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Atorpedo boat is a relatively small and fastnaval ship designed to carrytorpedoes into battle. The first designs were steam-powered craft dedicated to ramming enemy ships with explosivespar torpedoes. Later evolutions launched variants of self-propelledWhitehead torpedoes.
Torpedo boats were (and still are) chiefly smallinshore crafts created to counter the threat ofbattleships and other slow and heavily armed warships by using speed, agility, and powerful torpedoes. They presented an attractive alternative for smaller nations to the overwhelming cost and industrial strains involved in building a like number ofcapital ships to counter an enemy fleet. A swarm of expendable torpedo boats attacking en masse could overwhelm a larger ship's ability to fight them off using its large but cumbersome guns. A fleet of torpedo boats could pose a dire threat to an adversary's capital ships, albeit only in the coastal areas to which their small size and limited fuel load restricted them.
The introduction of fast torpedo boats in the late 19th century was a serious concern to the era's naval strategists, introducing the concept oftacticalasymmetric warfare. In response, navies operating large ships introduced firstly batteries of small-calibre quick-firing guns on board large warships for 'anti-torpedo' defence, before developing small but seaworthy ships, mounting lightquick-firing guns, to accompany the fleet and counter torpedo boats. These small ships, which came to be called "torpedo boat destroyers" (and later simply "destroyers"), initially were largely defensive, primarily meeting the torpedo boat threat with their own guns outside of the range at which battleships would be vulnerable. In time they became larger and took on more roles, including making their own torpedo attacks on valuable enemy ships as well as defending against submarines and aircraft. Later yet they were armed withguided missiles and eventually became the predominant type of surface warship in the modern era.
Today, the old concept of a very small, fast, and cheap surface combatant with powerful offensive weapons is taken up by the "fast attack craft".
TheAmerican Civil War saw a number of innovations in naval warfare, including an early type of torpedo boat, armed withspar torpedoes. In 1861, PresidentAbraham Lincoln instituted a navalblockade of Southern ports, which crippled the South's efforts to obtain warmateriel from abroad. The South also lacked the means to construct a naval fleet capable of taking on theUnion Navy on even terms. One strategy to counter the blockade saw the development of torpedo boats, small fast boats designed to attack the largercapital ships of the blockading fleet as a form ofasymmetrical warfare.
TheDavid class of torpedo boats were steam powered with a partially enclosed hull. They were not true submarines but weresemi-submersible; when ballasted, only the smokestack and few inches of the hull were above the water line. CSS Midge was aDavid-class torpedo boat.CSSSquib andCSS Scorpion represented another class of torpedo boats that were also low built but had open decks and lacked the ballasting tanks found on theDavids.
The Confederate torpedo boats were armed withspar torpedoes. This was a charge of powder in a waterproof case, mounted to the bow of the torpedo boat below the water line on a long spar. The torpedo boat attacked by ramming her intended target, which stuck the torpedo to the target ship by means of a barb on the front of the torpedo. The torpedo boat would back away to a safe distance and detonate the torpedo, usually by means of a long cord attached to a trigger.
In general, the Confederate torpedo boats were not very successful. Their low sides made them susceptible to swamping in high seas, and even to having their boiler fires extinguished by spray from their own torpedo explosions. Torpedo misfires (too early) and duds were common. In 1864, Union Navy LieutenantWilliam B. Cushing fitted a steam launch with a spar torpedo to attack the ConfederateironcladAlbemarle. Also the same year the Union launchedUSS Spuyten Duyvil, a purpose-built craft with a number of technical innovations including variable ballast for attack operations and an extensible and reloadable torpedo placement spar.
A prototype self-propelled torpedo was created by a commission placed byGiovanni Luppis, an Austrian naval officer fromRijeka, then a port city of theAustro-Hungarian Empire, andRobert Whitehead, an English engineer who was the manager of a town factory. In 1864, Luppis presented Whitehead with the plans of theSalvacoste ("coastsaver"), a floating weapon driven by ropes from the land that had been dismissed by the naval authorities due to the impractical steering and propulsion mechanisms.
Whitehead was unable to improve the machine substantially, since the clockwork motor, attached ropes, and surface attack mode all contributed to a slow and cumbersome weapon. However, he kept considering the problem after the contract had finished, and eventually developed a tubular device, designed to run underwater on its own, and powered by compressed air. The result was a submarine weapon, theMinenschiff ("mine ship"), the first modernself-propelled torpedo, officially presented to the Austrian Imperial Naval commission on December 21, 1866.
