Fairey Swordfish

[Oktoberfest]

About torpedoes launched to tons sunk, the problem would be for the americans at the early stage of the war till late 1942, when their torpedoes had very poor reliability compared to those of other nations.

I remember when the first silent hunter came out I've read an article about how they had problems with torpedoes sinking to low and going under the target, or hitting but not detonating, etc...

[IceFire]

Originally Posted by Oktoberfest

About torpedoes launched to tons sunk, the problem would be for the americans at the early stage of the war till late 1942, when their torpedoes had very poor reliability compared to those of other nations.

I remember when the first silent hunter came out I've read an article about how they had problems with torpedoes sinking to low and going under the target, or hitting but not detonating, etc...

Thats what they get for using the variant number Mark 13 Torpedo. If they had only named it 12 or 14 then things would have been fine!

But in all seriousness yeah I've also read about how bad the Mark 13 was. Torpedo bombing was in itself such a dangerous occupation - flying low and slow in order to drop the torpedo. It couldn't have helped that the weapon they were using would only work on odd occasion.

[Oktoberfest]

I certainly wouldn't have liked to be a torpedo bomber pilot....

[WTE_Galway]

Originally Posted by IceFire

Torpedo bombing was in itself such a dangerous occupation - flying low and slow in order to drop the torpedo. It couldn't have helped that the weapon they were using would only work on odd occasion.

The Swordfish was so low and slow it was actually hard to hit. They flew too close to the water for your typical high speed attack pass and flew too slow to safely dogfight particularly in planes like the fw190. The book "War in a Stringbag" describes how fw190 pilots regularly used flaps to get slow enough and even then had trouble hitting such a slow moving relatively manouverable target right on the water.