Naval History Forums

As I recall reading in John Campbells ? Naval weapons of world war 2, the MK XII Torpedo duplex warhead, was credited with being able to detect a ship equipped with a degausing coil from a depth up to about 6 feet below the hull. I used this as a basis for concluding that they could have passed unde...

I agree that the evidence is that Victorious hit the armour belt, I have seen it claimed in some accounts that the torpdeo malfunctioned and ran on the surface. I believe that as the duplex pistol seems to have been standard, and as Bismarck was the sole intended target in all three attacks, that th...

On what basis are you claiming that the torpedoes launched by Victorious had contact pistols. So far as I am aware the Duplex pistol used was capable of either contact or magnetic detonation. This was the pistol that had been used in the Mediteranean and in the attack at Taranto. I presume as this p...

I was aware of the problems with German torpedoes early in the war, I don't think that anyones early magnetic deatonators worked properly. Nonethe less having done the development and deployed the weapons you would have thought that ships anti-torpedo systems of the period should have been designed ...

This discusion is interesting in the context of the pre-war development of magnetic influence detonators for torpedoes, which the swordfish from Victorious launched at Bismarck. It is my undertsanding that these torpdeoes were intended to be set to run at a depth to pass just under the hull of the t...