MK 14 Mod 5 Torpedo - Asan Beach, Guam - Static Artillery Displays on Waymarking.com

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, and 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 US 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 which remained in service for almost 40 years in the US Navy, and even longer with other navies.

The Mark 14 was designed in 1930 to serve in the new "fleet" submarines, replacing the Mark 10 which had been in service since World War I and was standard in the older S-boats. Although the same diameter, the Mark 14 was longer, at 20 ft 6 in (6.25 m), and therefore incompatible with older submarines' 15 ft 3 in (4.65 m) torpedo tubes.

The Mark 14 was designed at the Naval Torpedo Station (NTS), Newport, beginning in 1922 under the direction of Lieutenant Ralph Waldo Christie. It had a fairly small warhead and was intended to explode beneath the keel where there was no armor. This required the sophisticated new Mark VI magnetic influence exploder, which was similar to the British Duplex and German models, all inspired by German magnetic mines of World War I. The Mark VI was intended to fire the warhead some distance below the ship, creating a huge gas bubble which would cause the keel to fail catastrophically.

The Mark VI exploder, designated Project G53, was developed "behind the tightest veil of secrecy the Navy had ever created." Small quantities were produced in extreme secrecy, and at a cost of US$1,000 per unit, by General Electric in Schenectady. The exploder was tested at the Newport lab and in a small field test aboard USS Raleigh. Only one live warhead test of the Mark 6 exploder was done. Prototype exploders were attached to Mark 10 torpedoes and fired at a stationary submarine; the first shot failed to explode, but the second sank the target. At Christie's urging, equatorial tests were later conducted with Indianapolis, which fired one hundred trial shots between 10°N and 10°S and collected 7000 readings. Tests were done using torpedoes with instrumented exercise heads: an electric eye would take an upward-looking picture from the torpedo; the magnetic influence feature would set off some gun cotton. Inexplicably, no live fire trial was ever done with production units. Chief of Naval Operations William V. Pratt offered the hulk of Cassin-class destroyer Ericsson, but prohibited the use of a live warhead, and insisted the Bureau of Ordnance (commonly called BuOrd) pay the cost of refloating her if she was hit in error. These were strange restrictions, as Ericsson was due to be scrapped. BuOrd declined. A service manual for the exploder "was written—but, for security reasons, not printed—and locked in a safe."

In 1923, Congress made NTS Newport the sole designer, developer, builder and tester of torpedoes in the United States. No independent or competing group was assigned to verify the results of Mark 14 tests. NTS produced only 1½ torpedoes a day in 1937, despite having three shifts of three thousand workers working around the clock. Production facilities were at capacity and there was no room for expansion. Only two thousand submarine torpedoes were built by all three Navy factories in 1942. This exacerbated torpedo shortages; the Pacific Fleet Submarine Force had fired 1,442 torpedoes since war began.

The Mark 14 was central to the torpedo scandal of the U.S. Pacific Fleet Submarine Force during World War II. Due to inadequate Depression-era peacetime testing of both the torpedo and its exploder, the defects tended to mask each other. Indeed, much of the blame commonly attached to the Mark 14 correctly belongs to the Mark VI 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) and failed to explode.

Responsibility lies with the BuOrd, 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. BuOrd failed to assign a second naval facility for testing, and failed to give Newport adequate direction.

On 24 December 1941, Commander Tyrell D. Jacobs in Sargo fired a total of eight torpedoes at two different ships, with no results, and had become very frustrated; when two additional merchantmen came in view, he took extra pains to get it right, pursuing for fifty-seven minutes and making certain TDC bearings matched perfectly before firing two torpedoes at each ship, at an average of 1,000 yd (910 m), very close range. All missed.

A few days after he discovered the torpedoes were running too deep, and corrected the problem, Jacobs detected a big, slow tanker. Again, his approach was meticulous, firing one torpedo at a close 1,200 yd (1,100 m). It missed. Exasperated, Jacobs broke radio silence, openly questioning the Mark 14's reliability.

A similar experience was had by Pete Ferrall in Seadragon, who fired eight torpedoes for only one hit, and began to suspect the Mark 14 was faulty.

