Inside The Navy's Secret Factory That Machined 50 Torpedoes A Day By Hand

In the early summer of 1943, a new Navy torpedo plant at Forest Park, Illinois, proved its first Mark 15, and the Bureau of Ordnance's own history records that defects were numerous and depth failure consistent. The drawings were right. What they did not carry, the Bureau wrote afterward, were trade secrets that were largely matters of memory or notes in some foreman's little black book at the Newport Station. This documentary tells the story of the U.S. Naval Torpedo Station on Goat Island in Newport, Rhode Island, from the summer of 1869, when a lieutenant commander and 3 civilian employees moved into an abandoned Army fort and built a machine shop out of scrap lumber, to the 13th of December 1951, when the Navy disestablished the station and sent torpedo manufacture elsewhere. It follows the station's first torpedo, the Fish of 1871, through the guncotton works that killed 3 men on the 3rd of July 1893, the gyroscope credited in 1903 to Lieutenant Commander W. I. Chambers and Quarterman Machinist Moore, and the factory begun on the 1st of July 1907. It covers the First World War, when the payroll passed 3,000 and the detonator room in Number 2 Workroom killed 13 workers in January 1918; the 20 years from 1923 when Newport was the only place in the United States that designed or built a torpedo, on about 30,000 dollars a year of research money; the electric torpedo built by 1 machinist when he could be spared; the exploder assembled in seclusion; and the 1932 letter warning that the Mark 14 was the only thing in sight to prevent a layoff of machinists. Then the war. About 13,000 people on 3 shifts, more than 750 subcontractors, a firing pier on Gould Island built to prove 100 torpedoes a day, and 18,751 torpedoes built at Newport between 1939 and 1946, about a third of the national total. The Bureau's 1945 manual for the Mark 14 supplies the machine itself, a 3,282 pound torpedo with its flask tested to 4,000 pounds per square inch, a turbine at 12,123 revolutions a minute and a gyro spun to 20,000. It explains, from the shop's side, why the Mark 14 ran 10 feet deep while Newport's own depth recorder read 4, because the recorder and the depth gear both sensed the same low pressure over the torpedo's skin. And it shows what happened when the craft had to leave the island, from Forest Park's zinc plated flasks to Westinghouse's struggle with tolerances. The story ends with the station writing its own history in 1946, the year it stopped building torpedoes, the 1955 explosion at Coddington Cove that killed 5 men including a 45 year machinist named Mecca Dan Sullivan, the memorial with 34 names, the hotel and marina on Goat Island, and the 500 linear feet of station records that the National Archives proposed to destroy in 1976 and that the Naval War College began cataloguing in 2021. The archivists have found the shops' stock cards and test data books, and a gap in the records from 1925 to 1941. Subscribe to Trade Archive for more stories about the shops, machines and people behind the trades: https://www.youtube.com/@TradeArchive Sources Administration of the Navy Department in World War II. Chapter 8. HyperWar transcription. Bureau of Ordnance. Torpedoes Mark 14 and 23 Types. Ordnance Pamphlet 635, First Revision. Washington, D.C.: Navy Department, March 24, 1945. Cohen, David E. "Technical Report: The Mk-XIV Torpedo, Lessons for Today." Naval History 6, no. 4 (December 1992). Henderson, Robert W. "Naval Torpedo Station." U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 29, no. 1 (January 1903). Historic American Engineering Record. Naval Torpedo Station (Naval Undersea Warfare Center), Coddington Cove and Gould Island. HAER No. RI-38 and RI-38-A. Washington, D.C.: National Park Service. Jolie, E. W. A Brief History of U.S. Navy Torpedo Development. NUSC Technical Document 5436. Newport, R.I.: Naval Underwater Systems Center, 1978. Merkle, Thomas, and John J. McConnell. "The Political Economy of the Naval Torpedo Station." Journal of Economics and Finance 18, no. 3 (1994): 301–311. Milford, Frederick J. "The Great Torpedo Scandal, 1941–43." The Submarine Review, October 1996. Milford, Frederick J. "U.S. Navy Torpedoes, Part One: Torpedoes Through the Thirties." The Submarine Review, April 1996. National Archives at Boston. "Navy and Marine Corps Records at Boston." Naval Sea Systems Command, NUWC Division Newport. "History" and "In Memoriam" pages. Naval Station Newport. "The History." Newport Historical Society. "History Bytes: Newport's Rosie the Riveters," 2018, and related pages. Rowland, Buford, and William B. Boyd. U.S. Navy Bureau of Ordnance in World War II. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1953. U.S. Naval War College Archives. "Torpedo Station Records Processing." Digital Commons exhibit, with Naval Torpedo Station records collections MSC-385 and MSC-392.