The first trials were not successful as the weapon was unable to maintain a course on a steady depth. After much work, Whitehead introduced his "secret" in 1868 which overcame this. It was a mechanism consisting of ahydrostatic valve and pendulum that caused the torpedo's hydroplanes to be adjusted so as to maintain a preset depth.
During the mid-19th century, theships of the line were superseded by large steam powered ships with heavy gun armament and heavy armour, calledironclads. Ultimately this line of development led to thedreadnought class of all-big-gun battleship, starting withHMS Dreadnought.
At the same time, the weight of armour slowed the battleships, and the huge guns needed to penetrate enemy armour fired at very slow rates. This allowed for the possibility of a small and fast ship that could attack the battleships, at a much lower cost. The introduction of thetorpedo provided a weapon that could cripple, or even sink, any battleship.
The first warship of any kind to carry self-propelled torpedoes wasHMSVesuvius of 1873. The first seagoing vesseldesigned to fire the self-propelledWhitehead torpedo wasHMS Lightning. The boat was built byJohn Thornycroft at Church Wharf inChiswick for theRoyal Navy. It entered service in 1876 and was armed with self-propelled Whitehead torpedoes.
As originally built,Lightning had twodrop collars to launch torpedoes; these were replaced in 1879 by a single torpedo tube in the bow. She also carried two reload torpedoes amidships. She was later renamedTorpedo Boat No. 1.[1] The French Navy followed suit in 1878 withTorpilleur No 1, launched in 1878 though she had been ordered in 1875.
Another early such ship was the Norwegian warshipHNoMS Rap, ordered from Thornycroft shipbuilding company, England, in either 1872 or 1873, and built at Thornycroft's shipyard at Church Wharf inChiswick on theRiver Thames. Managing a speed of 14.5 knots (27 km/h), she was one of the fastest boats afloat when completed. The Norwegians initially planned to arm her with aspar torpedo, but this may never have been fitted.Rap was outfitted with launch racks for the new self-propelled Whitehead torpedoes in 1879.
In the late 19th century, many navies started to build torpedo boats 30 to 50 metres (98 to 164 ft) in length, armed with up to three torpedo launchers and small guns. They were powered by steam engines and had a maximum speed of 20 to 30 knots (37 to 56 km/h). They were relatively inexpensive and could be purchased in quantity, allowing mass attacks on fleets of larger ships. The loss of even a squadron of torpedo boats to enemy fire would be more than outweighed by the sinking of acapital ship.
TheRusso-Japanese War of 1904–1905 was the first great naval war of the 20th century.[2] It was the first practical testing of the new steel battleships, cruisers, destroyers, submarines, and torpedo boats. During the war theImperial Russian Navy in addition to their other warships, deployed 86 torpedo boats[3] and launched 27 torpedoes (from all warships) in three major campaigns, scoring 5 hits.
TheImperial Japanese Navy (IJN), like the Russians, often combined their torpedo boats (the smaller of which possessed only hull numbers, although the larger1st class boats were named) with theirtorpedo boat destroyers (TBDs) (often simply referring to them asdestroyers) and launched over 270 torpedoes (counting the opening engagement atPort Arthur naval base on 8 February 1904) during the war. The IJN deployed approximately 21 TBs[4] during the conflict, and on 27 May 1905 the Japanese torpedo boat destroyers and TBs launched 16 torpedoes at the battleshipKnyaz Suvorov, AdmiralZinovy Rozhestvensky's flagship at thebattle of Tsushima. AdmiralTōgō Heihachirō, the IJN commander, had ordered his torpedo boats to finish off the enemy flagship, already gunned into a wreck, as he prepared to pursue the remnants of the Russian battle fleet.
Of the 16 torpedoes launched by the TBDs and TBs at the Russian battleship, only four hit their mark, two of those hits were from torpedo boats#72 and#75.[5] By evening, the battleship rolled over and sank to the bottom of the Tsushima Straits. By war's end, torpedoes launched from warships had sunk one battleship, two armored cruisers, and two destroyers. The remaining over 80 warships would be sunk by guns, mines, scuttling, or shipwreck.[6]
The introduction of the torpedo boat resulted in a flurry of activity in navies around the world, as smaller, quicker-firing guns were added to existing ships to ward off the new threat. In the mid-1880s there were developedtorpedo gunboats, the first vessel design for the explicit purpose of hunting and destroying torpedo boats. Essentially very smallcruisers, torpedo gunboats were equipped with torpedo tubes and an adequate gun armament, intended for hunting down smaller enemy boats.
