Dad was EM1 on a Balao class during WWII... SS-318, the USS Baya... His rack was in the forward torpedo room, and he always joked that his bunkmate was a torpedo. Then when I got to go onboard one with him he showed me... He wasn’t kidding - you could lay on the rack and literally reach over a few inches and pat the torpedo on its side. I always thought it was no big deal to sleep with my combat gear on in the Army when the situation warranted it... But sleeping next to that much explosive and torpex just sort of made me shudder. I’ve never meet a WWII Navy vet that, upon learning of my dad’s having served on a sub, didn’t say something along the lines of “That was a rough way to make a living in the Navy.” But every submariner I’ve met always said “at least they fed us submariners well” in order to make up for it.
I was on the 245 and 382 boats and it was the same way. The torpedoes we had then were all the magnetic type (shoot deep and have the fish blow up underneath the keel) so there was little chance of them going off.
One of the WWII vets on board told me they used contact torpedoes which had a large (about 12") four-bladed propeller on the front. It had to spin x amount of times before they would arm themselves. One day he found a Newbie idly spinning the propeller to pass the time. A quick sermon on "Why you shouldn't do that" followed.