Gotta love the Navy. I have been busy as hell lately at work. Reserve drill weekend, command inspection, renovation conference, etc.
Anyway, the mystery concerning the placement of the Salmon/Sargo class deck torpedo stowage tubes has finally been solved! I picked the brain of the eminent author and historian Jim Christley and sent him digging into his files. He found that the stowage tubes were stacked vertically, two each on either side of the conning tower and the deck gun mount inside the superstructure. They were sited just aft of the large deck hatches that covered the liberty boats. Check out this graphic:
To unload the tubes, both boats were removed and placed temporarily in the water alongside. The torpedoes were then extracted from the tubes and into the space left by the boats. They were then hauled up to the deck by the same davit used to move the boats and placed onto the raised torpedo loading skid just forward of the boat hatches. They were then lowered into the torpedo room one by one in the normal fashion.
I had suspected that this was the case. It was the only arrangement that made sense and that would enable the tubes to fit into the superstructure.
This is a perfect example of pre-war submarine design philosophy. A lot of novel features were incorporated into the boats during the 30's that were great for peacetime cruising, but turned out to be near useless liabilities when the shooting started. The boat CO's discovered pretty quickly that these tubes were not going to provide the benefit they were intended for and they were one of the first things to go as the boats were overhauled.