Hellions of the Deep
The Development of American Torpedoes in World War II
Robert Gannon
“The U.S. Navy's failure to provide its submarines with effective torpedoes was one of the great near disasters of the Second World War. Gannon offers us a finely crafted, thoroughly informative study of the failure and the successful technical effort to develop winning weapons for the fleet.”
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The largest center for torpedo work was a requisitioned gymnasium at Harvard University, where the most famous names in science worked with the best graduate students from all around the country at the business of war. They had to produce tangible weapons, to consider production and supply tactics, to take orders from the military, and, in many cases, also to teach the military how to use the weapons they developed. World War II grew into a chess match played by scientists and physicists, and it became the only war in history to be won by weapons invented during the conflict.
For this book, Robert Gannon conducted numerous interviews over a twenty-year period with scientists, engineers, physicists, submarine skippers, and Navy bureaucrats, all involved in the development of the advanced weapons technology that won the war. While the search for new weapons was deadly serious, stretching imagination and resourcefulness to the limit each day, the need was obvious: American ships were being blown up daily just outside the Boston harbor. These oral histories reveal that, in retrospect, surprising even to those who went through it, the search for the "hellions of the deep" was, for many, the most exciting period of their lives.
“The U.S. Navy's failure to provide its submarines with effective torpedoes was one of the great near disasters of the Second World War. Gannon offers us a finely crafted, thoroughly informative study of the failure and the successful technical effort to develop winning weapons for the fleet.”
Robert Gannon is Associate Professor of English at Penn State University. His articles have appeared in Popular Science, Reader's Digest, Science Digest, Science and Mechanics, Audubon, Oceans, and many other popular and specialized publications.
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