The United States entered the Pacific war with a torpedo that had never once been fired with a live warhead at a real ship. It ran ten feet deep, its magnetic exploder fired early or not at all, and its contact exploder failed on exactly the square-on hits a well-trained crew worked hardest to achieve. For twenty-one months the organisation that built it insisted the crews were missing.

This documentary follows the weapon itself: the closed loop at the Naval Torpedo Station on Goat Island, where one organisation designed, built, tested and certified the same torpedo; the Japanese Type 93 and Type 95, tested exhaustively with live warheads and superior in every dimension; the field diagnoses that broke the deadlock; and the decision to hand a captured German electric torpedo to Westinghouse, a company that had never built one. The result was the Mark 18 — slower, shorter-ranged, lighter, and wakeless. It covers the Mark 27 acoustic torpedo fired backwards at pursuing escorts, the loss of Tullibee to her own circular run, and the last torpedo of USS Tang's fifth patrol on 25 October 1944.

Built from patrol reports, ordnance records and post-war survey data — not from the legends that grew around them afterwards.

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