The Navy’s poor torpedo performance led Charles Momsen to have torpedos fired into a cliff in Hawaii until he got a dud. He then dove to retrieve the dud. They discovered the firing pins were faulty.
War has some strange twists. One surprise from the Battle of Midway was Japan providing a pristine sample of a Zero up in the Aleutians .
That is about 20% of The pathetic Story of US torpedo development. I am not ordinarily a big fan of Wikipedia, But if you lookup “Mark 14 torpedo” there you will get an idea of the total clown show it was.
The Bureau of ordinance going into World War II had quite the depression mentality, and the total number of actually fired torpedo tests that occurred going into World War II was probably well under half a dozen.
And might have been as low as two.
After all, Torpedoes were about $10,000 each, very expensive. And the Navy was unwilling to sacrifice any ships despite the fact that numerous ships were being sold for scrap all the time. At the beginning of the war they were being produced at a rate of between one and three Torpedoes a day despite being produced in a factory with 3,000 people in it. The explosive charge in the torpedo was increased sometime early in the game, with no consideration of the influence of the greater weight on the Travel of the torpedo. The port in the torpedo that allowed water pressure to come in that allowed the depth measuring mechanism to work was moved, and it created a difference in the hydrostatic performance of the port. All of the faults in these torpedoes covered each other. It wasn’t until maybe spring 1943 that the US had anything resembling a functional torpedo.