Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!att!cbnews!military
From: portal!cup.portal.com!mmm@apple.com
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: Mines
Message-ID: <11673@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Date: 22 Nov 89 17:12:50 GMT
Sender: military@cbnews.ATT.COM
Lines: 25
Approved: military@att.att.com



From: portal!cup.portal.com!mmm@apple.com
Ah, yes.  Dr. Bush had a good story on this topic.  Quoting from his
autobiography:

"An example of this latter kind of stumbling block appeared during the
last war with the marine torpedo.  An entrenched group in charge of this
weapon not merely wished no civilian aid;  it tolerated no interference
by the rest of the Navy.  So we shipped torpedoes to the Pacific, our
submarines carried them on arduous and dangerous voyages and fired them
at enemy ships, and the torpedoes would not go off.  The torpedoes' speed
had been increased, and the firing mechanism, having thus less time in which
to function, became crushed before it operated.  It was also improperly
oriented--crosswise instead of end on.  There had apparently been no tests
to reveal the defect.  Some of the mechanisms were altered at Hawaii by
the Pacific fleet itself, and there were protests that this action was
highly irregular.  There is another story (I cannot vouch for this one)
that magnetic torpedoes had been designed to explode under a ship by reason
of the alteration of the vertical component of the earth's field, and that
when used in low latitudes, they ran unexploded under the enemy ship because
at low latitudes there was no vertical component to speak of."

Vannevar Bush cites another reference on this topic:  HISTORY OF U.S. NAVAL
OPERATIONS IN WORLD WAR II, vol IV. by Samuel Eliot Morison, 1949.