Torpedo: The Complete History of the World's Most Revolutionary Naval Weapon

TRAINABLE SINGLE TUBES

The very first Royal Navy torpedo boat, HMS Lightning, which had been designed to carry and launch her torpedoes from two drop collars, was later fitted with a single training bow torpedo tube. To launch a second attack her crew would have to reload one of the pair of Whiteheads she carried on trolleys alongside the engine room casing, not an easy task on such a small vessel in anything but a flat calm.

Thirty-one years after the Thornycroft torpedo boat shown at the beginning of this chapter, the Imperial German navy started construction of a new series of small torpedo boats. Their A 1 class of 1915 displaced 137 tons on an overall length of 41.6m (136¹/2ft), were armed with two single trainable 17.7in torpedo tubes and two 50mm guns, but on the 1200ihp of their single-screw triple expansion engine were painfully slow, at only 19 knots. No less than five out of the twenty-five were sunk by British destroyers, one succumbed to an air attack, one was mined, and one disappeared without trace, probably another mine casualty.

The succeeding class, numbered from A 26 to A 55 and built in 1916 and 1917, were larger, at 227 tons on a length of 50m (164ft), but dropped down to only one trainable tube, in order to mount two 88mm guns. With 3500shp geared turbines they could reach 25.8 knots.This was a fair turn of speed for a small vessel but far below that which contemporary destroyers were reaching. It is a mystery why the Kaiser’s navy persevered with these small fragile boats. Since out of this second series of thirty boats only one was lost to a mine, and a second was scuttled in the Adriatic, one must surmise that they did not see much offensive action.

^{Class A 26 torpedo boat of 1916–17. Note the auxiliary bow rudder. (Drawing from Z-vor! by Harald Fock)}

^{USS Oregon’s training bow tube. Note the torpedoes mounted on the bulkhead, the overhead monorail for loading, and the tube training rack. (Detroit Collection, Library of Congress, photo #LC-D4-20532)}

^{A contemporary model of HMS Lightning in the National Maritime Museum collection. (© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, F2451-2)}

^{Le Tage bow tubes. (Châtellerault Archives, plan ref LE TAGE 1886CO26)}

^{A similar tube in USS Massachusetts, training through a ball-joint in the side armour. (Detroit Collection, Library of Congress)}

^{Typical bow arrangement of German destroyers, mounting two single trainable tubes in the well before the bridge, here shown on SMS V 43 in American hands. Note how the forward tubes can fire virtually straight ahead on either side of the slender bow, by very slight training on either beam — very useful in an attack, but in any sea the well before the bridge threw up a mass of spray, obscuring the vision of the bridge personnel. (Photo courtesy of Tom Tanner of Lothian, Maryland, website http: \\www.BB_Ops.tripod.com)}

Le Tage was a ‘croiseur à batterie, à grande vitesse’ (‘broadside battery, high-speed cruiser’), built in 1886. The plans reproduced here show her two single bow torpedo tubes stowed inboard, and also the tubes deployed on either side of the bow. They are transported into position by the same overhead rail system used to load the torpedoes. Note that both can train a few degrees either side of the bow, and they can also elevate and depress. Her broadside tubes shown on the left would be similarly stowed. When rigged in their socket for action they can be trained, but not elevated.

PT-boat torpedo tubes

PT-boats’ primary anti-ship armament was either two or four 21in Mark 8 torpedoes, launched from trainable Mark 18 steel torpedo tubes. These were pivoted from the after end to point outwards slightly off the centre-line to port and starboard when readied for firing, so were not strictly ‘trainable’.

^{Single trainable tubes on a French contre-torpilleur of the Claymore class. Note the raised grating deck on which the crew work, and the reload in its case to port. Torpedo-boat destroyers would later require the space taken up by the tube on the stern to be given over to anti-submarine depth charges. (Originally published in Le Miroir of 2 July 1916)}

^{A highly detailed 1/72nd scale model of the famous PT 109, built by Fritz Koopman, showing her four training torpedo tubes. At the time of her sinking some sources claim that John F Kennedy and his crew had replaced the after pair of tubes with extra depth charges. The dark olive-green was the same colour as had been used for US torpedo boats over forty years earlier, to camouflage these basically inshore types against the coast. (Photo courtesy of Matt Grzybinski)}

^{Mark 18 PT-boat tube. (Drawings by John Drain for construction of his scale model, on http://www.pt-boat.com/torpedotube/torpedotube.html)}

TWIN TUBES

By the outbreak of the Great War, twin tubes were the norm in many destroyers, but in the latter half of the conflict larger classes, like the British ‘V’ and ‘W’s and the later US ‘flush-deckers’, began to carry triple mounts. Post-war this escalated to quad mountings, and thereafter the trainable twin mounting found only specialist employment.

In Japanese heavy cruisers, the fixed torpedo batteries were later changed to twin training mounts, without shields, on the upper deck, with adjacent reloads immediately behind the tubes, and further reloads attached one above the other to the superstructure sides inboard of the tubes, for a total of twelve torpedoes per side. These twin mountings were also fitted to the light cruiser Yahagi and to the Kuma and succeeding classes of 5500-ton cruisers. They were also carried by Japanese destroyers of the 1920s and the torpedo boats of the 1930s.

The twin torpedo tube mounting returned to the Royal Navy on the Type III Hunt-class escort destroyers, ordered under the 1940 building programme. For service in the Mediterranean it was felt they needed to be able to at least threaten torpedo attacks. However, in practical terms the chances of hitting with a broadside of only two torpedoes were slim.

^{The large torpedo boat (some writers call her the first TBD) Kotaka, built for Japan by Yarrow in 1886. (Courtesy of Grace’s Guide to British Industrial History)}

^{Twin tubes on a Tatra-class Austro-Hungarian destroyer, showing the steam-heating elements enclosing the central part of these tubes, which were built by Whitehead Fiume. (Photo courtesy of Erwin Sieche)}

^{The original twin mountings of the heavy cruiser Takao. The dotted lines represent the overhead torpedo transporter rails. (Drawn by Janusz Skulski for his ‘Anatomy of the Ship’ monograph on the Takao)}

^{Russian triple 18in torpedo tube mounting on a Orfey-class destroyer.}