Talk:Mark 13 torpedo

This article has its problems, but all I could do with the time available was to remove the reference to it as a "Bliss-Leavitt" design. It was developed by the Naval Torpedo Station Newport well after E.W. Bliss Company and Frank Leavitt had been forced out of the torpedo business for the U.S. Navy. Will O'Neil (talk) 19:42, 21 May 2012 (UTC)

This article seriously needs an update. Both Battle of Midway and Douglas TBD Devastator pages state that the Mark 13 torpedo was dismally unreliable, but this page seems to be implying that the torpedo was perfectly reliable, with no mention as to any of the problems that plagued it during 1942 much like its sister torpedoes the Mark 14 Torpedo and Mark 15 Torpedo. In fact, the article directly states the Mark 13 torpedo had no problems in service whatsoever because it was larger, heavier, and didn't have the magnetic exploder. Compare and contrast that to the Devastator and Midway. 41 Devastators were launched during Midway, and not a single Japanese ship was harmed even when their torpedoes struck the targets. Everything either missed or was a dud. The Devastator was withdrawn from service as a result. In fact, let me quote the Devastator page:

Faults were discovered with the Mark 13 torpedo at this point. Many were seen to hit the target yet fail to explode; there was also a tendency to run deeper than the set depth. It took over a year for the defects to be corrected. These problems were not fixed by the time of the Battle of Midway on 4 June 1942.

These articles need to be made congruous with each other, and some counter-balancing research and cited sources added to this article, because otherwise, and I don't mean for this to sound inflammatory, it sounds like this comes straight from the POV of the Ordinance Board of the time, sticking their fingers in their ears yet again. Jetman123 (talk) 17:15, 9 May 2014 (UTC)

Wartime problems extensively added in 2015. RobDuch (talk) 01:29, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

Conflation?

The article contains a very prominent opening paragraph for the section "Wartime Development", phrased as follows:

"By 1942, poor combat performance had made it apparent that there were problems with the Mark 13, as 35 out of 41 torpedo bombers were lost at the Battle of Midway without scoring a single hit."

The problem with this simplistic assessment should be apparent, but to boil it down: TBD Devastators flying torpedo attacks at the Battle of Midway did so largely without the intended fighter escort's cover. Thus, they were exposed to aerial interception on their final approaches and during the attack runs themselves, leading to huge losses, most before the aircraft were even able to launch their torpedoes - and those which did heavily subject to pilot jitters (an inevitable result of such pressures, whatever one wants to say regarding heroism.) The very low success rate of the torpedo being used by the Devastators can be directly attributed to the total disruption of the attack itself by Japanese Combat Air Patrol.

It is, therefore, not reasonable to point to the torpedo itself as being the critical failure point in the USN's totally unsuccessful torpedo attacks at Midway. This is clear conflation of two separate tactical factors into one chimerical assessment.

That there were problems with the weapon may not be in dispute, but to lean into an air-to-air combat tragedy and point to this as proof of an underwater weapon's issues is not logical. I will attempt to rewrite this, so as to separate the two unrelated issues. 2A00:23C7:3100:B501:E4FC:9200:52DA:878F (talk) 20:22, 20 March 2024 (UTC)