Too many dids...

[Dread Knot]

Originally Posted by neilbyrne

The most astonishing incident I've read about the failures coincident with US torpedo fuzing in WWII concerns Albert Einstein. He was, as I remember, touring the torpedo works on Goat Island, RI prior to the war. He was very proudly handed a Mk 6 fuze to examine. After looking, he quickly said that it would never work to the shock of all assembled. But wait. Thereafter, he returned to New York and drew a diagram denoting the required fixes and sent it to the navy. All ignored.

That's interesting. I had never heard of a connection between Albert Einstein and torpedo/Navy work.

I've heard the frugal Depression era economics get a lot of the blame. A torpedo was considered to be an expensive item to the fleet budget for practice purposes. Therefore torpedoes were not tested to destruction. They were fired against soft targets with floatable warheads so they could be salvaged for reuse. Seems crazy in retrospect that the warheads were almost never tested.