The first example of this wasHMS Rattlesnake, designed byNathaniel Barnaby in 1885.[7] The gunboat was armed with torpedoes and designed for hunting and destroying smaller torpedo boats. She was armed with a single4-inch/25-pounder breech-loading gun, six3-pounder QF guns and four 14-inch (360 mm) torpedo tubes, arranged with two fixed tubes at the bow and a set of torpedo dropping carriages on either side. Four torpedo reloads were carried.[7]
A number of torpedo gunboat classes followed, including theGrasshopper class, theSharpshooter class, theAlarm class and theDryad class – all built for theRoyal Navy during the 1880s and the 1890s. In 1891, a ChileanAlmirante Lynch class torpedo gunboat managed to sink the ironcladBlanco Encalada with a torpedo at thebattle of Caldera Bay during theChilean Civil War of 1891. This marked a milestone in naval history, as it was the first time an ironclad warship had been sunk by aself-propelled torpedo.
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In the late 1890s, torpedo boats had been made obsolete by their more successful contemporaries, thetorpedo boat destroyers, which were much faster. The first ships to bear the formal designation "torpedo boat destroyer" (TBD) were theDaring class of two ships andHavock class of two ships of theRoyal Navy, ordered from Yarrows in 1892 by Rear AdmiralJackie Fisher.[8] These were basically enlarged torpedo boats, with speed equal to or surpassing the torpedo boats, but were armed with heavier guns that could attack them before they were able to close on the main fleet.[9]
HMS Daring andHMS Decoy were both built byThornycroft. They were armed with one12-pounder gun and three 6-pounder guns, with one fixed 18-in torpedo tube in the bow plus two more torpedo tubes on a revolving mount behind the two funnels. Later the bow torpedo tube was removed and two more 6-pounder guns added instead. They produced 4,200 hp (3,100 kW) from a pair of Thornycroft water-tube boilers, giving them a top speed of 27 knots, giving the range and speed to travel effectively with a battle fleet.[10]
After theRusso-Japanese War, these ships became known simply asdestroyers. Destroyers became so much more useful, having better seaworthiness and greater capabilities than torpedo boats, that they eventually replaced most torpedo boats. However, theLondon Naval Treaty after World War I limited tonnage of warships, but placed no limits on ships of under 600 tons. The French, Italian, Japanese and German Navies developed torpedo boats around that displacement, 70 to 100 m long, armed with two or three guns of around 100 mm (4 in) and torpedo launchers. For example, theRoyal Norwegian NavySleipner-class destroyers were in fact of a torpedo boat size, while the ItalianSpica-class torpedo boats were closer in size to adestroyer escort. After World War II they were eventually subsumed into the revivedcorvette classification.
TheKriegsmarine torpedo boats were classifiedTorpedoboot with "T"-prefixed hull numbers. The classes designed in the mid-1930s, such as theTorpedo boat type 35, had few guns, relying almost entirely upon their torpedoes. This was found to be inadequate in combat, and the result was a "fleet torpedo boat" class (Flottentorpedoboot), which were significantly larger, up to 1,700 tons, comparable to small destroyers. This class of German boats could be highly effective, as in the action in which the British cruiserHMS Charybdis was sunk off Brittany by a torpedo salvo launched by theElbing-class torpedo boats T23 and T27.
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BeforeWorld War I steam torpedo boats which were larger and more heavily armed than hitherto were being used. The newinternal combustion engine generated much more power for a given weight and size than steam engines, and allowed the development of a new class of small and fast boats. These powerful engines could make use ofplaning hull designs and were capable of the much higher speed of 30 to 50 knots (56 to 93 km/h) under appropriate sea conditions than displacement hulls. The boat could carry two to four torpedoes fired from simple fixed launchers and severalmachine guns.
