Hellions of the Deep: The Development of American Torpedoes in World War II

by Robert Gannon

Ultimately, World War II was the first war won by technology, but within only a few weeks after the war began, the U.S. Navy realized its torpedo program was a dismal failure. Submarine skippers reported that most of their torpedoes were either missing the targets or failing to explode if they did hit. The United States had to work fast if it expected to compete with the Japanese Long Lance, the biggest and fastest torpedo in the world, and Germany's electric and sonar models. Hellions of the Deep tells the dramatic story of how Navy planners threw aside the careful procedures of peacetime science and initiated "radical research": gathering together the nation's best scientists and engineers in huge research centers and giving them freedom of experimentation to create sophisticated weaponry with a single goal―winning the war. The largest center for torpedo work was a requisitioned gymnasium at Harvard University, where the most famous names in science worked with the best graduate students from all around the country at the business of war. They had to produce tangible weapons, to consider production and supply tactics, to take orders from the military, and, in many cases, also to teach the military how to use the weapons they developed. World War II grew into a chess match played by scientists and physicists, and it became the only war in history to be won by weapons invented during the conflict. For this book, Robert Gannon conducted numerous interviews over a twenty-year period with scientists, engineers, physicists, submarine skippers, and Navy bureaucrats, all involved in the development of the advanced weapons technology that won the war. While the search for new weapons was deadly serious, stretching imagination and resourcefulness to the limit each day, the need was American ships were being blown up daily just outside the Boston harbor. These oral histories reveal that, in retrospect, surprising even to those who went through it, the search for the "hellions of the deep" was, for many, the most exciting period of their lives.

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1996

Reviews

[Ushan · Rating 4 out of 5]

During World War II, 3,500 American submariners of the 16,000 total sank, at 22% the highest casualty rate of any branch of the military (for Germany, the figure was 70%). The principal weapon of the submarine is the torpedo. However, at the beginning of the war the main American submarine-launched torpedo was unbelievably lousy. On July 24, 1943 the American submarine USS Tinosa spotted the Tonan Maru No. 3, at over 19,000 tons the largest tanker in the Japanese Navy. Over 2 hours, the submarine fired 15 torpedoes at the tanker; 13 hit the target; 11 failed to explode. Aircraft-launched torpedoes were no better. 41 torpedo planes participated in the Battle of Midway in June, 1942; all but 4 were lost; none scored a hit. These people were risking their lives for nothing! The reason for this is that the interwar American military establishment was so small and so short of money that it failed to test the torpedoes properly under simulated battle conditions; the torpedoes were tested under conditions so unrealistic that their failures were masked.

From the summer of 1941 on, and especially after Pearl Harbor, Vannevar Bush's Office of Scientific Research and Development organized American scientists to work on many military projects from radar and proximity fuzes to atomic bombs, including better torpedoes. This was an absolute necessity as German submarines sank American ships every day. Working six days a week, and sometimes on Sunday afternoons, they fixed the defects of the submarine-launched torpedo. The scientists also designed a battery-powered torpedo, which did not leave a trail of bubbles behind pointing at the submarine that fired it, adapting the design of a German torpedo carried by a submarine that surrendered. Another one of their designs was an air-dropped anti-submarine homing torpedo with a hydrophone. Imagine vacuum tube-based electronics being dropped from hundreds of feet in the air, and hitting water head on! A chemist improved the manufacturing process of RDX or hexogen, an explosive much more powerful than TNT; late in the war, torpedo charges consisted of a mixture of TNT, RDX and powdered aluminum.

The author interviewed the scientists over 40 years later. They told him, "we were driven"; "[it was] like graduate school with pay"; "we felt we were accomplishing something." Indeed, they were. Despite the submarine service being less than 2% of the US Navy, by the end of the war, over half of all Japanese ships sunk by the US Navy were sunk by submarines.

[Jesper Jorgensen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even though this book deals with a quite narrow subject Robert Gannin never the less manage to make it an interesting read. He seasons fact with anecdotes and the book never gets 'dry'. As circumstances would have it I had the free time to read it in one day and had a good time all the way.

A can only recommend it whole-hearted

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a fine read. A history of torpedoes and research into their development with great anecdotes.