Up until the dramatic introduction of the Fritz-X guided armour-piercing bomb which sank the Roma, bombers had the ability to damage a capital ship on the high seas, free to manoeuvre and able to defend itself, but not sink it. Only the torpedo could guarantee immobilising and even sinking a battleship at sea. But despite the introduction of anti-ship guided missiles in the latter part of the Second World War, and their modern descendants today, the torpedo remained, and still remains, the ship-killer par excellence.
Hundreds of warships and tens of thousands of merchant ships have been sunk by torpedoes, or were so severely damaged that they were knocked out of action for months, if not years. In the modern age, the torpedo continues to be the major arbiter of potential naval actions worldwide, some 150 years after Robert Whitehead’s invention first took to the water.
When my publisher asked me to compile this encyclopedia of the torpedo, my first reaction was that the subject matter is immense. To tell the whole story in all its minor details would take a multi-volume work running to several thousand pages, which few would purchase and even fewer read in its entirety.
As I began collating information, I quickly came to realise that a large amount of technical and historical detail is already available, if one only knows where to search. The detailed technical history of torpedo development has been well covered by those authors to whom I pay due acknowledgement. In addition, a vast store of technical, historical and photographic information is salted away in the various national and naval archives, truly an Aladdin’s cave for those who wish to delve deeply into the specifications of any particular model of torpedo. I must pay tribute to the dedicated and often underfunded archivists and museum curators, who are the guardians of knowledge for present and future generations.
Then there is that universal trove of knowledge, the Web. Here one can browse long into the night, lured by links which lead off into hitherto unknown territories. But the Web is to be treated with caution: the amateur nature of the Web means that all too often contributors repeat the errors of authors who should have known better, not having had the time or the opportunity to return to the original sources. Web articles are often contradictory, and sometimes downright incorrect. What saves the Web is that with the presence of a site moderator one can correct such errors by quoting original sources. But the biggest weakness of the Web is its transitory nature: when the webmaster passes on, or loses interest, the information disappears. That is why I have used details published on certain specialist websites in my encyclopedia, with the aim of not only preserving the information, but also recognising the unpaid efforts of these enthusiasts.
Wherever possible, I have used current photographs to illustrate certain items, preferring even shots taken through display cases to official photographic records from archives. My aim is to encourage readers to visit every museum and heritage site they can, from the surviving ships themselves to the magnificent artefacts such as the huge cutaway model of the Austro-Hungarian battleship Viribus Unitis in the Vienna Military Museum.
Because of the wide scope of the subject, I have deliberately restricted myself to the mobile, fish or automobile torpedo and its derivatives. The original definition of a ‘torpedo’ was applied to an underwater explosive device for coast defence, which became the naval mine; this is in itself a vast subject, which lies outside the scope of this work, although the hybrid Mark 24 ‘mine’ and the hybrid Mark 6 °Captor will, however, be found here.
I have included several photographs and drawings of torpedoes, but the examples are far from exhaustive. There are hundreds of different types, but in reality they all share certain basic characteristics: a metal cylinder, of varying length and diameter, made of steel or bronze; an early pointed nose, changing to a less acute point, then a blunt rounded shape, finally ending with a metaplat (flattened nose) in the most modern types; whiskers and exploder can be found protruding from the nose of many types, and although practice heads did not, of course, carry exploders, divers must beware of later torpedoes, which carried an inertia exploder internally, in the upper or lower part of the nose; at the opposite end, first one, then two propellers, initially two-bladed but then increasing to three, four and six blades, before disappearing completely. The earliest stabilising fins ran along the top and bottom of the cylinder, but these soon disappeared, leaving two horizontal tail fins and two verticaclass="underline" the Whitehead Fiume factory put the tail fins behind the propellers, the Royal Laboratories (‘RL’) version had them before the propellers.
There are very few divergences. If you come across a torpedo with an oval cross-section instead of round, you have a Brennan. If the torpedo has two propellers set side by side at the tail, it is almost certain to be a Howell.
Due to the large number of different torpedoes, specifications are generally omitted from the narrative, so readers who require technical details of a particular model of torpedo or a range of torpedoes from, say, a specific country, should look in the tables in Part V.
In my research, I found very little published information on the wide variety of torpedo delivery vehicles and launch systems, and I have done my best to provide what I freely admit is a basic introduction to this topic. Again, the issue of anti-torpedo defence has been previously addressed here and there, but I have tried to tie up the various threads of a struggle which is still ongoing.
In bringing the whole story together, I have tried to give a broad, yet still detailed, overview of this important subject, to serve as a general reference work for naval enthusiasts and historians.
In conclusion, I must pay tribute to the work of the late Edwyn Gray, the undisputed expert on early torpedo development. Gray spent years tracking down the most obscure inventor and the most unfeasible patent application, in order to write his two major reference works listed in the Bibliography. After his death his extensive research files were donated by his widow to the RN Submarine Museum in Gosport. In compiling this encyclopedia, I have surfed widely in his books for my précis of the early development of the fish torpedo, but I wholeheartedly refer the reader to the works of Edwyn Gray for fuller details.
Part I
The Inventors and their Torpedoes, Successful and Imaginative
CHAPTER 1
Robert Fulton and his Infernal Devices, 1804–1813
In the nineteenth century the name of Robert Whitehead was generally synonymous with that of his invention: in the press of the day, torpedoes were referred to not by their designation or manufacturer, but as ‘Whiteheads’. However, the story of the torpedo itself does not begin with Robert Whitehead, but instead with that prolific genius, Robert Fulton, some sixty years earlier.
In the course of his short but fruitful career, Robert Fulton designed canal dredging equipment, a steamboat tested on the Seine on 9 August 1803, and the North River Steamboat, the first successful passenger-carrying steam vessel, in 1807. During the Anglo-American War of 1812, he designed the first steam warship, Demologos, which was not completed until after his death, and was then renamed Fulton in his honour. Before he died, he had proposed a submerged cannon which he christened the Columbiad, designed to fire projectiles into the vulnerable underwater hull of an enemy vessel. He was, of course, conversant with the attempt by his fellow American, Bushnell, to destroy British warships using his primitive submarine boat the Turtle during the Revolutionary War. He was also aware of the reasons why Bushnell had failed. And he took up the name ‘torpedo’, which Bushnell had used to describe his explosive devices.