thorough in their inspections and a boat as bad off as the S-10 was would not escape detection for long.

I myself can not implicitly state that inspections were done, but the simple fact that some of the S-boats served until 1946 indicates that they were not in as bad a shape as is indicated. The S-boats were leaky, smelly, mechanically tempermental, and suffered from their fare share of design flaws. They were a real challenge to take to sea, but were not inherently unsafe.

Once the war started, however some of these rigid inspections went by the wayside. We were desperately short of boats and anything that was even remotely seaworthy went to sea. By 1942, the S-boats were pretty well shot and if the war had not come along they would have been long gone. It really wasn't until large numbers of Gato and Balao class fleet boats began hitting the water that the good ol' S-boats could get a well earned rest.

Arc,

I wasn't ignoring your question, I just had to do a little reading. I came up with the following link:

http://www.maritime.org/fleetsub/psc...4e.htm#fig4-40

It describes the rayfilter assembly in great detail, but not how it is used. You may have seen this already. Unfortunately, I am not an optics expert, so I would have to direct you to photographer or someone with that level of expertise. I have a feeling they were used for photography applications. On the Darter our #2 scope had a similar assembly, but we didn't use it much.

I have a general naval question that may pertain to submarines.

Chipping Irons

Donald Morris wrote a lot about Chipping Irons and so did Daniel V. Gallery.

Does the US Navy still use Chipping Irons? If not, when did they stop?

I didn't think you were ignoring it, I know it takes time to dig around looking for answers. ;)

And yes, I went over that manual a few times myself, but like you I couldn't find anything about the filters application. Thanks for the suggestions, I'll dig around some more. :up:

:har: This is very true en nicely told and seems to be universal DaveyJ576 . In the navy i served in ....it was the same . Oooh..and the beer flowed alot in those day's .

The 2 MSO's (American build b.t.w. - Aggressive class ) i served on , had the nickname "beercarrier" among the other european navy's because we had our beerbarrels stocked around the smokestack . Still we had a famous reputation worldwide and knew our job when it came to minesweeping and hunting because we had (still have i think) a little navy , so we specialized in that business .

Can't remember all details of how things where done and worked , buth the stories ,the true ones and the "coctails" , ..those i do ..even 30 years later :yep:

Thanks for sharing your RL experience on a sub with us , i salute you sir :salute:

(sry for my poor English)

Yellow filters cut out the blue end of the light spectrum. When you are target shooting a black circle on a white background, you get a kind of bluey halo around the black centre. Using a yellow filter on your scope / sights or even wearing a set of yellow glasses will cut down that out and give a clearer circle. I have heard, though never having shot outdoors I can't say, that a yellow filter helps increse sharpness of edges through mist.