During the First World War, three junior officers of theHarwich Force suggested that small motor boats carrying a torpedo might be capable of travelling over the protective minefields and attacking ships of theImperial German Navy at anchor in their bases. In 1915, theAdmiralty produced a Staff Requirement requesting designs for aCoastal Motor Boat for service in theNorth Sea. These boats were expected to have a high speed, making use of the lightweight and powerful petrol engines then available. The speed of the boat when fully loaded was to be at least 30 knots (56 km/h) and sufficient fuel was to be carried to give a considerable radius of action.
They were to be armed in a variety of ways, with torpedoes,depth charges or for laying mines. Secondary armament would have been provided by light machine guns, such as theLewis gun. The CMBs were designed byThornycroft, who had experience in small fast boats. Engines were not proper maritime internal combustion engines (as these were in short supply) but adapted aircraft engines from firms such asSunbeam andNapier. A total of 39 such vessels were built.[11]
In 1917 Thornycroft produced an enlarged 60-foot (18 m) overall version. This allowed a heavier payload, and now two torpedoes could be carried. A mixed warload of a single torpedo and four depth charges could also be carried, the depth charges released from individual cradles over the sides, rather than a stern ramp.[12] Speeds from 35–41 knots (40–47 mph; 65–76 km/h) were possible, depending on the various petrol engines fitted. At least two unexplained losses due to fires in port are thought to have been caused by a build-up of petrol vapour igniting.
Italian torpedo boats sank the Austrian-HungarianSMS Wien in 1917, andSMS Szent István in 1918. During the civil war in Russia, British torpedo boats made raids onKronstadt harbour damaging two battleships and sinking a cruiser.
Such vessels remained useful throughWorld War II. The Royal Navy'sMotor Torpedo Boats (MTBs),Kriegsmarine 'S-Boote' (Schnellboot or "fast-boat": the British termed themE-boats), (Italian)M.A.S. and M.S.,Soviet NavyG-5 andU.S.PT boats (standing forPatrol Torpedo) were all of this type.
A classic fast torpedo boat action was theChannel Dash in February 1942 when GermanE-boats and destroyers defended the flotilla ofScharnhorst,Gneisenau,Prinz Eugen and several smaller ships as they passed through the Channel.
By World War II torpedo boats were seriously hampered by higher fleet speeds; although they still had a speed advantage, they could only catch the larger ships by running at very high speeds over very short distances, as demonstrated in the Channel Dash. An even greater threat was the widespread arrival ofpatrol aircraft, which could hunt down torpedo boats long before they could engage their targets.
During World War II United States naval forces employed fast woodenPT boats in the South Pacific in a number of roles in addition to the originally envisioned one of torpedo attack. PT boats performed search and rescue, reconnaissance, ferry and courier work as well as attack and smoke screening duties. They took part in fleet actions and they worked in smaller groups and singly to harry enemy supply lines. Late in thePacific War when large targets became scarce, many PT boats replaced two or all four of their torpedo tubes with additional guns for engaging enemy coastal supply boats and barges, isolating enemy-held islands from supply, reinforcement or evacuation.
The most significant military ship sunk by a torpedo boat during World War II was the cruiserHMS Manchester which was attacked by two Italian torpedo boats (M.S. 16 and M.S. 22) duringOperation Pedestal on 13 August 1942. It seems that the torpedo that mortally struckManchester was launched by M.S. 22 (commanded byTenente di vascello Franco Mezzadra) from a distance of about 600 meters.
Boats similar to torpedo boats are still in use, but are armed with long-rangeanti-ship missiles that can be used at ranges between 30 and 70 km. This reduces the need for high-speed chases and gives them much more room to operate in while approaching their targets.
Aircraft are a major threat, making the use of boats against any fleet with air cover very risky. The low height of the radar mast makes it difficult to acquire and lock onto a target while maintaining a safe distance. As a result, fast attack craft are being replaced for use in naval combat by largercorvettes, which are able to carry radar-guided anti-aircraft missiles for self-defense, and helicopters for over-the-horizon targeting.
Although torpedo boats have disappeared from the majority of the world's navies, they remained in use until the late 1990s and early 2000s in a few specialised areas, most notably in the Baltic. The close confines of the Baltic and ground clutter effectively negated the range benefits of earlyASMs. Operating close to shore in conjunction with land based air cover and radars, and in the case of the Norwegian navy hidden bases cut intofjord sides, torpedo boats remained a cheap and viable deterrent to amphibious attack. Indeed, this is still the operational model followed by theChinese Navy with itsType 025-class torpedo boat for the protection of itscoastal and estuarial waters.
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