Mark 14 Torpedo

It was more that they didn't realize air-dropped mines could be effective until they were already at the home islands anyway. They could have been mining all the sea lanes/harbors of the various islands much more aggressively to prevent their reinforcement, but didn't.

There were many other factors that limited the submarine force's effectiveness early in the war. Unsuccessful skippers were replaced, the rigid prewar doctrine had to be adapted to wartime realities, and much of the numbers were made up of aging models, some of which had no radar. Fixing the torpedoes would be solving just one part of the equation. In fact, the torpedo scandal even could have had a positive effect in an way by making the Japanese not take the submarine threat seriously until it was too late. The spectacular success of the submarines in 1944 was a result not only of improved torpedoes, but also aggressive skippers leading experienced crews, established doctrine based on extensive experience, and the arrival of newer, better boats like the Gato and Balao classes with state of the art radar and other equipment.

Yeah I'd say so. Depends also on whether the nukes were ready by the time the US was ready to invade Japan, otherwise it might have been a hard slog anyway

There's also the Senator who leaked dive debt of subs to the japs, who up till then had set their charges do detonate 100 feet to shallow

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Didn't that guy quietly resign after Lockwood swore that, should he catch him still in office by the end of the year, he'll personally ventilate his skull? That happened after a sub was lost due to the nips setting their trashcans to the proper depth, IIRC.

Carried them in 88, HFRO missions going up against AKULA

Traditionally painted gold, and had a diesel engine

apparently he was never charged for leaking that information but got imprisoned on other counts

I read that too

What a horrible person

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Am I seriously the only person who noticed a part of the torpedo is called the "exploder mechanism"?

Attached: exploder.png (334x232, 56K)

You are in fact the only person who has ever noticed this very basic fact about torpedoes which was true for about a hundred years

Imagine if Operation Matterhorn had switched to mining Eleven sea lanes when it became clear that dropping bombs on Nipland from the middle of Chinkland wasn't gonna work. Started strangling their factories keeping them from shipping out reinforcements in early 1944. How much would that have pushed VJ Day forward?

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>Mines actually claimed far more merchant vessels than submarines ever did (in terms of effort expended vs kills made)
source? how is "effort expended" quantified?

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You got some decent points, but I think the extreme unreliability shouldn't be underestimated.
ww2pacific.com/torpedo.html

Give the right goy some shekels and you can get out of anything

A tragedy that
He should have been skinned alive and burned for it

US basically erased Japan's ability to ship stuff across the ocean in exchange for 15 planes lost

>Eventually most of the major ports and straits of Japan were repeatedly mined, severely disrupting Japanese logistics and troop movements for the remainder of the war with 35 of 47 essential convoy routes having to be abandoned. For instance, shipping through Kobe declined by 85%, from 320,000 tons in March to only 44,000 tons in July.[4] Operation Starvation sank more ship tonnage in the last six months of the war than the efforts of all other sources combined. The Twentieth Air Force flew 1,529 sorties and laid 12,135 mines in twenty-six fields on forty-six separate missions. Mining demanded only 5.7% of the XXI Bomber Command's total sorties, and only fifteen B-29s were lost in the effort. In return, mines sank or damaged 670 ships totaling more than 1,250,000 tons.[2]

>In return, mines sank or damaged 670 ships totaling more than 1,250,000 tons
JANAC gives different figures, around 551,000 tons of merchant ships sunk by mines. Either way, submarines sank nearly 4.8 million tons of merchant vessels for the cost of 49 boats lost in the Pacific. These losses were much smaller than any other major naval power's submarine force during the war, and the sinkings were achieved by a branch that made up only 1.6% of the Navy's total manpower. Air dropped mines were very economical in closing up the last gaps near the end of the war, but so were the subs at actually doing most of the work in Japan's vital sea lanes.

Attached: 1527857620845.jpg (800x631, 80K)

In what universe is losing 49 submarines for 5 million tons better than losing 15 planes for 1 million tons?

The one where subs and planes are cheap compared to the tonnage you're sinking per unit time

It's a magnetic sensor that triggers the fuse. It was so unreliable early in the way that they would sometimes slam into the target and bounce off without detonating.

Nither is bad. Lots of the work done by subs was done without the advantage of knowing exactly where the ships would be going though and the ability to lay mines at choke points they couldn't avoid. They also were doing jobs long before there were air bases in range of the home islands. Until bomber command could get B-29s in range the mines weren't an option at all.

Likewise, the subs were great hunters but couldn't just shut down a port the way ADM could.

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What was that AAR of the skipper hitting a ship with like 6-8 torpedos and literally all of them were duds?

I might be wrong on this one, but werent torpedo boats were pretty effective against merchnant ships in the pacific as well? Dont see them at all in that picture.

>torpedo boats
*PT boats

Fuckers still managed to take out an unmarked prison ship the Japs were trying to sneak back to China unnamed, so they must have been good for something
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Montevideo_Maru
Fucking Japanese and their war crimes, not even fucking announcing their prison ships for fuck sake.
Lost my great uncle on that ship.

>inb4 he was one of the guards