The Pacific War Online Encyclopedia
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U.S. Navy. Via Wikipedia
||21" by 20'10"
53.3cm by 6.35m
|Range||13,500 yards (12,300m) at 27 knots
|Warhead||385 lbs TNT
175 kg TNT
|Propulsion||Alcohol-air two-stage impulse turbine
The Bliss-Leavitt Mark 8 was the first 21" destroyer torpedo deployed by the U.S. Navy, in 1915. It was a significant improvement over earlier types, with a much longer range and larger explosive charge, but it was considered obsolescent by the time war broke out in the Pacific. However, it was used on PT boats (primarily as the Mod 3) until early 1944. The age and low speed of these torpedoes likely contributed to the ineffectiveness of U.S. PT boats as torpedo boats.
Wildenberg and Polmar (2010)
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