Uniquely, Lieutenant Commander John A. Scott in Tunny on 9 April 1943 found himself in an ideal position to attack aircraft carriers Hiyo, Junyo, and Taiyo. From only 880 yd (800 m), he fired all ten tubes, hearing all four stern shots and three of the bow's six explode. No enemy carrier was seen to diminish its speed, though Taiyo was slightly damaged in the attack. Much later, intelligence reported each of the seven explosions had been premature; the torpedoes had run true but the magnetic feature had fired them too early.

Dan Daspit (in Tinosa) carefully documented his efforts to sink 19,000-ton whale factory ship Tonan Maru III on 24 July 1943. He fired four torpedoes from 4,000 yd (3,700 m); two hit, stopping the target dead in the water. Daspit immediately fired another two; these hit as well. With no enemy anti-submarine combatants in sight, Daspit then took time to carefully maneuver into a textbook firing position, 875 yd (800 m) square off the target's beam, where he fired nine more Mark 14s and observed all with his periscope (despite the Japanese firing at it). All were duds. Daspit, suspicious by now he was working with a faulty production run of Mark 14s, saved his last remaining torpedo to be analyzed by experts back at base. Nothing out of the ordinary was found.

At Pearl Harbor, despite nearly all his skippers' suspicions about the torpedoes, Admiral Thomas Withers refused to deactivate the torpedo's Mark VI exploder, arguing torpedo shortages stemming from inadequate production at NTS made it impossible. As a result, his men did it on their own, doctoring their patrol reports and overstating the size of ships to justify using more torpedoes. Only in May 1943, after the most famous skipper in the Sub Force, Dudley W. "Mush" Morton, turned in a dry patrol, did Admiral Charles A. Lockwood, Commander Submarine Force Pacific (COMSUBPAC), accept the Mark VI should be deactivated, but waited to see if Bureau of Ordnance commander Admiral William "Spike" Blandy might yet find a fix for the problem. The Bureau of Ordnance sent an expert to Surabaja to investigate, who set the gyro backwards on one of Sargo??'?s trial torpedoes; the potentially deadly setting, guaranteed to cause erratic running, was corrected by torpedo officer Doug Rhymes. Though he found nothing wrong with maintenance or procedures, the expert submitted a report laying all the blame on the crew.

Official US Navy naming policy had settled on using Arabic instead of Roman numerals to designate torpedo models since the 1917 development of the Bliss-Leavitt Mark 4 torpedo. However, many instances exist of the Mark 14 being referred to as the "Mark XIV" (Roman style) in official documentation and reports as well as accounts by historians and observers.


X Function: Anti-ship
X Powerplant: Wet-heater combustion / steam turbine with compressed air tank
X Fuel: Methanol
X Length: 20 ft 6 in (6.25 m)
X Weight: 3,280 lb (1,490 kg)
X Diameter: 21 in (530 mm)
X Range / Speed:
XI Low speed: 9,000 yards (8,200 m) at 31 knots (57 km/h)
XL High speed: 4,500 yards (4,100 m) at 46 knots (85 km/h)
X Guidance system: Gyroscope
X Warhead: 643 lb (292 kg) of Torpex
X Date deployed: 1931
X Date withdrawn from service: 1975–1980

~From Wikipedia and historical Naval records.

What type of artillery is this?: Wet-Heater Torpedo Where is this artillery located?: Park What military of the world used this device?: US Navy Date artillery was in use: 01/01/1980 Cost?: 0.00 (listed in local currency) Artillery is no longer operational: yes Still may work: no Are there any geocaches at this location?: Yes Date artillery was placed on display: Not listed Parking location to view this Waymark: Not Listed

Visit Instructions:
Two pictures are required for this Waymark. Please take a close up picture of the artillery. Take a second with the artillery in the distance and capture as much of the surroundings as possible. Name the Waymark with first the name of the area and second what the artillery is. An example would be if it were a cannon in front of the Montgomery Armory you would name the Waymark: Montgomery Armory Cannon.

Recent Visits/Logs:

There are no logs for this waymark yet.