page_title: Mark 14 torpedo
section_title: Controversy
hierarchical_section_title: Mark 14 torpedo / Controversy
caption_attribution_description: English: From source: "NTS C.O. Captain Theodore Westfall and Captain Carl Bushnell of the Bureau of Ordnance, third and fourth from left respectively, inspect the Station's first Mk 14 in 1943." Actually, the Mark 14 torpedo had been in service for a decade, so this photo cannot represent the "first" one.
context_page_description: The Mark 14 torpedo was the United States Navy's standard submarine-launched anti-ship torpedo of World War II. This weapon was plagued with many problems which crippled its performance early in the war. It was supplemented by the Mark 18 electric torpedo in the last two years of the war. Nonetheless, the Mark 14 played a major role in the devastating blow U.S. Navy submarines dealt to the Japanese naval and merchant marine forces during the Pacific War.
  By the end of World War II, the Mark 14 torpedo was a reliable weapon ultimately remaining in service for almost 40 years in the U.S. Navy, and even longer with other navies.
context_section_description: The Mark 14 was central to the torpedo scandal of the U.S. Pacific Fleet Submarine Force during World War II. Inadequate production planning led to severe shortages of the weapon. The frugal, Depression-era, peacetime testing of both the torpedo and its exploder was woefully inadequate and had not uncovered many serious design problems. Torpedoes were so expensive that the Navy was unwilling to perform tests that would destroy a torpedo. Furthermore, the design defects tended to mask each other. Much of the blame commonly attached to the Mark 14 correctly belongs to the Mark 6 exploder. These defects, in the course of fully twenty months of war, were exposed, as torpedo after torpedo either missed by running directly under the target, prematurely exploded, or struck targets with textbook right angle hits (sometimes with an audible clang) yet failed to explode.
  Responsibility lies with the Bureau of Ordnance, which specified an unrealistically rigid magnetic exploder sensitivity setting and oversaw the feeble testing program. Its pitiful budget did not permit live fire tests against real targets; instead, any torpedo that ran under the target was presumed to be a hit due to the magnetic influence exploder, which was never actually tested. Therefore, additional responsibility must also be assigned to the United States Congress, which cut critical funding to the Navy during the interwar years, and to NTS, which inadequately performed the very few tests made. The Bureau of Ordnance failed to assign a second naval facility for testing, and failed to give Newport adequate direction.
caption: Captain Theodore Westfall, NTS CO and Captain Carl Bushnell of the Bureau of Ordnance, inspect a Mark 14 torpedo at the Naval Torpedo Station, Keyport, Washington, 1943[34]
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