English subs ?

[perisher]

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

Peter Padfield's War Beneath The Sea is not overly detailed, but does give a good accounting of British and Japanese submarine operations during the war; Britain's Norwegian and Malta operations especially. As for torpedo fire control, Padfield alleges that they had no TDC at all, and had to go by 'whiz wheel' and pencil and paper calculations alone.

Anyway, I highly recommend the book.

British subs did get a TDC sometime during the war, certainly by late 1941. Officially it was know as the Torpedo Director or Torpedo Control Calculator, but it was always called the "Fruit Machine" (See Unbroken by Alistair Mars). The main difference between the "Fruit Machine" and the TDC was that the "Fruit Machine" was not linked to the torpedo and all settings had to be passed by telephone and manually set. Despite this the Royal Navy achieved the highest "hits per torpedo fired" of all Allied Submarine Forces (see THE UNDERWATER WAR, 1939-45 by Richard Compton-Hall).